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

never dreamed that our worlds bore much resemblance to each other. I lived in a democracy, she lived in an aristocracy. In my world, people could make their way through talent and hard work; in hers, you were pretty much stuck where you were born. In our day, people married for love (or so I had thought). In hers, marrying for money and status was more or less taken for granted. But now I saw how similar our worlds really were, especially at the level where I currently found myself. Beneath the ideals, which looked so different, the very same attitudes: the same values, the same motives, the same ambitions. Whatever I might have wanted to believe, I realized, we also have an aristocracy in this country, and I was looking at it. So in the months that followed the wedding, as I continued to travel within that world—but now more cautiously, more consciously—a process of mutual illumination began to unfold. Mansfield Park taught me about my experiences, and my experiences taught me about Mansfield Park.

Who was I, ultimately, among those rich Manhattanites, if not another Fanny Price: an outsider, an onlooker—creeping, largely unregarded, along the edges? What an idiot I had been to think that I could ever really belong, and how pathetic to imagine that my education, of all things, would win me a glamorous girlfriend. That the novel expended so much energy on a play—one that its golden youth put on by themselves, for themselves—made perfect sense to me now. The episode simply made visible what had always been true, that Fanny was and only ever could be a spectator. She may have chosen to sit out the play, but the larger drama of money and status that was being enacted around her all the time—the balls and the games, the flirtation and the matchmaking—she had no more choice to sit and watch than I. We didn’t know the lines, and no one would have given us a part even if we had managed to learn them. The play’s title, Lovers’ Vows, was perfectly chosen. Fanny was penniless; at that point in the novel (Henry’s later interest was something of a miracle on Austen’s part), she wasn’t going to find herself reciting those anytime soon.

I also began to understand the unique role that Mansfield itself played in the book. The novel was not the only one of Austen’s that was named after a place, but no other place achieved the kind of presence in its novel that this one did. None of her other stories dwelled so insistently within the confines of a single estate. Mansfield was mentioned in the first sentence, and it was named again in the very last line. We discovered its routines, learned the names of its servants, were shown the sources of its wealth. We acquired a sense of its spaces with a richness of detail that was otherwise unknown in Austen’s work: the drawing room, where the family gathered; the billiard room, where the young people set up their theater; the East room, where Fanny went to lick her wounds; the gardens; the stables; the parsonage; the park. No wonder the novel was named for the estate. Mansfield Park was a more important character than anyone else besides the heroine.

As for why this should be true, I had only to think of the place that I had come to as a seventeen-year-old suburban boy. Mansfield was for Fanny what New York was for me: a place of awe, astonishment, intimidation, and social peril, a labyrinth of mysterious values and of spaces heavy with symbolic and emotional meaning. About Longbourn, where Elizabeth Bennett grew up, or Hartfield, where Emma lived, we learned almost nothing, and just because those heroines could take their homes for granted. If Mansfield Park had been narrated from the perspective of Edmund, say, the estate would have figured as an equally neutral backdrop.

But the novel sees with Fanny’s eyes, wide with provincial wonder. Nothing about Mansfield could ever be neutral for her; nothing would ever be taken for granted. The book was about her encounter with the place as much as it was about anything else. Mansfield was a character in the novel for the same reason that New York was in so many movies and television shows—Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, Sex and the City. The two places were not just locations: they were climates, moods, cultures. They made their own weather, dictated their terms.

Which made the Bertrams and Crawfords I knew, children of Manhattan, all the more powerful to me. Coming from the magic place, they carried, quite apart from their own beauty or poise, the dazzle of its aura. So too, in the novel, did the Crawfords, who represented something even more than Mansfield: London, the place where they’d grown up, New York’s forerunner and equivalent. The Bertrams themselves were provincial compared to them, and it was the glamour of London, I now understood, that the Crawfords sailed into Mansfield on the wind of. It was the source of their worldliness, their knowingness, their confidence.

When the young people, at one point in the novel, were discussing the “improvement” of estates—renovation, in our language, a fashionable subject at the time—Mary delivered her opinion with urban nonchalance. “Had I a place of my own in the country, I should be most thankful to any Mr. Repton [a famous landscape designer] who would undertake it, and give me as much beauty as he could for my money; and I should never look at it till it was complete.” Beauty for money: Mary was not just advertising her wealth, she was displaying an ostentatiously metropolitan insouciance in the way she handled it. People in London, she was saying, don’t dirty their hands with the details. They snap their fingers, and the world jumps.

Was Mary being a snob? Maybe a little. Mainly she was doing what she always did. She was being charming. Only now did I realize, though, what “being charming” meant. Charming, after all, is a verb—an action, not merely a state. Mary wasn’t charming the way that Elizabeth Bennet and Catherine Morland were—unconsciously, as a simple outgrowth of their personalities. She deliberately set out to win people over. It was a performance, I saw, an act. (And the significance of the play, the brilliance of placing it at the center of the novel, was once again brought home to me: these people were already acting all the time.) The idea was counterintuitive. Why would someone who was so much more fabulous than you were bother to prove—to you, of all people, the toad, the provincial—just how fabulous they were? Because they needed to know that you thought they were fabulous. Apparently, no matter how poised and confident they seemed to be, they weren’t sufficiently convinced of it themselves.

Mary, I realized, was exactly, almost eerily, like my friend’s new wife. I had been utterly charmed from the night I had met her—by her stories, by her repartee, by her sense of daring and fun—but only now, thinking back to that encounter, did I see how calculated the whole thing must have been. Of course I’d been charmed: that’s what she did. And then it hit me. My friend’s wife had done to me exactly what the Crawfords did to the people at Mansfield, but also what they did to us.

And so I finally began to recognize the depth of Austen’s cunning in Mansfield Park. As Mary seduced Edmund and Henry seduced Fanny, their creator was seeing to it that they were also both seducing the reader. The fact that I had been so taken with them was not the novel’s flaw, as if Austen had created characters that she couldn’t control; it was, precisely, its strategy. She had done it again, just as she had in Emma and Pride and Prejudice: orchestrated my responses to teach me a lesson about my responses. She wanted me to fall for the Crawfords, and then she wanted me to figure out why. Only this time, it had taken me a lot longer to catch on.

My friend’s wife had had a particular reason for wanting to win me over that night—I was her new boyfriend’s friend—but as I began to see, she didn’t need a particular reason. In a coincidence that was almost too beautiful, she was an actress herself—or had been, in college, before she gave it up, as she once told me, because “the best I was probably ever going to do was shampoo commercials.” Instead, she went to law school, or as she put it, “I figured I’d get much better parts as a lawyer than I ever would as an actress.” If she boasted about the way she could work a party, she also bragged about her skill at working on a jury, getting them to think exactly what she wanted.

Like the Crawfords, she pushed people’s buttons for the simple pleasure of being able to do so, and the challenge of figuring out how. Mary, too, was an acute reader of people. Or as Edmund gushed to Fanny, “I know nobody who distinguishes characters better. . . . She certainly understands you; . . . and with regard to some others, I can perceive, from occasional lively hints . . . that she could define many as accurately, did not delicacy forbid it.” In the case of my friend’s wife—or my friend, for that matter, an equally cutting observer—delicacy most certainly did not forbid it, and they had long been regaling me with reflections on the rest of the private-school crowd, from “high-maintenance” to the notion that the twelve-dollardessert woman had acquired her gorgeous boyfriend “like she was buying a pretty book.” Only now did I begin to wonder, though, what the two of them must have been saying about me, to everyone else, and how they must have been working on my buttons, too, without my having realized it.

It was the same in Mansfield Park. When Mary comforted the heroine after that vicious attack by Mrs. Norris, I now saw, she may have been motivated mainly by kindness—“the really good feelings by which she was almost purely governed,” as Austen slyly put it—but she was also manipulating two