A Jane Austen Education

by William Deresiewicz

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1 - emma everyday matters

  CHAPTER 2 - pride and prejudice growing up

  CHAPTER 3 - northanger abbey learning to learn

  CHAPTER 4 - mansfield park being good

  CHAPTER 5 - persuasion true friends

  CHAPTER 6 - sense and sensibility falling in love

  CHAPTER 7 - the end of the story

  Acknowledgements

  also by william deresiewicz

  Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2011 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © William Deresiewicz, 2011

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Deresiewicz, William.

  A Jane Austen education : how six novels taught me about love, friendship, and the things that really matter / William Deresiewicz.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-51417-7

  1. Austen, Jane, 1775-1817—Appreciation. I. Title.

  PR4037.D

  823’.7—dc22

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  To Jill,

  and to the memory of Karl Kroeber

  CHAPTER 1

  emma everyday matters

  I was twenty-six, and about as dumb, in all human things, as any twenty-six-year-old has a right to be, when I met the woman who would change my life. That she’d been dead for a couple of hundred years made not the slightest difference whatsoever. Her name was Jane Austen, and she would teach me everything I know about everything that matters.

  The thing that takes my breath away when I think back on it all is that I never wanted to read her in the first place. It happened quite by accident, and very much against my will. I had been eager, when I’d gone back to school to get my Ph.D. the year before, to fill the gaps in my literary education—Chaucer and Shakespeare, Melville and Milton—but the one area of English literature that held no interest for me, that positively repelled me, was nineteenth-century British fiction. What could be duller, I thought, than a bunch of long, heavy novels, by women novelists, in stilted language, on trivial subjects?

  The very titles sounded ridiculous. Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights. Middlemarch. But nothing symbolized the dullness and narrowness of that whole body of work like the name Jane Austen. Wasn’t she the one who wrote those silly romantic fairy tales? Just thinking about her made me sleepy.

  What I really wanted to study was modernism, the literature that had formed my identity as a reader and, in many ways, as a person. Joyce, Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov: complex, difficult, sophisticated works. Like so many young men, I needed to think of myself as a rebel, and modernism, with its revolutionary intensity, confirmed my self-image. I’d pass my days in a cloud of angry sarcasm, making silent speeches, as I stalked down Broadway in my John Lennon coat, against everything conventional, respectable, and pious. I’d walk right up alongside the buildings, in the shadows—it makes you feel like a rat scuttling for cover—to aggravate my sense of alienation. If I was waiting for someone and had nowhere else to go, I’d sit right down on the sidewalk with my Kerouac or my Catch-22, just you try and stop me. I smoked weed, listened to the Clash, and snorted at the business monkeys who’d sold out to the Man. Like the modernists, I was hot to change the world, even if I wasn’t sure exactly how. At the very least, I knew I wasn’t going to let the world change me. I was Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, raging against the machine. I was Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, the rebel artist who runs rings around the grown-ups. I was Conrad’s Marlow, the world-weary truth teller who punches through hypocrisy and lies.

  Needless to say, I was not the easiest person to get along with. In fact, I wonder that my friends put up with me at all. Like so many guys, I thought that a good conversation meant holding forth about all the supposedly important things I knew: books, history, politics, whatever. But I wasn’t just aggressively certain of myself—though of course I never let anyone finish a sentence and delivered my opinions as if they’d come direct from Sinai. I was also oblivious to the feelings of the people around me, a bulldozer stuck in overdrive, because it had never occurred to me to imagine how things might look from someone else’s point of view.

  My best friend, who knew me better than I knew myself, once introduced me to a friend of hers named Honour. Just as I was gearing up to reel off all the stupid puns I could think of—“Your Honor,” “Honored to meet you,” and so forth—my friend caught the smirk spreading across my face and cut me off before I could make an idiot of myself. “Billy,” she explained with the weary patience with which you might address a difficult child, “she’s already heard them all.” Basically, I had no insight into myself or anyone else.

  My romantic life, not surprisingly, had never been particularly happy. I was stuck at the time in a relationship that should have ended long before. We had jumped each other one night the previous summer, and though we’d been together for over a year, we had little in common and had never much progressed beyond the sex. She was gorgeous, bisexual, impulsive, experienced, with a look that knew things and a laugh that didn’t give a damn. We would go to bed, and then we would go dancing, and then we would go to bed again.

  But as for anything like real intimacy, I just couldn’t manage it. I’d had girlfriends before, including ones I’d even thought I’d loved, but things had always ended badly: fights, sulks, head games, tears. Eventually, good riddance. At least this time we didn’t fight. We didn’t talk, either—not about anything real, not about what was going on with us or what we might have been feeling. Instead, I’d hold forth as usual, even think I was doing her a favor in the process. I was a graduate student at Columbia, after all, and she had barely scraped through college. I was going to do something important with my life, a
nd she was marking time as a waitress—a job that struck me as depressingly unambitious—while she tried to figure out her next move. In short, I didn’t respect her enough to imagine that she might have anything to say to me that was worth listening to.

  I knew it wasn’t a real relationship, but I kept telling myself that this was what I’d always wanted. A steady supply of sex, with no strings attached: a teenage boy’s idea of paradise. Except I wasn’t a teenage boy anymore. Still, I thought—and this is how numb I was by then—well, so maybe I never will find that one person to love. So what? I knew, deep down, that the idea of doing without love for the rest of my life was completely absurd, that it was a sign of grave emotional peril that it could even occur to me, but I managed to keep the lid on my denial. Besides, I thought, as soon as you fell in love, people started expecting you to get married. And if there was one thing I knew, it was that I was never going to get married.

  My second year in graduate school, I signed up for a class called Studies in the Novel, less because I knew anything about it than because it sounded like a good fit. Our first two books were Madame Bovary, the novel that raised the art of fiction to a new level of cultural esteem, and The Ambassadors, Henry James’s most honored masterpiece. So far, my need to study prestigious literature was being satisfied.

  Then came Emma. I had heard some scattered talk, over the years, about its supposed greatness—one of the best novels in the language, more complex than anything in Joyce or Proust—but at first, my prejudices against Jane Austen were only confirmed. Everything was so unbearably banal. The story seemed to consist of nothing more than a lot of chitchat among a bunch of commonplace characters in a country village. No grand events, no great issues, and, inexplicably for a writer of romance novels, not even any passion.

  Emma, it turned out, was Emma Woodhouse, “handsome, clever, and rich,” who lived with her feeble, foolish old father on their family estate of Hartfield. Her life was impossibly narrow. Her mother had died when she was a baby; her sister, Isabella, lived in London; and the governess who had raised her had just gotten married. Mr. Woodhouse himself was too much of a hypochondriac to even venture off the estate, and his best friends, who were forever dropping by, consisted of a sad, silly spinster named Miss Bates and her elderly mother, the widow of the old clergyman.

  This was a pretty unpromising bunch of people to begin with, and then all they seemed to do was sit around and talk: about who was sick, who had had a card party the night before, who had said what to whom. Mr. Woodhouse’s idea of a big time was taking a stroll around the garden. Reading the mail was the highlight of everybody’s day, and a shopping trip to Highbury, the little village near Hartfield where the Bateses lived—and where there seemed to be a total of one store—counted for the heroine as a major event.

  I couldn’t believe how trivial this all was. In my other classes, D. H. Lawrence was preaching sexual revolution and Norman Mailer was cursing his way through World War II, and here I was reading about card parties. One whole chapter—Isabella had just brought her family home for Christmas—consisted entirely of aimless talk, as everyone caught up on one another’s news. For more than half a dozen pages, the plot simply came to a halt. But the truth was, for long stretches of the book there really wasn’t much plot to speak of. Things happened, story lines developed, but no single issue, no point of suspense, moved the story forward—especially not the one I’d been led to expect, the one about the heroine’s romantic future, which the book hardly even seemed to address.

  What was the point of all those long, rambling speeches by Emma’s father? Here he was, talking to Emma about Isabella’s sons:Henry is a fine boy, but John is very like his mama. Henry is the eldest, he was named after me, not after his father. John, the second, is named after his father. Some people are surprised, I believe, that the eldest was not, but Isabella would have him called Henry, which I thought very pretty of her. And he is a very clever boy, indeed. They are all remarkably clever; and they have so many pretty ways. They will come and stand by my chair, and say, “Grandpapa, can you give me a bit of string?” and once Henry asked me for a knife, but I told him knives were only made for grandpapas.

  Emma undoubtedly knew all this, had heard it a hundred times. The information wasn’t for our benefit, either. The boys, their cleverness, and their desire for knives and string played no role whatsoever in the story. And we knew by then that Emma’s father was a tedious old man. So why did we have to listen to this?

  Mr. Woodhouse, what was more, was nothing compared to Miss Bates. He driveled by the paragraph; she prosed by the page. I’d be sitting in a coffee shop, surrounded by people reading Kierkegaard or Chomsky, and get to a paragraph like this, where she told Emma about a letter she had just received from her niece, Jane Fairfax. Or tried to, anyway:Oh! here it is. I was sure it could not be far off; but I had put my huswife upon it, you see, without being aware, and so it was quite hid, but I had it in my hand so very lately that I was almost sure it must be on the table. I was reading it to Mrs. Cole, and since she went away, I was reading it again to my mother, for it is such a pleasure to her—a letter from Jane—that she can never hear it often enough; so I knew it could not be far off, and here it is, only just under my huswife—and since you are so kind as to wish to hear what she says;—but, first of all, I really must, in justice to Jane, apologize for her writing so short a letter—only two pages you see—hardly two—and in general she fills the whole paper and crosses half. . . .

  And that was only the first part of the speech, and we didn’t get to hear what the letter actually said for another page after that.

  Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates—the dull old man, the scatterbrained neighbor—were the kind of people I tuned out in real life. I’d stare past them and hurry on my way, or nod absentmindedly and think about how I needed to get my library books renewed. I certainly didn’t want to spend my time reading about them.

  The funny thing was, the heroine agreed with me. If I was bored with Highbury, so was Emma. She didn’t think that anything interesting was going on there either, and what little plot the novel had involved her determination to get things moving on her own. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. On the one hand, I sympathized with her. On the other, she went about everything so blindly and willfully, and all her schemes turned out to be such disasters, that I found myself cringing almost every time she opened her mouth.

  Early on, casting about for something to do, Emma struck up a friendship with a girl named Harriet Smith. Harriet was docile, ignorant, and naïve—a worshipful younger friend who flattered Emma’s vanity in every way. She was also very pretty— “short, plump, and fair, with a fine bloom, blue eyes, light hair, and a look of great sweetness”—and that gave Emma an idea. “Those soft blue eyes, and all those natural graces,” she thought, “should not be wasted.” Harriet “wanted only a little more knowledge and elegance to be quite perfect.” And so, like Henry Higgins sizing up Eliza Doolittle, Emma decided to turn her friend into a project. “She would improve her . . . and introduce her into good society; she would form her opinions and her manners. It would be an interesting, and certainly a very kind undertaking; highly becoming her own situation in life.”

  This was really too much. Such arrogance, such nosiness—and from someone who was all of twenty herself, and scarcely less naïve than her friend. Emma gave herself credit for bringing about her governess’s marriage with a local gentleman—though all she’d really done was guess that it would happen—and now she set about arranging a match for Harriet with Mr. Elton, the new clergyman. The idea was ridiculous—Harriet was the illegitimate daughter of an unknown father, with no money or social standing—but Emma convinced herself otherwise.

  Worse, she convinced her friend, persuading Harriet to turn down a proposal from a worthy young farmer, Mr. Martin, whom Harriet liked very much. The scene was excruciating, like watching someone torture a puppy:“You think I ought to refuse him then,” said Harriet, looking down.<
br />
  “Ought to refuse him! My dear Harriet, what do you mean? Are you in any doubt as to that? I thought—but I beg your pardon, perhaps I have been under a mistake. I certainly have been misunderstanding you, if you feel in doubt as to the purport of your answer. I had imagined you were consulting me only as to the wording of it.”

  Harriet was silent. With a little reserve of manner, Emma continued:

  “You mean to return a favourable answer, I collect.”

  “No, I do not; that is, I do not mean—What shall I do? What would you advise me to do? Pray, dear Miss Woodhouse, tell me what I ought to do.” . . .

  “Not for the world,” said Emma, smiling graciously, “would I advise you either way.”

  Now I really couldn’t stand her. To play with someone else’s happiness, whether she knew it or not, simply for the sake of her own vanity! Just as Emma thought that no one in Highbury was good enough for her, so did she think that Mr. Martin wasn’t good enough for her friend—not because she thought so much of Harriet, but just because she was her friend. In the same way, she knew that Miss Bates and her mother were lonely women, teetering on the edge of poverty, and that a visit from her always made their day, but she could never bring herself to drop by as often as she knew she should, and when she did show up, she would find an excuse to run away as fast as possible. Jane Fairfax, Miss Bates’s niece, was an intelligent, talented, gracious young woman, right around the heroine’s age, who came to Highbury for a couple of months every year—but Emma did all she could to avoid her. Any relative of the lowly Miss Bates, after all, could hardly be a suitable companion for the great Emma Woodhouse.