A Jane Austen Education

by William Deresiewicz

  One was in Boston, doing a postdoc; one was in Chicago, studying religion; one was in Kansas, becoming a mom; one was in California, working in film. My very closest friend, the one who knew me better than I knew myself—she was also just about my last remaining link to the movement—had settled in New Hampshire and was starting her own design business. They were all living their separate lives, and the older we grew, the worse it got. The prospect of recapturing that sense of community, that feeling of belonging to something, seemed more remote than ever. So when I had to choose a topic for my dissertation, I decided to study what I couldn’t experience. It was a classic academic move. Since I didn’t have community, I would spend my time thinking about it.

  Two years into Brooklyn, I was still working on my Austen chapter. The thing was like a chronic illness, my only comfort being the grad-school adage that once you’ve finished your first chapter, you’re halfway through the dissertation, because writing the first one teaches you how to write the rest.

  I had chosen to begin with Austen not only because I loved her work so much, but also because she seemed to me to represent the perfect starting point for my investigation: a writer who had celebrated community in its most basic and traditional sense—the settled, stable rural world, that good green place where everybody knows you and everybody belongs, the exact image of what I was trying to recapture in my own life. I had also decided to focus on my two favorite among her novels—Pride and Prejudice, of course, and the book that had long since won a special place in my heart, and now increasingly reflected my state of mind, Persuasion.

  Austen’s final work, Persuasion was unique among her novels for its layered emotional texture and profound depth of feeling. The mood was wistful, melancholy, autumnal, projecting an atmosphere of nostalgia and regret that was unlike anything she had created before. A work of loneliness and loss, the novel was completed less than a year before Austen’s death. Whether she knew that she was dying by then—the illness that came upon her in the middle of writing the book was mysterious and, for a long time, intermittent—it was impossible to say. What seemed clearer—Austen turned forty during the novel’s composition—was that Persuasion reflected the ripened outlook of a woman who felt herself to be passing into the next phase of life.

  The novel’s special place among her work was clear from its very first chapter. The heroine, Anne Elliot, was not a blooming girl of seventeen or twenty, a Catherine Morland or Elizabeth Bennet springing lightly over the threshold of adulthood and into the adventure of romance; she was already twenty-seven, still young by our standards but well past her prime by those of Austen’s day. Anne had already had her novel, so to speak, and it had ended in failure. Eight years earlier, she had fallen rapidly and deeply in love with a dashing young naval officer named Captain Wentworth. Wentworth was modeled on Austen’s brother Frank. Both made captain at a young age; both fought in the great Battle of San Domingo. Even their first names were similar: Wentworth’s was Frederick. Both also came ashore after that momentous engagement to get themselves a wife, but while Frank did marry his bride in that summer of 1806, Anne and Wentworth’s romance only led to grief.

  He was “a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit, and brilliancy.” She was “an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling.” But she also came from a family of aristocratic snobs that made the Bertrams of Mansfield Park look like socialists. A young man without wealth or pedigree was just not going to do. Anne’s father, the odious Sir Walter—spiteful, shallow, and vain—“thought it a very degrading alliance” and “gave it all the negative of great astonishment, great coldness, great silence, and a professed resolution of doing nothing for his daughter” (that is, refusing to give her a dowry). Anne’s mother, Lady Elliot, a warm and decent woman whose excellent judgment had saved her husband from the worst consequences of his character, might have seen to it that justice was done after all, but she had died when Anne was fourteen, and her place in Anne’s life had been taken by Lady Elliot’s best friend, Lady Russell.

  Lady Russell appreciated the heroine as her father never did—Anne’s virtues were far too fine for Sir Walter to know how to value them—but she was no more cheerful about the match. “Anne Elliot, with all her claims of birth, beauty, and mind, to throw herself away at nineteen! . . . Anne Elliot, so young; known to so few, to be snatched off by a stranger without alliance or fortune!” It was the same snobbery with a kinder face. And so, without a friend to take her side, Anne was pressured into breaking the engagement. Wentworth went off in anger and resentment, and Anne, her bloom ruined and her spirits sunk, was left to waste her youth in the bitterness of futile regret.

  Flash forward eight years, and the heroine was more alone than ever now, alone in a way that none of Austen’s other characters were. Even Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, had her cousin Edmund and her brother William and the genuine if lazy affection of her aunt Lady Bertram. But while Anne still had Lady Russell, for what she was worth, that was all she had. Having never gotten over Captain Wentworth, she had refused the hand of a local gentleman a few years later, and she seemed to have no chance of ever being offered someone else’s. Her younger sister, Mary, had gotten married herself (to Charles Musgrove, the same local man whom Anne refused). Her older sister, Elizabeth, was as cold and mean as their father—one of the things that made her Sir Walter’s favorite—and equally awful to Anne. Isolated in her own family, the heroine “was nobody with either father or sister; her word had no weight, her convenience was always to give way: she was only Anne.”

  Fanny also had Mansfield Park to hold on to, but now Anne was even going to lose her own beloved home. Sir Walter, with a very high opinion as to what so great a man deserved, had run himself into such a morass of debt that he was forced to rent out the family manor and move to Bath. Elizabeth would be coming along, of course, but her chosen companion would be, not the sister whose excellence she could never perceive, but an oily young widow named Mrs. Clay, all flattery and compliance, who had worked her way into Elizabeth’s affections.

  Anne would go to stay with the Musgroves and play the role of spinster aunt that Austen knew herself by then so very well. She would take care of her nephews while Mary, a world-class whiner, complained about how put-upon she was; she would play dances for Charles’s lively, lovely younger sisters Henrietta and Louisa (who resembled Austen heroines far more than Anne now did); she would listen to everybody’s grievances about one another; she would make peace between them when she could; and above all, she would stay in the shadows, where a spinster belonged. It was to be a lesson, she mused, “in the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle”—not that Anne was much of anything even in her own circle.

  My circumstances, needless to say, were very different from Anne’s, but I shared her feelings of loneliness and melancholy. I hadn’t lost a parent or a home, but I had done what I could—what I had to do—to distance myself from both. I had wanted to be on my own, and now I was. I just didn’t realize quite how on my own I was going to be. When you’re young—when you’re in high school and college and even your early twenties—you take your friends for granted. Of course they’ll always be there. You take friends for granted. Why would you ever have trouble making new ones? Then all of a sudden—and it can feel very sudden indeed—everybody’s gone. Some have moved, some have married, everyone’s busy, and the crowd of potential friends by which you’ve always been surrounded has evaporated.

  I still didn’t want to get married, but I didn’t want to be alone, either. Yet just as it was for Anne, that’s how it was starting to look like it was always going to be for me. I still loved living in my own place and being out from under my father’s shadow, but my Austen chapter wasn’t taking me forever just because it gave me so much work to do. A lot of days, I didn’t even have the strength to face it. I would drag myself out of bed, only to sit around and stare off into space. The air would sag, the clock woul
d point its contemptuous hands, my cat would look at me and seem to wonder why I wasn’t moving. I would feel ugly and worthless. Anne was depressed—that’s what it meant for Austen to say that her spirits were low—and let’s face it, so was I.

  Austen herself had lost a home, a circumstance that Anne’s experience undoubtedly reflected. Right around her twentyfifth birthday, Austen’s parents suddenly announced that her father would be retiring—he had been rector of the same parish for forty years—and that they and the girls, Cassandra and Jane, would be picking up and moving, just like Sir Walter, to Bath. The news came as a terrible shock, and there was little time to get used to it. Within a couple of months, the household in which Austen had lived her entire life was going to be broken up.

  Friends would have to be taken leave of, a world of familiar feelings left behind. Most of the family’s things were not even transferred to Bath, but sold or given away to Austen’s brother James and his wife, Anna, who were coming to take possession of the house: the piano on which Austen had learned to play; the family pictures and furniture, companions of many years; her father’s library—“my books,” as she called them—whose value to her we can only imagine. Austen was even pressured into surrendering one of her own important possessions, a move she defied with tart indignation. “As I do not choose to have Generosity dictated to me,” she wrote to Cassandra, “I shall not resolve on giving my Cabinet to Anna till the first thought of it has been my own.” From a life of rural rhythms and settled routines, she was being hustled out of the only home she’d ever known.

  Four years later, years of upheaval and adjustment, came another blow that would echo through Anne’s story: Austen’s beloved father died. “The loss of such a Parent must be felt,” she wrote to Frank, “or we should be Brutes.” “His tenderness as a Father, who can do justice to?” Austen’s mother was no Sir Walter, but she was a difficult, hypochondriacal woman whom Austen poked fun at to Cassandra, and there seems little doubt that her father was the author’s favorite, just as Anne’s mother was hers.

  After the Reverend Austen’s death, four more years of uncertainty followed before Austen’s mother and the girls would find a permanent home. The young woman who had tossed off three novels before the age of twenty-four—early drafts of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey—was virtually silent, artistically speaking, during this entire eight-year stretch. The one piece of work that survives, the beginning of a novel called The Watsons, was abandoned after a few dozen pages. Was Austen discouraged at the fate of her previous work? (Pride and Prejudice was rejected sight unseen; Northanger Abbey was bought for ten pounds but never published.) Did she need stability to do her work?

  Both undoubtedly were true, but Anne’s story makes us suspect that the formerly ebullient young writer was also suffering from her own feelings of depression. The Watsons, about a group of poor, unmarried sisters trying to figure out how to save themselves from destitution before the death of their ailing clergyman father—and thus a frighteningly close parallel to Jane and Cassandra’s situation—has been called “grim,” “bleak,” and “pessimistic.” Austen, said one critic, “seems to be struggling with a peculiar oppression, a stiffness and heaviness that threatens her style.” And that was before her father died—an event itself preceded, by only a couple of months, by the death of Anne Lefroy, the surrogate mother who had been a crucial figure in Austen’s life since childhood. No wonder she couldn’t summon the will to write.

  One more circumstance must have contributed to Austen’s portrait of Anne, as well as to the novel’s somber atmosphere as a whole. At around the age of twenty-seven, the same age as the heroine, Austen rejected what she must have known would be her last chance at marriage. The man in question was Harris Bigg-Wither, brother to a trio of old friends and heir to a large estate, but a shy and awkward young man who was five years Austen’s junior. She accepted his proposal one evening, agonized about it the entire night, then rescinded her acceptance the next morning. It was, she surely knew, a decisive step. From there, says Austen biographer Claire Tomalin, she “hurried into middle age,” embracing the role of maiden aunt for once and for all. She was not lonely, but in a profound sense, she would always be alone. Now, in Anne, she created a heroine who was staring over the same cliff.

  It was no accident that the novel began in autumn, or that Anne dwelled, like none of Austen’s other heroines, in the past and her own mind. On a walk with Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove and some of the other young people, while the rest of them chattered away, Anne mused wistfully on the declining year. Austen’s language swelled with unaccustomed feeling here, its normally satirical accents drawn, almost against their will, into a slower, more pensive rhythm. Anne’s own pleasure in the walk, we learned, must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn,—that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness,—that season which had drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.

  And when something happened to interrupt her train of thought, a reminder of her own exclusion from the dance of youth, “the sweet scenes of autumn were for a while put by, unless some tender sonnet, fraught with the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness, and the images of youth and hope, and spring, all gone together, blessed her memory.”

  But by then her memory had had a very different kind of work to do. When Sir Walter had decamped for Bath, he had rented the Elliot manor to a navy man, Admiral Croft, whose wife turned out to be none other than the sister of a certain Captain Wentworth—the very man the heroine had loved and lost those eight long years before. “A few months more,” said Anne when she had heard the news, “and he, perhaps, may be walking here.”

  And so indeed it proved to be. And when the dreaded meeting came,a thousand feelings rushed on Anne, of which this was the most consoling, that it would soon be over. . . . Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s, a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice; . . . the room seemed full, full of persons and voices, but a few minutes ended it. . . . The room was cleared, and Anne might finish her breakfast as she could.

  “It is over! it is over!” she repeated to herself again and again, in nervous gratitude. “The worst is over!”

  Mary talked, but she could not attend. She had seen him. They had met. They had been once more in the same room.

  Soon, however, she began to reason with herself, and try to be feeling less. . . .

  Alas! with all her reasoning, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing.

  But if the past was instantly revived for Anne, the case was very different for her former fiancé. “Henrietta asked him what he thought of you,” reported Mary in her passive-aggressive way, “and he said, ‘You were so altered he should not have known you again.’”

  Yet painful as the meeting was, Wentworth’s arrival began to draw Anne away from her awful family and toward a very different group of people. Wentworth’s fellow officer and close friend, Captain Harville, was now living with his wife in the nearby seaside town of Lyme. When the whole group decided to pay them a visit—Henrietta and Louisa, Charles and Mary, Wentworth and Anne—the heroine discovered a kind of togetherness that she had never suspected.

  Captain Harville’s sister had been engaged to a third officer, Captain Benwick, but she had died before the couple could be married. And yet, Anne learned, “The friendship between him and the Harvilles seemed, if possible, augmented by the event which closed all their views of alliance, and Captain Benwick was now living with them entirely.” It was the same note, and the same word—“friendship”—that marked every description of this group of naval companions. When Wentworth had complained to his sister, Admiral Croft’s wife, that women are too delicate to have aboard a ship�
��she herself having passed many a voyage aboard her husband’s—she pointed out that Wentworth had once transported Captain Harville’s wife and children himself. “Where was this superfine, extraordinary sort of gallantry of yours then?” she teased. “All merged in my friendship,” Wentworth replied. “I would assist any brother officer’s wife that I could, and I would bring anything of Harville’s from the world’s end, if he wanted it.”

  Again, when the Harvilles met the visitors in Lyme, “nothing could be more pleasant than their desire of considering the whole party as friends of their own, because the friends of Captain Wentworth, or more kindly hospitable than their entreaties for their all promising to dine with them.” And when “they all went in-doors with their new friends,” the visitors “found rooms so small as none but those who invite from the heart could think capable of accommodating so many.” “Friendship,” “friendship,” “friends,” “friends”: the point was not lost on the heroine, but the more she was pleased by what she saw—the more the captains and Mrs. Harville revealed their mutual warmth and generosity and goodwill—the more she was pained. “‘These would have been all my friends,’ was her thought; and she had to struggle against a great tendency to lowness.”

  Anne found, at Lyme, what she did not know that she’d been searching for: something to belong to. And as I thought about the novel more deeply than I ever had before, thought about what it was saying about the ways that people attach themselves to one another, the ways that they belong together, I realized that this, and nothing else, was Austen’s image of community—this group of friends.