I had been looking in the wrong place, both in her novels and in my own life. I had come to Austen imagining that I would find a picture of that idyllic rural community that we all carry around in our heads. And I had dimly supposed that if I was ever going to find another community myself, it was going to have to resemble something like that. Now I saw that community, in the modern world, would never be a structure you could put your hands on—something regular or stable or permanent. It would not resemble a kibbutz or a commune, both of which made that exact mistake of trying to turn back the clock to an earlier state of existence. Nor would it resemble a youth movement, which, like the other communities that young people pass through (and which, like me, they often later pine for)—a high school or a college, a sports team or fraternity or summer camp—is the kind of all-encompassing environment that can only exist when you’re young. The modern world, I began to understand, was far too unstable for anything like that, modern relationships too fluid. For adults today, it seemed to me now, community can only be a circle of friends.
Still, that was relatively easy for me to see, two centuries into the modern age and with the help of Austen. The wonder was how she had managed to see it herself, at a time when modernity was still just getting off the ground, and from her little perch in rural England. Because what Persuasion dramatized, I now saw, was nothing less than the passing of the traditional world. The community that Austen was rejecting—or at least, bidding farewell—was rural England itself: the very thing I had come to her to find. Rejecting its hierarchy, the feudal order that the smug and pompous Sir Walter, like the odious Bertrams of Mansfield Park, embodied. Bidding farewell to its sense of rootedness and intimacy and continuity—which she had indeed celebrated, but only once, I now saw, only in Emma, her one truly idyllic work.
Now, the strange thing was that Emma was written immediately before Persuasion. Only four months separated the end of work on one novel and the beginning of work on the next. But Austen could think extremely fast. From her picture of a timeless England she moved in one step to a picture of England in the middle of head-spinning change. Emma, which contained no dates, seemed to occur outside of history. Persuasion, which began with a flurry of dates, was set at a very precise historical moment: the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Austen saw, with amazing clairvoyance, that the world she had always known was about to start to disappear. The old order was yielding, however slowly, to the new. Sir Walter was packing his bags and moving aside for Admiral Croft. Aristocracy was giving way to meritocracy, hierarchy to equality. People would henceforth be bound, more and more, not as master and servant or landlord and tenant (or even as husband and wife, in the traditional, unequal fashion) but rather as friend and friend.
Yet the traditional system that put a Sir Walter above a Captain Wentworth was not the only thing, I saw, that Austen turned away from in Persuasion. As hard as it was to believe, she seemed to turn away from family itself. By gravitating toward the men and women of the navy, Anne was hoping that she wouldn’t have to spend the rest of her life putting up with her miserable father and sisters. In fact, she avoided her family more and more as the novel went on. After the trip to Lyme, the day finally came for her to join Sir Walter and Elizabeth in Bath—not that anybody really wanted it, but she couldn’t stay with her sister Mary forever—yet she tried, when she got there, to spend as little time with them as she could. Instead, she immersed herself in the company of her new friends from the navy, who had come to Bath on holiday, as well.
Indeed, Anne’s disaffection with her family achieved remarkable heights. Late in the novel, she got wind of an intrigue that severely threatened her father and sister’s peace. Ordinarily that sort of development would have moved to the center of the plot, with the heroine hastening to spread the news and avert disaster. Here she never even got around to passing it along. Her family simply didn’t matter to her anymore.
How could this be, I wondered. How could Austen, the great novelist of romance, the great maker of marriages, be against family? Yet when I thought back to her other books, I realized that there was scarcely a happy family among them—ten unhappy ones, by my count, and no more than one of the other kind (and that was only Emma and her father, as much a kind of marriage as a family). And while she always got her heroines married, she never followed their stories beyond the bliss of couplehood and into the complications that followed, the battle of children and parents. Her own family, by all accounts, was happy, and she clearly enjoyed her nieces and nephews, but when she imagined felicity, she always drew a picture of a bond among adults—couples and friends and the little circles, the miniature communities, they make together.
For once I saw this pattern in Persuasion, I looked and found it everywhere. Yes, Austen made sure to find her heroines a husband, but she also took care to build them a community—a sphere of husbands and wives and brothers and sisters to live their marriages within. Pride and Prejudice ended, not with one wedding but with two, a pair of sisters marrying a pair of friends and gathering additional siblings to them. Emma ended with three, and the heroine’s, we were told, was sped along by “the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony.” It was no surprise that one critic called friendship, for Austen, “the true light of life.”
Friends, Austen taught me, are the family you choose. But while the notion has become a commonplace of late, Austen, I realized, saw a step further. We make our friends our family, but we also make our family—or some of them—our friends. William Price, in Mansfield Park, was Fanny’s “brother and friend.” Catherine Morland, in Northanger Abbey, made friends with Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who were friends with each other but not with their treacherous older brother. Elizabeth Bennet was friends with Jane and her father but couldn’t stand her mother or her other sisters; the community that formed at the end of Pride and Prejudice included some relatives but pointedly excluded others.
Anne herself, Austen told us, found no reason to be jealous of Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove, her sister Mary’s sisters-inlaw—pleasant, pretty girls who didn’t have a whole lot going on upstairs—except for this one thing: “that seemingly perfect good understanding and agreement together, that good-humoured mutual affection, of which she had known so little herself with either of her sisters.” The Harvilles, one of the few happy families in Austen’s work, included a friend, Captain Benwick, as part of their household; the circle of nautical friends included a brother and sister, Captain Wentworth and Mrs. Croft. Friendship and family can blur together, Austen was showing me—the groups intersecting, the feelings intermingling.
No one understood this more intimately than Austen herself. Everywhere in her letters, the terms and accents of family and friendship intertwine. What was her impulse to accept the hand of Harris Bigg-Wither, misguided though she soon realized it to be, if not a desire to create a family with his sisters, her friends? Her own sister, Cassandra, of course, was her very best, her lifelong friend, but her favorite niece won entrance to the circle at the early age of fifteen. “I am greatly pleased with your account of Fanny,” Jane wrote Cassandra. “I found her in the summer just what you describe, almost another Sister, & could not have supposed that a niece would ever have been so much to me.”
Later, with Fanny in her twenties, niece and aunt exchanged letters of exquisite intimacy, in one of which the older woman exclaimed, “You can hardly think what a pleasure it is to me, to have such thorough pictures of your Heart.” But, she added, fearing that the circle would someday be broken, “Oh! what a loss it will be, when you are married.” Cassandra surely knew that she was speaking for both survivors when, in the wake of Austen’s death, she wrote her niece—“doubly dear to me now for her dear sake whom we have lost”—“I have lost a treasure, such a Sister, such a friend as never can be surpassed.”
Jane and Cassandra’s household, the one they shared with their mother for the last twelve years of Austen’s life, was i
tself a little community of family and friends, just like the Harvilles’. The role of Captain Benwick was assumed by Martha Lloyd, a childhood friend who grew closer to Austen than anyone but her sister. The two had laughed together in bed when Austen was a teenager, and Martha moved in with the Austen women the year that both Jane’s father and Martha’s widowed mother died—an arrangement that was not uncommon at the time. She stayed there until her marriage to Austen’s brother Frank—being dragged by Jane to the theater, listening to the author’s views on politics, royal scandal, and her own career, and generally being, as Jane told Cassandra, “the friend & Sister under every circumstance.”
Friends may be the family you choose, but I was still no closer to being part of such a circle than Anne had been at Lyme. In fact, I was having as much difficulty as she did simply finding individual friends, let alone a whole circle of them. The terrain had shifted when I wasn’t looking. People were not just busier than they used to be, they also weren’t as open. That youthful flexibility, that eagerness for new experiences and new people, that Austen celebrated in Northanger Abbey—it seemed to be draining away as we rounded the corner and headed into our thirties. You could no longer just meet someone and dive right into a friendship, as you’d been able to when you were fifteen or twenty or even twenty-five. The people I met now, potential friends, seemed cagier, less trusting, more defended. Making a friend had become a whole project, like a high-level diplomatic negotiation or a complicated puzzle that you could only fill in a couple of pieces at a time.
Austen herself cared far too much about friendship to make the mistake of idealizing it. She knew all about what Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, referred to as “the different sorts of friendship in the world,” and she had written about them from the time she was a girl. In her teenage years, the fashion had been for what they called romantic friendships—histrionically passionate attachments designed to show off your susceptibility to fine emotion. Love and Freindship, the most famous of her adolescent satires (“as fast as she could write and quicker than she could spell,” as Virginia Woolf remarked about them), was designed to deflate that exact cliché:After having been deprived during the course of 3 weeks of a real freind, . . . imagine my transports at beholding one, most truly worthy of the Name. . . . She was all sensibility and Feeling. We flew into each other’s arms and after having exchanged vows of mutual Freindship for the rest of our Lives, instantly unfolded to each other the most inward secrets of our Hearts.
One can only imagine the fun that Austen would have made of Facebook or MySpace or Twitter, with their comparable illusion of instantaneous intimacy. Isabella Thorpe tried to pull the same kind of thing with Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, but in her later books, Austen moved on to more adult forms of insincerity. Social climbers, she knew, can exercise their limbs on friendship as well as marriage, and the world of Persuasion was crawling with them. The town of Bath was a full immersion in the tepid waters of social ambition. Mrs. Clay, the oily widow, had hooked herself onto Elizabeth Elliot to see how far the ride would take her, her ultimate purpose being to inveigle Sir Walter into making her his second wife—at which point, we could be sure, the new Lady Elliot would no longer bother being deferential to her “friend.” “Frenemy,” we sometimes call this sort of person now, the kind who’s nice just long enough to get whatever they think they can out of you.
The novel’s most avid lickspittle, however, turned out to be none other than Sir Walter himself. This made perfect sense once I thought about it. Anyone that invested in distinctions of social rank had to be as obsequious to those above him as he was contemptuous of those below. Just as bullies are cowards in disguise, snobs are secret grovelers—another reason Austen so adored the aristocracy. The object of Sir Walter’s particular veneration was a cousin, the Viscountess Dalrymple, and her daughter, Miss Carteret, a pair of mediocrities who turned out to have nothing going for them but their pedigree:Anne had never seen her father and sister before in contact with nobility, and she must acknowledge herself disappointed. She had hoped better things from their high ideas of their own situation in life, and was reduced to form a wish which she had never foreseen,—a wish that they had more pride; for “our cousins Lady Dalrymple and Miss Carteret,” “our cousins, the Dalrymples,” sounded in her ears all day long.
But the friendship of a Sir Walter or a Mrs. Clay was not likely to take in anyone less susceptible to flattery than their intended targets. Far more dangerous, Austen wanted us to know—and far more insidious—were the friends who actually did mean well but couldn’t tell the difference between what was good for you and what was only good for them. Such a friend was Lady Russell, and the saddest thing about Anne’s relationship with her, her surrogate mother and only intimate, was just how much the heroine actually valued her, how little she could afford to let herself see the older woman’s limitations. Anne thought, early on, “of the extraordinary blessing of having one such truly sympathising friend as Lady Russell,” but only after the perfectly blasé reception she received at the Musgroves’ (that lesson “in the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle”). Even her sister Mary had treated the whole trauma of surrendering the family estate, which Anne had been suffering through for weeks, as a matter of utter indifference. Anyone was going to look good compared to that.
Yet it was that same Lady Russell who had pressured the heroine into making the worst mistake of her life, rejecting Captain Wentworth. Of course, she did it for what she thought were all the right reasons. Still, late in the novel, when she was presented with the same kind of situation again, she gave, unbelievably, the same advice—even though she knew perfectly well how terribly alone Anne was and how miserable she had been for all those years. But even Anne, by then, could see the truth. Lady Russell, whether she recognized it or not, was trying to protect her own dignity, not her friend’s. She was the person she was trying to save from being connected with someone as lowly as a naval officer.
This was a woman, after all, who thought that kissing up to the Viscountess Dalrymple sounded like a really good idea. Indeed, once the heroine took a hard look at her friend, she figured out that there wasn’t a whole lot of difference, in their ideas about class and manners and what really mattered in a person, between Lady Russell and her own father. And so, once Anne had made up her mind about how she was going to live her life—uninfluenced, this time, by any of her “friends”— “there was nothing less for Lady Russell to do,” if she wanted to stay on good terms with the heroine, “than to admit that she had been pretty completely wrong, and to take up a new set of opinions.” In plain language, Anne told Lady Russell to go soak her head. The heroine had walked away from her father and sisters, and she was strong enough now to do the same to anyone else who stood in the way of her happiness.
I saw this kind of thing all the time back then—friends who thought they were looking after your happiness when they were really just trying to protect their own. People pressuring you to break up with someone they didn’t like, or stay together with someone they did. People wanting you to get married already, like they had, or stay single, because they didn’t want to be the last ones left alone. I’m sure I did that sort of thing myself. There’s nothing deliberate about it, as Austen knew; it just takes a lot of self-awareness, as well as a lot of generosity, to remove your own desires from the equation.
The couple who introduced me to the private-school crowd, needless to say, did not possess a great deal of either. “Thank God that’s over!” they said when I told them about a certain new relationship—“that” being my long string of romantic failures, the source of all those funny stories I used to entertain them with. However kindly it was meant, the statement came to exert an unmistakable pressure, as the months went by and the relationship soured, to stay coupled up. “That” was supposed to be over; I couldn’t disappoint them by going back to “that.” And when I did finally break off the relationship, their response, while undoubtedly well inte
ntioned, was not exactly consoling. “We’re just sorry that there won’t ever be any little Billys running around.” Wait—ever? You mean you’re closing the books on me? It sure sounded like they were—like I had proved to them, for once and for all, just how completely hopeless I was.
True friendship, like true love, was pretty rare in Austen’s view. “Here and there, human nature may be great in times of trial,” said a character in Persuasion, “but generally speaking . . . it is selfishness and impatience rather than generosity and fortitude, that one hears of. There is so little real friendship in the world!” The person who made that statement, a Mrs. Smith, had had a difficult life. She had traveled, Anne reflected, “among that part of mankind which made her think worse of the world than she hoped it deserved”—that is, than Anne hoped it deserved. But that was all that she could do—hope. She knew that Mrs. Smith, who “had lived very much in the world,” had seen a great deal more of life than had the sheltered heroine herself. And after all, her new acquaintance with the people of the navy notwithstanding, her own experience offered precious little with which to dispute the other woman’s views.
Yet Anne’s relationship with Mrs. Smith turned out to be one of those rare, true friendships itself. The two had known each other at the boarding school where Anne was sent in the wake of her mother’s death, “grieving for the loss of a mother whom she had dearly loved, feeling her separation from home, and suffering as a girl of fourteen, of strong sensibility and not high spirits, must suffer at such a time.” The future Mrs. Smith, three years older, “had shewn her kindness, . . . had been useful and good to her in a way which had considerably lessened her misery.” Usefulness and kindness—those same standards of human decency that Austen had championed in Mansfield Park, and that mattered to her more than all the wit in the world.
A Jane Austen Education Page 16