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

Pride and Prejudice, adapting some lines of poetry, “As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.” And Emma, she knew, would be the hardest challenge of all. “I am going to take a heroine,” she said as she was about to start working on the novel, “whom no-one but myself will much like.”

But from the beginning, there were readers of discernment who recognized her genius behind the façade. No less a judge than Sir Walter Scott, the leading writer of her day, author of epic poems and sweeping historical novels like Ivanhoe and The Bride of Lammermoor, confessed her superiority:

That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of description and sentiment, is denied me.

Another critic poked fun at readers who thought that there could be but “little merit in making characters act and talk so exactly like the people whom they saw around them every day,” not recognizing that, as with Mozart or Rembrandt, the highest art lies in concealing art. Such readers, he joked, were like the man who couldn’t see why everyone was making a big fuss about a certain celebrated actor, “who merely behaved on the stage as anybody might be expected to in real life.”

Her reputation slowly grew, but by the late 1800s there were only two opinions about Jane Austen. Either you loved her or you hated her. Mark Twain, a famously exuberant hater, swore that reading Austen made him feel “like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven.” “It seems a great pity to me,” he taunted an Austen fan, “that they allowed her to die a natural death.” “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice,” he told another friend, “I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shinbone.”

But if you loved her—if you “got” her—you felt like you’d joined a secret club, with its own code words and special signs and degrees of initiation. It was a creed, in the words of one writer, “as ardent as a religion,” and “a real appreciation of Emma,” her subtlest book of all, was “the final test of citizenship in her kingdom.” Rudyard Kipling, very much a citizen himself, celebrated the phenomenon in “The Janeites,” a story about Austen worship in, of all places, the trenches of World War I. “Jane?” says Humberstall, the simple-minded veteran at the heart of the story—

Why, she was a little old maid ’oo’d written ’alf a dozen books about a hundred years ago. ’Twasn’t as if there was anythin’ to them, either. I know. I had to read ’em. They weren’t adventurous, nor smutty, nor what you’d call even interestin’—all about girls o’ seventeen . . . , not certain ’oom they’d like to marry; an’ their dances an’ card-parties an’ picnics, and their young blokes goin’ off to London on ’orseback for ’air-cuts an’ shaves. [Which is exactly what Frank Churchill does in Emma.]

Yet once Humberstall was accepted into the brotherhood—“it’s a very select Society, an’ you’ve got to be a Janeite in your ’eart”—he came to understand her true worth. “I read all her six books now for pleasure ’tween times in the shop. . . . You take it from me, Brethren, there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place. Gawd bless ’er, whoever she was.”

The very first review of Emma was written by none other than Sir Walter Scott himself. If people had trouble recognizing the value of the novel’s portrait of daily life, he said, if they thought of it as a book in which “nothing happened,” that’s because they were so used to reading novels in which all too many things happened. Austen lived in the great age of trash fiction: the gothic novel, the sentimental novel, the bodice ripper—crumbling castles, creaking doors, and secret passageways; heavenly maidens and dark seducers, piercing shrieks and floods of tears, wild rides and breathless escapes; shipwrecks, deathbeds, abductions, avowals; poverty, misery, rape, and incest. And of course, at the last minute, by grace of the author and a heap of coincidences, a happy ending.

Austen herself made delirious fun of this kind of nonsense when she was young. Her juvenilia—the satirical skits and sketches she produced as a girl for the entertainment of her large, literate, fun-loving family, some of which were written when she was no more than twelve—are full of wicked parodies of this fashionable fluff. In one story, two young heroines, highly sensitive in the accepted style, “faint alternately on a sofa.” In another, an infant girl is discovered, perfectly unharmed and already able to talk, under a haystack. In a third, a young man has “so dazzling a Beauty that none but Eagles could look him in the Face.” People fall in love at the drop of a hat, children pilfer their parents’ savings, and a man discovers four long-lost grandchildren in rapid succession.

In other words, Austen knew exactly what she was doing when she created her fiction of ordinary life. It didn’t happen by default, as if she never really thought about it and simply did what came naturally. It was a revolutionary artistic choice, a courageous defiance of convention and expectation: exactly why so many of her early readers had trouble appreciating what she had done, and why her fame took so long to establish itself.

Yet she did more than reject the literary formulas of her day. Her own life may have seemed uneventful: she lived in a quiet corner of the English countryside, never married, never traveled more than about a hundred miles from home, didn’t publish her first novel until she was thirty-five, and died, still sharing a house with her mother and sister, just six years later. But she lived amid a host of dramatic events, both global in scope and closer to home. Born in 1775, the year that launched the American Revolution, she was a teenager during the French Revolution and an adult during the Napoleonic Wars—a quarter century of epic struggle between Great Britain and France that climaxed at Waterloo just two years before her death. Her life also coincided with the most dynamic phase of the conquest of India, and thus, the rise of the British Empire.

Though they seem remote from her quiet existence, these events touched her very closely. Her father’s bright, pretty sister, endowed with the striking name of Philadelphia, went out to India as a young woman, like so many girls at the time, to find herself a husband from among the mass of ambitious young men who had gone to the booming colony to seek their fortune. Not only did she find one, she may have also found a lover in the person of Warren Hastings, the brilliant young administrator who was on his way to becoming the first governor-general of India and one of the most important figures in the history of the Raj. From then on, the Austen and Hastings families would remain intertwined. Philadelphia, childless for the first eight years of her marriage, gave birth to a daughter within two years of meeting her husband’s new business associate. The girl’s name, Eliza, was the same as that of Hastings’s daughter, who had died in infancy. Hastings, a widower, not only acted as Eliza’s godfather and later gave her the spanking sum of ten thousand pounds, he also sent his young son back to England to be raised in the home of Philadelphia’s newly married brother—that is, Jane Austen’s father himself.

Austen never knew the boy, for he died of diphtheria within a few months. But she did come to know her cousin Eliza, who went on to live another remarkable story, very well indeed. Philadelphia had returned to England along with her husband when their daughter was three. When Eliza was nineteen—she had grown up to be a lively, beautiful, and flirtatious young woman—she married a French count and acquired the glamorous name of Capot de Feuillide. A few years later—Jane was ten by now—Madame de Feuillide descended upon the Austens’ sleepy parsonage in all the glory of her French stories and French fashions. Despite the age difference, the two cousins formed a close and loving friendship that lasted to the end of the older woman’s life.

Meanwhile, Warren Hastings, returned to England after twelve years as the master of British India, was impeached for corruption by the House of Commons and embroiled in the most spectacular trial of Austen’s day. The ordeal dragged on for seven years, followed by the Austens with intense partisanship on behalf of their patron, and finally ended in Hastings’s acquittal. By that point, however, Eliza had become entangled in the French Revolution. Her husband lost his estates; Madame la Comtesse, as she liked to be called, was prevented from returning to France; and at last—Eliza herself was probably taking refuge with the Austens at the time—the count himself was sent to the guillotine. And then, before long, in a turn toward the family with which she had become so close, Eliza married Austen’s older brother Henry, ten years younger than herself.

The Napoleonic Wars came even closer to home. Two of Austen’s other brothers (she had six in all) joined the Royal Navy, Britain’s proudest institution and first line of defense—Frank, a year older than she, and Charles, the baby, four years younger. Frank sailed to the Far East, fought in the Mediterranean, made captain by the age of