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

then there was Mrs. Norris, Lady Bertram’s sister, probably the most repulsive character in all of Austen: spiteful, miserly, and mean as dirt, a woman who reacted to the death of her husband “by considering that she could do very well without him” and who harried Fanny—“Remember, wherever you are, you must be the lowest and last”—like a wicked stepmother. But indeed the whole family treated the heroine like a glorified servant—that is, when they bothered to notice her at all.

The whole family but one. Edmund, the kind, attentive younger son, was an oasis of decency in a desert of selfishness. But even he was hard for me to take—as proper and priggish as Fanny herself, and in fact, as her mentor and adored older cousin, the one primarily responsible for making her that way. Nor was Edmund any less immune to the lures of hypocrisy. He, too, opposed the play—until he saw the chance to do a little flirting of his own. Not that he regarded it like that, of course. The cast was one short, and Edmund only took the unclaimed part to forestall the greater impropriety of having to give it to someone outside the family circle. It also just happened to involve playing opposite a young woman in whom by then he had developed a somewhat more than innocent interest.

For a new pair of young people had arrived upon the scene. Henry and Mary Crawford, whose half sister was the wife of the Mansfield clergyman, were everything, it seemed to me, that the novel had been needing, a gust of fresh air from beyond the musty confines of Mansfield Park. Henry was dashing and debonair, a sophisticate, a raconteur, a man of the world—cleverer than Tom, more confident than Edmund, and a lot more fun than either one. As for his “remarkably pretty” sister—healthy and high-spirited; witty, playful, and independent—she reminded me of no one so much as Elizabeth Bennet. “I am very strong,” Mary said, bouncing off a horse. “Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like.” She even came with an extra little dash of sauciness. Henry and Mary had been raised by their uncle, a high-ranking naval officer. “My home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals,” she quipped at one point; “Of Rears, and Vices, I saw enough”—a naughty pun on military ranks and the sexual reputation of the Royal Navy.

The Crawfords were independently wealthy, and their money gave them a freedom of spirit that was previously unknown to the heavy atmosphere of Mansfield Park. Their arrival jolted both the Bertram siblings and the novel itself awake. Walks, rides, outings, the play—suddenly it was all liveliness and movement. Of course, Fanny herself was appalled. These were not her kind of people, or her idea of how to pass the time (which tended to involve a lot of sitting). And when Mary and Edmund began to take a shine to one another—his steadiness of character attracting her almost against her will—the heroine was thrown into a panic of jealousy.

But if she stewed with secret spite, Mary treated her with a gentle consideration that seemed to flow from real goodwill. “I am not going to urge her,” Mrs. Norris barked in front of everyone when Fanny refused to participate in the play, “but I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful girl; . . . very ungrateful, indeed, considering who and what she is”:

Edmund was too angry to speak; but Miss Crawford, looking for a moment with astonished eyes at Mrs. Norris, and then at Fanny, whose tears were beginning to shew themselves, immediately said, with some keenness, “I do not like my situation: this place is too hot for me,” and moved away her chair to the opposite side of the table, close to Fanny, saying to her, in a kind, low whisper, as she placed herself, “Never mind, my dear Miss Price, this is a cross evening: everybody is cross and teasing, but do not let us mind them.”

As for Henry, a hardened flirt, he was tougher to like, luring Maria Bertram’s affections, during the time of the play, from the rich but dull-witted young man to whom the oldest Mansfield girl was already engaged—though with no motive more serious, on Henry’s part, than the gratification of his own vanity. Fanny’s turn was next—he boasted to his sister that he only wanted to make “a small hole” in the heroine’s heart—but he soon discovered that the influence was running the other way. Like Mary with Edmund, Henry was surprised to find himself susceptible to Fanny’s finer, quieter qualities. And as he set out to court her in earnest, he began to display some rather fine qualities of his own: patience and tact and sensitivity, a cultivated mind and a susceptible heart.

As Pride and Prejudice ultimately arranged a merging of its hero’s and heroine’s best qualities, a purging of their faults, so I always rooted, each time I read the novel, for a synthesis of Mansfield and Crawford: Edmund and Fanny on the one hand, Mary and Henry on the other. Goodness matched with boldness, stability with spirit. The cousins would grow up, the siblings would settle down. Everybody would be better, and everybody would be happy.

But then, something happened to change my mind, not only about Mansfield Park but also about myself. A year or so after I’d begun to hang around the private-school crowd, my friend and his girlfriend got married. It was more like a coronation than a wedding: a rehearsal dinner the night before at an elegant restaurant overlooking the East River, a stately ceremony in the grand space of an East Side Episcopal church, and an opulent, impeccably tasteful reception at a private club nearby. I fished my best shoes out from the back of the closet and bought my first new suit since my bar mitzvah. Hundreds of people attended, most of them from the bride’s parents’ rarefied sphere of business associates and social contacts. And then, as I was watching the dancing with some of the other single guys—the department-store heiress was wearing a little black dress with a fur-trimmed neckline that none of us could take our eyes off—one of them said, apropos the groom, “Well, he got what he wanted.”

“What do you mean?” I said, looking over to where the newly married man, a big grin on his face, was shaking hands with some of his father-in-law’s friends—cool, confident men who looked like they knew where all the levers were. “He’s on the inside,” came the reply. “He’s been working on this for years.” My friend, it was true, was not of that world. He had grown up in the South, a professional’s son but the grandson of a state trooper, and his mother had been a stewardess. He had gradually worked his way up the chain of academic prestige, through college and graduate school, always traveling in a northeasterly direction, then came to the city, moving from job to job in the same fashion. But I had never imagined that the whole thing had been so calculated.

Sure, I knew in a theoretical sense that people sometimes married for money. I had read The Great Gatsby and understood about coming to New York to bury your past and bluff your way into high society. But I had never dreamed that any of those things applied to my friends. Didn’t we all just go out with people because we liked them? Weren’t we going to marry for love? A phrase popped into my head, understood as if for the first time: “social climber.” And then I remembered something that my friend had said not long after I had met his girlfriend. The two of them had wanted to set me up with one of those old schoolmates of hers, but they had had their reservations. “She’s high-maintenance,” they said. “What’s high-maintenance?” I asked. (I hadn’t seen When Harry Met Sally . . . yet.) “High-maintenance is the worst,” my friend said, searching for a way to express the true awfulness of the concept. “It’s worse than being ugly. It’s worse than being poor!”

It’s funny how that hadn’t really hit me at the time—or had, but I had let it go. They were such a fun couple, and they promised so much fun to come. I hadn’t wanted to hear what he was really saying, or maybe I couldn’t quite believe it. But now, at the wedding, seeing the whole world they’d introduced me to spread out in front of me, seeing its logic laid bare, I was forced to think about what it all meant—the greed beneath the elegance, the cruelty behind the glow—and more to the point, what I myself had been doing in it. Because if my friend was a social climber, then what the hell was I? I had never planned things out the way that he had, or even thought about where it was all heading, but my attraction to that golden crowd, my ache to be accepted by them, what did it amount to if not the very same thing? Who was I becoming? Who had I already become?

I’d like to be able to say that I turned my back on that world that very night, but it wasn’t so simple. The newlyweds were still my friends, and I didn’t find it easy, in any case, to walk away from something that seductive. But I did start to notice all kinds of things—how these people treated others, but also what they did to themselves—that I hadn’t wanted to see before. And it wasn’t long before I realized, as I returned to my dissertation, that someone had already told me everything I needed to know about that world before I’d even encountered it, only I hadn’t been able to listen. For where was I, I finally saw, but smack in the middle of a Jane Austen novel—and one of them, in fact, in particular? What was that realm of luxury and cruelty, glamour and greed, coldness and fun, if not a modern-day version of Mansfield Park?

The recognition almost knocked me down. However much I had learned from Austen about myself, I had