A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really

Instead of meeting people through friends, like I always had, I was expected to endear myself to complete strangers—who knew exactly what I was trying to do—in the time it took to walk into a party or order a drink.

And this being New York, it wasn’t enough to be charming (not that I had a clue any longer about how to be charming). You had to be impressive, you had to look successful, you had to sound like a winner, especially as a man. What did you do? Who did you know? Where had you gone to school? I learned to drop the salient points of my résumé into the first five minutes of a conversation. It got so that talking to single women felt like having a job interview. Just be yourself, people would say. Be myself? Wasn’t that the whole problem?

I was spared no indignity. Blind dates. Setups. A dinner invitation from a woman who turned out to have a boyfriend and “didn’t realize this was a date.” A parade of women who liked me, but “not in that way.” “At least you’ve made a new friend!” my friends would say. “I don’t want any more goddamn friends!” I would shoot back.

One day, I struck up a conversation with a woman on the way out of exercise class—one of those miraculous situations where you’re already in the middle before you have a chance to feel nervous. She was smart, nice, interesting, pretty. When we got to the corner and seemed about to go our separate ways, we turned to each other at the same time and said, “So what’s your name?”

Her name was Pam. Pam, Pam, Pam, Pam, Pam. I thought about seeing her again all week. But the next week came, and she didn’t show up. I started to get a little desperate. Surely she would come back the following week. But she wasn’t there the following week, either. Finally, I got so distraught that I put one of those “missed connections” ads in the Village Voice: “Desperately Seeking Pam,” with the place and date and my phone number.

Here’s a tip: don’t put your number in a personal ad. First I got a call from a woman pretending to be Pam (“Of course I’m Pam”—“Okay, so what do you do for a living?”—“Oh, c’mon”). Then I got a call from a woman who admitted that she wasn’t Pam but was hoping we could get together anyway. Then I got a call from a guy in New Jersey who wanted to commiserate about how hard it was to meet women. (“Maybe you should stop going to those singles events with your richer, better-looking friend,” I suggested.) Then I got a call from a guy pretending to be Pam. (“You can call me Pam if you want to.”) And finally, late at night, I got one last call from a guy with a voice like sandpaper, who let me know that, for the right price, he’d be happy to introduce me to “Pam.”

I did have one serious relationship during those years. It all started very romantically. I met her at the wedding of an old friend. Actually, as I discovered later, it had been a setup. She had chosen me out of a whole lineup of eligible guys that my friend had laid out—literally, with pictures—upon her request. Well, a short lineup. Okay, me and another guy. But still. It made it all seem even more romantic, when she told me—like the whole thing was meant to be.

My friend arranged to have her pick me up at the airport bus, and as I climbed into the car, we felt the chemistry right away—not just sexual sparks, but an immediate feeling of ease and familiarity and kinship, as if we already knew each other and were merely resuming a conversation that had gotten briefly interrupted. We were inseparable the entire weekend, didn’t stop laughing, couldn’t believe our luck. The wedding was in Michigan (she and my friend had just finished a graduate program together at the U of M), and when she set out for Boston right after the ceremony to start a new job, a new life, she invited me along for the ride—a spur-of-the-moment dash that seemed to have all the glamour and daring of Bonnie and Clyde making a getaway.

We traded stories the whole way, spent the night at a motel in Niagara Falls, of all places (we hadn’t even realized that it was a honeymoon spot), and as I tore myself away from her a couple of days later, swore that we were committed to making the relationship succeed, even though it was going to have to be conducted long- distance. We even mentioned the M-word—as in, “Yes, I think I would be ready to get married if things work out.” That sentence actually came out of my mouth. I couldn’t believe how grown up I was being. It felt like all that Austen was paying off, and that now I was ready for a mature, adult romance.

Well, it didn’t take long for things to go south. Fights in Boston, fights in Brooklyn, fights over e-mail (which had just come in). Fights about my feelings, fights about her feelings, fights about the fights we’d just had. Fights that spun off little subsidiary fights that had to be resolved before we could get back to the main fight. Endless phone calls where we’d talk for a few minutes until we stumbled over something to fight about, then spend the rest of the evening fighting about it.

I was so in love with the idea of having a mature relationship, of throwing around words like married, that I forgot to ask myself whether I was actually happy with this person. The truth was, we weren’t really compatible—didn’t, once the honeymoon phase was over and we started to get to know each other for real, even much like each other. But it took me months to finally give up and admit it, because I was still under the spell of that romantic beginning, the allure of the story we would one day get to tell.

Once it was over, I almost swore off serious relationships altogether. The meeting, the spark, the sense of kinship: wasn’t that what love was supposed to look like? Were my instincts that bad? And what if I hadn’t gotten out before it was too late? It was an awfully narrow escape. For someone as allergic to commitment as I was, the experience was chilling. I still wanted to find a girlfriend, I finally decided, but I was more determined than ever not to let myself get married.

Having long since finished my first chapter, I thought I was done with Austen for a while, but that was the year that all those adaptations started to come out: Clueless, Persuasion, the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice, the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma. My favorite, though, was the Ang Lee/Emma Thompson adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. It was light, it was charming, it was fun—qualities I had never associated with the book itself. Sense and Sensibility, like Persuasion and Mansfield Park, belonged to the darker wing of Austen’s fiction. It was a sober, even bitter book—satiric but not joyful, funny but not comic. It contained my single favorite line in all of Austen—“She was not a woman of many words; for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas” (a doubleedged piece of irony that left no one standing and pretty much epitomized the book’s disposition)—but the novel as a whole had never won me over.

Now I went back to it again, to see how such a delightful movie could have been produced from so frustrating a book. My problem with Sense and Sensibility was the same as the one I had had with Mansfield Park: it wanted us to accept something that I refused to believe—something that I had trouble accepting even Austen believed. The story seemed perversely unromantic, even anti-romantic. Sense and Sensibility set two visions of love before us, each exemplified through one of its heroines, and insisted that we prefer the less appealing.

Marianne Dashwood was everything that you could want in a romantic heroine. She was young, beautiful, passionate, and unreserved. She sang like an angel, read poetry with feeling, and took long, solitary rambles at twilight. Her ideas of love were high and exacting. “The more I know of the world,” she said, “the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love.” Not only would such a man need virtue and intelligence, but his figure would have to be striking, his eyes full of spirit and fire. And to be worthy of her passion, something still more was required. “I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter into all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.” Marianne was not just looking for a husband; she was seeking a soul mate.

Amazingly, such a man soon appeared. Running home one blustery morning to escape the rain, Marianne fell and twisted her ankle. Out of nowhere, it seemed, a gentleman rushed to her rescue, sweeping her up in his arms and carrying her to safety. He was young, handsome, elegant, and manly. His manner was charming, his voice expressive, his movements graceful. What was more, it soon turned out, he shared all of Marianne’s passions: for music and poetry, dancing and riding. Fate, it seemed, had destined them for one another. Before long, Marianne had come to feel that she understood this man as well as she knew herself. “It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy,” she said, “it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.” His name was Willoughby, and they fell quickly and deeply in love.

Her older sister, Elinor, meanwhile, was involved in a romance of her own—if you could call it that. As the novel opened, the heroines were about to lose their childhood home of Norland. Their father had died, and they and