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

Now I was getting a new idea about what life can have in store.

Once I moved in next to my professor, I found myself running into him from time to time outside our buildings. He had a long-term project to repaint the railings in front of his house (he and his wife would go away for the summers, so the progress was slow), and we would stand there now and then—I’d have a backpack, he’d be holding a brush—and talk about whatever happened to be on my mind. One day it was Northanger Abbey, and he called my attention to a scene I hadn’t thought about before.

“It’s the one where Catherine tells Henry, ‘I have just learnt to love a hyacinth’,” he said. “Now that’s exceedingly interesting, don’t you think?”

“Uh, I guess so,” I said—not an unusual response on my part.

“Well,” he went on, “Austen is saying that we need to learn to love things, that it doesn’t just happen by itself. That’s not an obvious idea.”

“No, I guess not,” I said. “Love is supposed to be completely spontaneous and natural, like love at first sight.”

“Right,” he said, “but the most remarkable thing is, we can learn. And think about what Henry says in response.” He could apparently recite the scene from memory, but I needed a little help.

“‘Who can tell,’” he quoted, “‘the sentiment once raised, but you may in time come to love a rose? . . . The mere habit of learning to love is the thing.’”

The habit of learning: if Catherine could learn to love a hyacinth when she was seventeen, my professor was telling me—or rather, Austen was telling me, through my professor—I could keep learning to love new things my whole life. Of course, it was my professor himself who had helped me learn to love Jane Austen in the first place, against expectations at least as stubborn as the ones that Catherine brought to Northanger Abbey. But I was starting to get it now: the wonderful thing about life, if you live it right, is that it keeps taking you by surprise. Just when you think that nothing can be more uninteresting than a hyacinth (or a scene about a hyacinth, or an author who writes scenes about hyacinths), you find it becoming a new source of delight.

Catherine thought she saw things at Northanger Abbey that weren’t really there, but the novel, my professor explained, was not against imagination. Quite the opposite. It was against delusion, against projection, against thinking the same old thing again and again, whether it’s the idea that all balls are “very agreeable indeed” or that all old houses conceal dark secrets. True imagination, he went on, means the ability to envision new possibilities, for life as well as art. Mrs. Allen and the rest of Austen’s dull adults were not ignorant or stupid so much as they were unimaginative. Nothing was ever going to change for them, because they couldn’t imagine that anything ever would.

But Austen’s ideas about staying young contained a further paradox. When I went back and looked up that scene for myself, I remembered how Catherine had learned to love a hyacinth. “Your sister taught me,” she said to Henry. “I cannot tell how. Mrs. Allen used to take pains, year after year, to make me like them; but I never could, till I saw them the other day in Milsom Street.” Young people, Austen was saying, need to learn to be young, must be woken up to the world’s physical beauty (the loveliness of hyacinths) as well as to their own moral beauty (their capacity to love them). They need to be taught, somehow, by older people, people who have learned it already—people like the Tilneys, or my professor, or Jane Austen. Taught by example (“I cannot tell how”), not the pedantic taking of pains we can too well imagine Mrs. Allen having employed.

The need for teachers: there is something in the modern spirit that bridles at the notion. It seems inegalitarian, undemocratic. It injures our self-esteem, the idea of having to confess our incompleteness and submerge our ego beneath another person. It outrages our Romantic temper, which feels that the self is autonomous and the self is supreme. And if the teacher is a man and the student a woman, as they are in Northanger Abbey—and, even worse, an older man and a younger woman—it offends our feminist sensibilities, as well.

But Austen accepted it, even celebrated it. Nearly all of her heroines have teachers of one kind or another, and in her own life, we know, her mentors were many and crucial. There was James, her oldest brother, ten years older, who had, according to his son James-Edward, Austen’s first biographer, “a large share in directing her reading and forming her taste.” There was Eliza Capot de Feuillide, her glamorous cousin, fourteen years her senior, who became Jane’s friend and idol when she descended upon the Austens from France. There was Anne Lefroy, the wife of a neighboring parson when Austen was a girl—beautiful, spirited, clever, a great reader and wit—her “best loved and admired mentor,” according to Austen biographer Claire Tomalin, a kind of “ideal parent” to whom she could turn for advice and encouragement. And finally, there was Cassandra herself, Austen’s deeply beloved older sister, about whom she would speak “even in the maturity of her powers,” as James-Edward put it, “as of one wiser and better than herself.”

My professor and I were having another one of those conversations when the subject turned to Austen again, her ideas about mentors and maturation. “Austen is saying that it’s important to spend time with extraordinary people,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “So that’s what I advise you to do: spend time with extraordinary people.”

I had come to graduate school with a very different idea about what it means to get an education. It was an idea that derived from my father. Here was a man who had earned three university degrees, spoke six languages, and had taught himself all about classical music and European art and Western history—a man who equated being educated with knowing things, knowing facts. And the purpose of knowing things, in a strangely circular way, was simply to “be” educated, to be able to pride yourself on being a “man of culture” (and feel superior to those who weren’t). Knowledge, culture, ego. Mine was a household, growing up, where it was understood that there were certain things one “ought to know,” where “having heard of” Brahms or Giotto was considered a virtue in itself— even if one didn’t know any more about them than that one was a composer, the other a painter—and where one encounter was considered equivalent to “knowing” (or as my father would have put it, “being acquainted with”) a work of art.

My father had never been very keen on literature—it was just stories, after all; he preferred books that gave you real information—but he began to show an interest once I started graduate school, as a way of sharing the experience. When I took a course on Ben Jonson, he read a biography of the playwright, though not any of his actual plays. When I took a course on Shakespeare, I suggested that he might at least try some of those. “I’ve read them already,” he said. “When I was in my twenties.” And indeed he had, by buying a Complete Works, starting at the beginning, and reading until he had gotten to the end. Another “ought to know” checked off the list.

Knowledge, culture, ego. Even if my notion of what it meant to know a work of art or literature had become more strenuous than my father’s, that was still pretty much the formula I was working with until well into my time in graduate school—as my freshman English students, not to mention the woman I was in love with the summer that I studied for my orals, as well as the one I was going out with when I first read Emma, could readily attest. But now I was learning a new idea, and learning it with the help of that other “father,” the one I’d been so nervous about getting too close to when I took him up on the apartment. It was a new idea about education, but it was also a new idea about being a man—“of culture” or otherwise. You didn’t have to be certain, I now saw, to be strong, and you didn’t have to dominate people to earn their respect. Real men weren’t afraid to admit that they still had things to learn—not even from a woman.

For it was Austen, of course, who had ultimately taught me these new ideas about knowledge and education. While she had no patience with ignorance and valued characters who had “information” and “conversation”—people who knew what was going on in the world and could talk about it intelligently—she ridiculed the emphasis, in both the education of children and the self-education of adults, on the mere acquisition of facts. Elizabeth Bennet’s sister Mary wasn’t just pedantic; she was also dense.

“What say you, Mary?” her father teased her at one point.

“For you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books and make extracts.”

Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.