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

As for formal education as it existed in Austen’s day—of which there was in any case precious little to be had by girls—she had this to say in a short poem titled “On the Universities”:

No wonder that Oxford and Cambridge profound

In Learning and Science so greatly abound

Since some carry thither a little each day

And we meet with so few that bring any away.

When Cassandra visited some friends at a nearby estate, her sister included this bit of invective in one of her letters:

Ladies who read those enormous great stupid thick Quarto Volumes, which one always sees in the Breakfast parlour there, must be acquainted with everything in the World.—I detest a Quarto.—Capt. Pasley’s Book is too good for their Society. They will not understand a Man who condenses his Thoughts into an Octavo.

Quartos were large-format volumes reserved for books that took themselves very seriously; octavos were half the size and much less pretentious. As for Captain Pasley’s work, Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, Austen called it “a book which I protested against at first, but which upon trial I find delightfully written & highly entertaining”—evidence both that she was no stranger to serious works of nonfiction and that she judged whether a book was likely to tell her anything valuable by the way it was written. Her problem with quartos was not their subject matter but their ponderous prose, their “thickness” in both senses.

Of course, the kind of books she valued most were novels. This was not a fashionable position—novels were considered too trivial and feminine—but she defended it without apology. Writing to Cassandra about a new library that was about to open in the neighborhood (libraries were private businesses at the time and charged a subscription fee), she noted that:

As an inducement to subscribe Mrs. Martin tells us that her Collection is not to consist only of Novels, but of every kind of Literature etc. etc.—She might have spared this pretension to our family, who are great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so;—but it was necessary I suppose to the self-consequence of half her Subscribers.

In Northanger Abbey, a novel about reading novels, John Thorpe marked himself out as just such a snob when Catherine asked if he had read The Mysteries of Udolpho: “Udolpho! Oh, Lord! Not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do.”

It was a response that Austen had already taught us to disdain. She was not against Udolpho and its kin; she was only against the way that people misread them. And just to make sure that we didn’t miss the point, she made this thundering declaration very early in the book, right after telling us that Catherine read novels herself:

Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel- writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. . . . There seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss——?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

So there. As for history, the ultimate in “serious” reading, this was how Catherine, explaining why she hated it, described what it involved: “The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.” It was a great line, that second half, but Austen also intended something deeper by it, a sly reference to her own project. “Hardly any women at all”: in other words—since women had essentially no role in public affairs—nothing about private life, nothing about personal life. Whereas the novel, the great genre of private life, was almost always, in Austen’s day, about women and almost always by them—two of the main reasons that people were so quick to put it down.

Histories tell us what happened, but novels can teach us something even more important: what might happen. The opening line of Northanger Abbey was a joke about gothic fiction and a way of calling attention to Austen’s own use of conventions, but it was also, I now saw, something still more. “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.” From the humblest beginnings, the greatest possibilities. Catherine never did become a traditional heroine, never did have the wild passions and epic adventures that we’re supposed to find so admirable. Instead, she became something better.

By waking up to the world, by renouncing certainty and cynicism, by opening herself to new experiences—all of which take real courage, real strength—she turned her life into an adventure that would never end. This, Austen told us, is the true heroism. Life, if you live it right, keeps surprising you, and the thing that keeps surprising you the most, I now understood, is yourself. The caterpillar can’t imagine the butterfly, the child can’t imagine the adult, and no one, before they do it, can imagine what it feels like to fall in love. We can never reach the end of what’s inside us, never know the limit of our own potential.

These were lessons to explore for a lifetime, but the first place I applied them was the classroom. Instead of thinking of a session as a kind of engineering problem—how to transfer a certain quantity of material from my head to my students’—I started to see it as an opportunity to incite them to discover the powers that were waiting, unborn, within them, and in doing so take both themselves and me by surprise. I went from feeling that a good class was one in which I had “gotten my points across” to regarding it as one in which I had learned something myself—not because my learning was the goal, but because if I had found out something new, it meant that I had given my students the freedom to think their way beyond me.

All of a sudden, teaching became a joyful experience. I arrived in the classroom with excitement and left it with exhilaration. The time in between, which now seemed as if it was never long enough, began to feel like a collaboration, even an adventure—like I was working a trapeze, and the best moments came when I let go of the bar, let go of my plan, and just flew through the air, confident that someone would be there on the other side to catch me. It was scary, but it was also really fun.

I began to like my students rather than resent them. They suddenly seemed really smart and interesting— because I was letting them be, instead of having to suppress their talents in order to maintain my fragile sense of intellectual authority. They seemed to start to like me, too, began to come to talk to me, even confide in me. Best of all, a few of them became my friends, in that special way that can happen between a student and a teacher—the way that had happened between me and that extraordinary person whom I felt so privileged to live next door to.

It turned out that I hadn’t made a mistake by wanting to become a professor, after all. It had just taken me a while to discover my potential. I had started to learn how to teach—but more importantly, after more than twenty years in school, I had finally learned how to learn.