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

by choosing a wife who was never going to be able to challenge him, someone to whom it was far too easy to feel superior. Living with a woman like Mrs. Bennet had made him self-satisfied and morally lazy, and his children suffered as a result. He could have done a lot more to make his daughters financially secure, and when the great crisis came for his family, he turned out to be pretty much useless. If I was going to keep growing, Austen was telling me, I needed to stay on my toes. Fortunately, I had something to help me do so that Elizabeth and her father didn’t. I had Pride and Prejudice.

Jane Austen was about a year old when another English author wrote a statement that could serve as a motto for all her books. “Life is a comedy for those who think,” said Horace Walpole, “and a tragedy for those who feel.” Everyone thinks, and everyone feels, but Jane Austen’s question was, which are you going to put first? Comedies are stories with happy endings. I could grow up and find happiness, Austen was letting me know, but only if I was willing to give up something very important. Not my feelings, but my belief in my feelings, my conviction that they were always right.

This was not easy to swallow. We tend to believe that our emotions are reliable indicators of the way things are in the world. How many times have you heard someone say, “I have a good feeling about this”—a college application, a lottery ticket, a new relationship—only to discover that things don’t necessarily work out just because we have a good feeling about them? Older relatives are particularly fond of these kinds of pronouncements. “I know you’ll do well.” “I can’t imagine they won’t hire you.” “I’m sure everything will work out fine.” Really? You’re sure? What makes you so sure? Just because you happen to like me?

This was exactly Elizabeth’s problem, I realized, as Pride and Prejudice began. She thought she was right because she felt she was right. Mr. Darcy offended her, so he must be a terrible man. Her sister Jane was lovable, so how could anyone not want his friend to marry her? Elizabeth thought she was thinking, but she was really only feeling—resentment, affection, desire—and her great intelligence made her more susceptible to this delusion, not less. Only later did she realize, after the humiliating recognition of her many mistakes, that head and heart can disagree, and that when they do, the head should win.

This was the conflict that Austen expressed in the title of her very first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, and embodied in its two main characters. Elinor Dashwood was sensible; her little sister Marianne was full of sensibility or feeling. Early in the book, the two had an argument that laid out the matter very squarely. “I am afraid,” Elinor said, rebuking Marianne for having gone about unchaperoned with a young man, “that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.” The fact that something feels good, in other words, does not make it right. “On the contrary,” Marianne replied, “nothing can be a stronger proof of it . . . if there had been any real impropriety in what I did, I should have been sensible of it at the time, for we always know when we are acting wrong.”

We always know when we are acting wrong: how simple life would be if only that were true. Marianne was a romantic, in both senses. She believed that love is more important than anything else, and certainly more important than what her straitlaced older sister thought was proper. And she was also a devotee of the Romantic movement that was sweeping the West in Austen’s day. Austen viewed that movement with alarm precisely because of what it said about the proper relationship between feeling and reason. Romanticism taught that society and its conventions are confining and artificial and destructive, and that reason was simply another one of those conventions, not a source of truth. It taught that the real source of truth was Nature, and that if we only followed the nature within us—our spontaneous impulses and feelings—we would be good and happy and free. A romantic is someone who thinks that if their heart is in the right place, it doesn’t matter where their brain is. That was what Marianne meant: that our emotions are a moral compass that can never steer us wrong. If something is pleasant, it must be proper. If it feels good, it is good.

In terms of cultural history, Austen was fighting a losing battle. The Romantic idea gave rise to almost all the great art of the last two centuries. It gave us Wordsworth and Byron, Whitman and Thoreau, modern dance, expressionist painting, Beat poetry, and much, much more. It has set the terms for the way we think and feel ever since the time of Austen, and in particular, for the way we think and feel about thinking and feeling. The most important word in popular music today is not “love,” it’s “I.” And the second most important is “wanna.” Popular music is one giant shout of desire, one great rallying cry for freedom and pleasure. Pop psychology sends us the same signals, and so does advertising. “Trust your feelings,” we are told. “Listen to your heart.” “If it feels good, do it.”

These can be the right lessons to learn at a certain point in life. They certainly were for me. I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community: there were a lot of restrictions, a lot of rules. Don’t eat pork. Don’t play music on the Sabbath. Don’t go out with non-Jewish girls. Don’t stray outside the bounds of the group. Every action was prescribed by an ancient tradition, every choice circumscribed by the values of a tight-knit community. Keep your head covered. Say your prayers three times a day. Get A’s, go to a good college, make your parents proud. Learning that my feelings mattered—learning to figure out what my feelings were in the first place—was extremely liberating as I got older. I needed to realize that I could do what I wanted with my life and that I could do it just because I wanted to. Accepting that my emotions were valid and important and morally significant— that they should have a bearing on how I act—was a crucial part, at that point, of growing up.

Some of Austen’s heroines had to learn this lesson, too. They were inexperienced and needed to discover their feelings, or they were neglected and needed to stand up for them. But Elizabeth and Emma and Marianne had already figured out how to do those things. They trusted their gut. They listened to their heart. If it felt good, they did it. Their problem, like that of so many young people, was that they had too great a belief in their own feelings. They had achieved the relative autonomy of adolescence—learning to trust yourself—but now they had to take the next step, into the full autonomy of adulthood. They needed to learn to doubt themselves.

And that was what Elizabeth finally did. That was what happened when she read the letter that overturned her beliefs—and why she had to read it twice. Its arguments—its infuriatingly rational arguments—flew in the face of her feelings, and the first time through, her feelings rebelled. But the second time, her honesty forced her to listen—forced her to think. By telling us Elizabeth’s story, I saw, Austen was calling us to do something very difficult, something that violates our instincts and intuitions. But of course it does. She was telling us, precisely, to question our instincts and intuitions. She wanted us to override our emotions, which dwell within us and urge us to do what we want, and replace them with reason—with logic, with evidence, with objectivity—which stands outside us and doesn’t care what we want.

Learning this lesson was oddly liberating. Just because I thought that another person had done something to me, I was now forced to acknowledge, didn’t mean that I was right. I might be offended by something they had said, but maybe I’d misunderstood them. I might be mad because they were getting ugly with me, but maybe I had started it. Feelings are always about something, and that “something” is not itself a feeling. It’s an idea, a perception of a situation, just as Elizabeth’s feelings were based on her perceptions of certain situations. Everyone could see that Jane loved Bingley; Elizabeth’s family wasn’t really all that bad; Mr. Darcy was insufferably proud: these were the perceptions, the ideas, on which her feelings were based, and they all turned out to be wrong. And because ideas can be wrong, the emotions that are based on them can also be wrong. So now I had a way to let go of my feelings when they weren’t legitimate—when they weren’t correct. I could acknowledge my emotions, but I didn’t have to be controlled by them.

Needless to say, not everybody wants to hear that their feelings aren’t necessarily valid. In fact, a lot of people hate Jane Austen for just that reason. They see her as cold and prudish, a schoolmarm and killjoy. In graduate school, we split into two camps over the question—Jane Austen, pro or con—and emotions ran high. At a certain point, we were each expected to teach a class that included one nineteenth-century novel. Now, there are a lot of great nineteenth-century novels, but almost all of us chose one of only two: Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre. It may seem like a small matter, but great issues were felt to be at stake (as they always are in graduate school). The decision wasn’t just a pedagogical choice, it was a statement of faith, a declaration of self, for the books represented the strongest possible expressions of two diametrically opposed views of life.

In Pride and Prejudice, reason triumphs over feeling and will. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë’s own typically Romantic coming-of-age story, emotion and ego overcome all obstacles. Those of us who chose Pride and Prejudice couldn’t imagine how you could stand to read anything as immature and overwrought as Jane Eyre. Those who