Payne, Pamela Wood.

Jane Austen and Flannery O'Connor possess essentially religious imaginations. The character of their work is determined by the degree of similarity or difference between their beliefs and those generally held by their intended audiences. Austen, an orthodox Anglican in a fundamentally religious era, creates a fiction of restraint: gently satiric, ultimately comic in form and intent, directed to a reader who shares her vision of spiritual and moral order revealed through social structure. O'Connor, a Catholic in an age of unbelief, writes a fiction of extremity, characterized by fierce satire, violence, grotesquerie, and the juxtaposition of comic characters and situations with tragic form and meaning, directed to an unbelieving reader whom she wishes to "shock" into a new awareness of the sacred. A comparison of the work of Austen and O'Connor in this context leads to a renewed appreciation of the interdependence of imagination and reality in determining the distinctive qualities of a writer's oeuvre.