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

behaved when they were young, they want to curl up in a ball, and when they see someone acting the same way now, they want to smack them in the head. But Austen observed it all with perfect humor and understanding. She sympathized with it, even though she recognized how foolish it was. But here’s the really incredible thing. When she started working on Pride and Prejudice, she was still only twenty herself.

In writing about Elizabeth’s situation, in other words, she was also writing about her own. Elizabeth loved to dance, and so did her author. Elizabeth loved to read, and so did her creator. Elizabeth loved to walk, and so did Jane Austen. As Elizabeth had Jane, so did Austen have Cassandra, a milder and properer two-years-older sister— confidante, sounding board, best friend—to adore and admire. (“If Cassandra were going to have her head cut off,” their mother once said, “Jane would insist on sharing her fate.”) Most importantly, Austen gave Elizabeth her own qualities of mind: a piercing wit and a wicked sense of humor. Like Elizabeth’s high-wire conversations with Mr. Darcy, Austen’s letters to Cassandra were an opportunity to show off both. Elizabeth said things like, “I am perfectly convinced . . . that Mr. Darcy has no defect. He owns it himself without disguise.” Austen let herself go at greater length. Here she was, dishing the dirt on a ball she’d just attended:

There were very few Beauties, & such as there were, were not very handsome. Miss Iremonger did not look well, & Mrs. Blount was the only one much admired. She appeared exactly as she did in September, with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, & fat neck.—The two Miss Coxes were there; I traced in one the remains of the vulgar, broad featured girl who danced at Enham eight years ago. . . .—I looked at Sir Thomas Champneys & thought of poor Rosalie [a maid who’d caught his eye some years before]; I looked at his daughter & thought her a queer animal with a white neck.—Mrs. Warren, I was constrained to think a very fine young woman, which I much regret. She has got rid of some part of her child, & danced away with great activity, looking by no means very large. Her husband is ugly enough; uglier even than his cousin John; but he does not look so very old.—The Miss Maitlands are both prettyish; very like Anne; with brown skins, large dark eyes, & a good deal of nose.— The General has got the Gout, & Mrs. Maitland the Jaundice.—Miss Debary, Susan & Sally, all in black, . . . made their appearance, & I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow me.

Ouch. But however wickedly she may have laughed at her neighbors in private, Austen went out of her way to protect their feelings when it came to her public behavior. In the very same letter—in fact, the very next thought—she talks of visiting a friend the following Thursday, unless she stays for another ball that night. But, she adds, “If I do not stay for the Ball, I would not on any account do so uncivil a thing by the Neighborhood as to set off at that very time for another place, & shall therefore make a point of not being later than Thursday morning.”

Her sense of humor could be savage, but her heart was generous, and she endowed Elizabeth with that very same balance of wit and warmth. No wonder the heroine of Pride and Prejudice remained her author’s favorite for the rest of her life. “I want to tell you that I have got my own darling Child from London,” she wrote Cassandra upon receiving the first copies of the novel, and it’s not entirely clear if she meant the book or its heroine. “I must confess,” she went on, “that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.”

A few months later, on a trip to London, she searched the galleries for pictures of Elizabeth and Jane. “I was very well pleased,” she wrote Cassandra, having found a painting that matched her mental image of the latter. “I went in hopes of seeing one of her Sister,” she went on, but there was none to be found. “I can only imagine,” she concluded, that Elizabeth’s new husband “prizes any Picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye.—I can imagine he would have that sort of feeling—that mixture of Love, Pride & Delicacy.” It’s a lovely conceit, and it tells us two things. Austen was every bit as enraptured by Elizabeth’s marriage as the heroine was herself, and no painting could measure up to Austen’s image of her. The first person to fall in love with Elizabeth Bennet, it seems, was her creator.

All the more telling, then, that Austen didn’t fool herself into thinking that her offspring was perfect. She knew that Elizabeth had a lot of growing up to do—which means that she recognized that she herself did, too. Indeed, as Austen grew older, her letters lost most of their sharpness and snark. Though she began Pride and Prejudice when she was barely out of her teens, it wasn’t published until she was thirty-seven—First Impressions, the original version, was rejected by a publisher sight unseen, and she didn’t return to it for many years—and by that point her letters made a very different sound than that freeswinging tale of the ball.

“Wisdom is better than Wit,” she told her favorite niece around this time, “& in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.” The niece, Fanny Knight, now twenty-one herself, was trying to decide whether to marry a certain young man, serious and thoughtful but a little wanting in manner and grace. Aunt Jane wasn’t sure: did Fanny love him enough? But one thing she was certain of. “His uncommonly amiable mind, strict principles, just notions, good habits—all that you know so well how to value, All that really is of the first importance—everything of this nature pleads his cause most strongly.” Good character, she was reminding her niece, is more important than liveliness and spirit.

Saying as much, she was watching over Fanny’s own character, just as she had long done with all her brothers’ many children (of whom she would live to see more than two dozen born). She wasn’t a mother herself, but she had a mother’s care for her nieces and nephews—especially Fanny and her siblings, her brother Edward’s children, whose own mother died giving birth to the last. “They behave extremely well in every respect,” she wrote of his two oldest boys, sent from boarding school to be cared for by their aunt and grandmother in the wake of the tragic event, “showing quite as much feeling as one wishes to see, and on every occasion speaking of their father with the liveliest affection.”

Of her brother Charles’s oldest girl, some years later, she was less complimentary: “That puss Cassy, did not shew more pleasure in seeing me than her Sisters, but I expected no better;—she does not shine in the tender feelings.” “Nature has done enough for her—but Method” (i.e., what her parents have done) “has been wanting.” Yet two years later, much of it spent under the guidance of Jane and Cassandra and their mother, little Cassy gave signs of improvement. “Her sensibility seems to be opening to the perception of great actions,” her aunt wrote, and she has become, for her father, “a comfort.” Soon, Austen was looking out for a new generation, her niece Anna’s children. “Jemima has a very irritable bad Temper,” she told a correspondent. “I hope as Anna is so early sensible of its’ defects, that she will give Jemima’s disposition the early & steady attention it must require.”

The emphasis, as it always was when Austen wrote about children, was on character. Not beauty or creativity or even intelligence, but conduct and temperament and the capacity for empathy and feeling. She watched her nieces and nephews grow; she shaped that growth when she could; she knew that it would be a difficult process. Austen understood that kids are going to make mistakes, and she also understood that making mistakes is not the end of the world.

Finally, by reading Pride and Prejudice, I had come to understand it, too. Being right, Austen taught me, might get you a pat on the head, but being wrong could bring you something more valuable. It could help you find out who you are. Still, that wasn’t the whole story. If I only needed to make mistakes, growing up would have been easy. I made mistakes all the time. In fact, I tended to make the same mistakes over and over again, just like Elizabeth. Making mistakes, I learned, was only the first step. Elizabeth’s youngest sister, Lydia, loud, wild, and brazen, made flagrant mistakes all the time, too—yawning in people’s faces, wasting money on trifles, shamelessly flirting with the young officers—and she was clearly never going to grow up. Elizabeth’s mother’s entire life was one long series of embarrassments, blunders, and miscalculations, including the whole way she raised her daughters and went about finding them husbands, yet she remained the same anxious, foolish, self-centered person that she’d always been.

It wasn’t even enough, Austen showed me, to have your mistakes pointed out to you. Our brains are very good at figuring out what to say when people call us out on something that we’ve done. We scurry around like beavers, shoring up the walls of our self-esteem. Who, me? No, you must be wrong. That’s not what I meant. Was it really such a big deal? It was an accident. It’ll never happen again. That was the first time, I swear. Mistake? What mistake?

Austen’s heroines, I discovered that summer, had their mistakes pointed out to them over and over again,