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

an eye straining with curiosity, her fingers grasped the handle of a drawer and drew it forth. It was entirely empty. With less alarm and greater eagerness she seized a second, a third, a fourth; each was equally empty. . . . The place in the middle alone remained now unexplored. . . . It was some time however before she could unfasten the door . . . but at length it did open; and not vain, as hitherto, was her search; her quick eyes directly fell on a roll of paper pushed back into the further part of the cavity, apparently for concealment, and her feelings at that moment were indescribable. Her heart fluttered, her knees trembled, and her cheeks grew pale. She seized, with an unsteady hand, the precious manuscript.

A dark house, a stormy night, a cryptic roll of paper—all her expectations seemed to be coming true:

The manuscript so wonderfully found, . . . how was it to be accounted for? What could it contain? To whom could it relate? By what means could it have been so long concealed? And how singularly strange that it should fall to her lot to discover it! Her greedy eye glanced rapidly over a page. She started at its import. Could it be possible, or did not her senses play her false? No, they did not. The precious manuscript turned out to be nothing other than—a laundry list.

And that was only the beginning. One dose of reality was not enough to cure Catherine of her imaginative projections, and before she knew it, she had concocted an elaborate fantasy about buried secrets and violent crimes in the Tilney household. In fact, something scary truly was going on at Northanger Abbey—Catherine was right to detect a dark cloud hanging over the family—but the violence was emotional, not physical. Catherine missed it—until, before long, she was blindsided by it—because she was looking, all too zealously, in the wrong direction. Her fantasies were not just foolish, they were dangerous. Long passageways and old cabinets notwithstanding, there really was nothing remotely mysterious about Northanger Abbey. The only thing separating Catherine from the truth was her own mind.

We may be born with an untrained eye, Austen was telling us, but by the time we get to be Catherine’s age —by the time we’re old enough for college, let alone graduate school—our eyes have been trained only too well. That, I now understood, was why my professor needed to ask us all those “irritating” questions, as he liked to put it. It wasn’t enough for him to be receptive to what we had to say, or to treat us like equals. In fact, that kind of teaching has been very much in vogue of late: encourage students to express themselves, validate their ideas, pass out the positive comments like lollipops.

But students don’t come to school with open minds, they come with all the concepts they’ve already acquired (“foregrounds, distances, and second distances . . .”), and they can’t wait to project them onto everything they read. If you’re in college, you go hunting for “symbolism” or “foreshadowing” or “Christ figures.” If you’re in graduate school, it’s “constructions of otherness” or “discourses of sexuality” or “the circulation of power.” Either way, you end up like Catherine, with a very elaborate theory that bears no relationship to what’s actually going on in front of you. Henry challenged Catherine; my professor challenged his students; Austen challenged all of us. The job of a teacher, I now understood, is neither to affirm your students’ notions nor to fill them with your own. The job is to free them from both.

My professor taught novels, and Catherine was mistaught by them, but neither he nor Austen was finally concerned with novels as such. Learning to read, they both knew, means learning to live. Keeping your eyes open when you’re looking at a book is just a way of teaching yourself to keep them open all the time. Now I understood how my professor had managed to stay so young. He never settled into certainty, never stopped challenging himself—and getting us to challenge him—as hard as he challenged us. There was a paradox, I realized, at the heart of Austen’s work. She showed us how to grow up, but she also wanted us to remain young. Her heroines became adults, but her adults, by and large, did not look very good at all. Here was Catherine and her chaperone on a slow morning in Bath:

She sat quietly down to her book after breakfast; . . . from habitude very little incommoded by the remarks and ejaculations of Mrs. Allen, whose vacancy of mind and incapacity for thinking were such, that as she never talked a great deal, so she could never be entirely silent.

Mrs. Allen was a warning to Catherine, sitting there all too absorbed in her book, but even more, she was a warning to us. Be careful, Austen was saying. Don’t end up like that.

Austen loved youth, precisely because it is the time of life when we are most open to new experiences. Her great subject was change, and young people still retain the capacity for change. Her novels, charged with the energy of youth, quicksighted and playful, were full of young people and their concerns—the adults often relegated, like parents in a Peanuts cartoon (or Mrs. Allen on that morning in Bath), to the inaudible margins. Pride and Prejudice, I realized, had only eight adult characters and fully twenty- one younger ones, starting with the five Bennet girls. Northanger Abbey, a story on a smaller scale, had seven young people and only two adults who played any kind of significant role. Adults are boring, Austen seemed to feel—or at least, they all too often let themselves become so.

As her letters to her nieces and nephews make clear, Austen celebrated youth in her life as well as in her books. She was always looking to entertain and engage her young relations, always interested in what they had to say. When her brother Frank took his new bride to visit their older brother Edward’s estate, Austen composed a poem for Edward’s daughter Fanny, then thirteen, imagining how the exciting new experience must have felt from her perspective.When her brother James’s daughter Caroline acquired a niece of her own at the ripe old age of ten, Aunt Jane entered into her feelings, too. “Now that you are become an Aunt,” she wrote, “you are a person of some consequence & must excite great Interest whatever You do. I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible, & I am sure of your doing the same now.”

She encouraged, but she never condescended. Three of her brothers’ children tried their hands at writing novels—inspired, no doubt, by their famous aunt’s success—and Austen would return their drafts with detailed criticism as well as praise. Even one of Caroline’s stories, sent when she was nine, was taken seriously enough to critique:

I wish I could finish Stories as fast as you can.—I am much obliged to you for the sight of Olivia, & think you have done for her very well; but the good for nothing Father, who was the real author of all her Faults & Sufferings, should not escape unpunished.

Fanny and Anna, her oldest nieces, became her closest correspondents in the last years of her life (both were twenty-four at the time of Austen’s death), but little Caroline, only twelve when her aunt passed away, became a regular one, too, and the letters Austen sent her during those last months were remarkable for the maturity they grant their recipient and the genuine pleasure their writer obviously took in the relationship. As for Fanny, around the same time, a series of personal reflections she’d sent her aunt elicited this:

You are inimitable, irresistible. You are the delight of my Life. Such Letters, such entertaining Letters as you have lately sent!—Such a description of your queer little heart! . . . You are the Paragon of all that is Silly & Sensible, commonplace & eccentric, Sad & Lively, Provoking & Interesting.

She might have been talking about Catherine Morland, and the same vitality, and joy in vitality, shines through her responses to both young women. Finally, there was the letter she sent one January to her brother Charles’s daughter Cassy, also nine at the time, in which every word was spelled backwards, a missive that began, “Ym raed Yssac, I hsiw uoy a yppah wen raey,” and ended, “Ruoy Etanoitceffa Tnua, Enaj Netsua.” No wonder Tnua Enaj was the favorite of her many nieces and nephews.

Austen’s work contained a paradox, yet it didn’t have to be a tragedy. You can get older, she was telling me, but still remain young. That, I started to realize, was part of what had been keeping me from growing up for all those years, the fear of foreclosing possibilities, of turning into another boring adult with a spouse and a house.