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

may well have given his sister the idea for Mansfield Park, especially since his oldest daughter, the novelist’s favorite niece—eighteen, like Fanny Price, when Austen started to write the novel—was also named Fanny. But if Edward contributed the idea of adoption, and Fanny Knight donated her name, the heroine’s experiences—exclusion, alienation, subordination—belonged to none other than Austen herself.

While she visited her brother’s estate of Godmersham Park any number of times, and struck up that friendship with Fanny Knight, she was never regarded there as anything more than a poor relation. Like Fanny Price at Mansfield Park, or me in that circle of rich New Yorkers, she remained an outsider, and an inferior. The fault was not Edward’s, by all accounts an impeccably generous man (it was he who lent the house, on land attached to yet another one of his estates, in which the Austen women settled after the death of Jane’s father). The fault was not even his wife’s, though when it came to summoning a spinster sister-in-law to help with her many lyings-in (she had eleven children altogether), she much preferred Cassandra. According to a different niece, “a little talent went a long way with the Goodenstone Bridgeses,” Edward’s wife’s family, “& much must have gone a long way too far.”

No, the fault was simply the system’s. Austen was treated like an inferior despite being such a close relation, and despite her immense gifts of character and mind, because according to the way that people thought at the time, that was exactly what she was. Fanny Knight herself, over fifty years after Austen’s death and nearly as many since she had become a titled lady in her own right, put the matter with brutal frankness. Her aunt, she remembered, “was not so refined as she ought to have been from her talent.” The Austens as a whole, she continued, “were not rich & the people around with whom they chiefly mixed, were not at all high bred, or in short anything more than mediocre & they of course tho’ superior in mental powers & cultivation were on the same level as far as refinement goes.” Cassandra and Jane, she went on, “were brought up in the most complete ignorance of the World & its ways (I mean as to fashion etc.) & if it had not been for Papa’s marriage, . . . they would have been, tho’ not less clever and agreeable in themselves, very much below par as to good Society & its ways.”

And this, remember, was Austen’s favorite niece. She wasn’t being mean; she was being honest. This was simply how people thought in “Society,” in “the World.” Family was all well and good, but it was no substitute for “refinement” or “fashion” or being “high bred.” Cassandra went to help her pregnant sister-in-law with a willing heart, no doubt, but it wasn’t as if she really had a choice. Edward lent his mother and sisters a house with an equally good will, but that made them no less his dependents. It is no wonder that the closest friend that Austen made at Godmersham—a relationship that lasted the rest of her life—was none other than the family governess: someone equally marginal, inferior, and dependent. And it is also no wonder that she used her lifetime of stealthy observation there to create her cutting portraits of aristocrats like the Bertrams and the Crawfords.

For all that Austen helped me see about the ways the rich and wellborn deal with other people—as objects or instruments, as puppets or toys—her deepest lessons about the dangers of power and luxury had to do with how such people hurt themselves. It’s no fun to have friends who constantly want you to entertain them, but it’s far worse if you’re the one who constantly needs to be entertained. The Crawfords’ mobility, which looked so much at first like energy—Mary galloping about the countryside, Henry dashing about the country—was little more, I finally saw, than restless discontent. Mary was moping one showery day at the Mansfield parsonage, her half-sister and brother-in-law’s house—“contemplating the dismal rain in a very desponding state of mind, sighing over the ruin of all her plan of exercise for that morning, and of every chance of seeing a single creature beyond themselves for the next twenty-four hours”—when a very wet Fanny was spotted nearby and asked to come inside.

“The blessing of something fresh to see and think of was thus extended to Miss Crawford,” Austen commented, “and might carry on her spirits to the period of dressing and dinner.” The moment went by quickly, but what an indictment it was. So poor was Mary in any kind of inner resources, Austen was telling us, any ability to dwell in her own mind—to read, to draw, or simply to sit still and think—that her spirits couldn’t survive a few hours alone indoors. Perpetual amusement, the privilege of the idle rich, leads only, it seems, to the perpetual threat of boredom.

Being able to get whatever you want, Austen was showing me, leaves you awfully unhappy when you cannot get what you want. While the Crawfords’ arrival set Mansfield awhirl with schemes of pleasure—the play, a trip to Maria Bertram’s fiancé’s estate—they always seemed to have a way of going sour. Everyone fought about who was going to get the best parts in the play or the best seats in the carriage, who was going have the chance to flirt with whom. Everyone fought, in other words, over what kind of pleasure they were each going to have, and who was going to have the most.

When Mary’s harp arrived from London in the middle of the harvest, she couldn’t understand why she found it so difficult to hire a cart to bring it from the nearby town:

I was astonished to find what a piece of work was made of it! To want a horse and cart in the country seemed impossible, so I told my maid to speak for one directly; and as I cannot look out of my dressing- closet without seeing one farmyard, nor walk in the shrubbery without passing another, I thought it would be only ask and have. . . . Guess my surprise, when I found that I had been asking the most unreasonable, most impossible thing in the world; had offended all the farmers, all the labourers, all the hay in the parish!

Charmingly put, as always, but the meaning was clear enough. “I told my maid to speak for one directly”: Mary was not accustomed to waiting for a bunch of farmers, and she did not intend to become accustomed to it, either. Like her brother, or most of the Bertrams, she was not the kind of person who was used to hearing “no.”

Edmund—who, as a younger son, had to find a way to make a living—planned to become a clergyman. William, Fanny’s brother, was already on his way to becoming a naval officer. But Tom, the oldest son—he wasn’t going to become anything. He was an heir, after all; he felt himself to be born “only for expense and enjoyment.” And Henry Crawford, what were his plans? Like a lot of the wealthy young people I knew—the café-owning heiress, who later took an unsuccessful stab at law school, or her boyfriend, the film dabbler—Henry was a dilettante.

When Edmund talked of his future, Henry imagined how splendid it would be to deliver a sermon. “But then,” he added, “I must have a London audience. I could not preach but to the educated. . . . And I do not know that I should be fond of preaching often.” When William, Fanny Price’s sailor brother, recounted his stories of adventure, Henry wished that he had joined the navy. “He longed to have been at sea,” as Austen put it, “and seen and done and suffered as much.” The wording was perfect. Henry wished, not to be at sea, but to have been—to have gotten his suffering over with and now stand ready to reap the credit. “The glory of heroism, of usefulness, of exertion, of endurance, made his own habits of selfish indulgence appear in shameful contrast; and he wished he had been a William Price, distinguishing himself and working his way to fortune and consequence!”

The wish, however, was short-lived. Why work hard if you don’t have to? Why restrict your freedom if you have all the money in the world? Henry wanted to do a little of everything but not too much of anything, and so in the end he did precisely nothing. It was not an uncommon predicament among the rich kids I knew, both in that private-school circle and through other connections. Many were chronically aimless, and some were downright miserable, psychologically crushed by the fact that nothing was ever going to be expected of them. At the highest levels of wealth, I heard, doing well meant no more than not having tried to kill yourself. It made me wonder whether people would ever seek to make themselves rich in the first place, if they knew what it was going to do to their children.

The Crawford worldliness, which had always so impressed me, now seemed, in fact, a kind of narrowness. Mary’s crack about the hay, her inability to understand that there might be other priorities than the ones that prevail in London, was evidence not only of a bloated sense of entitlement, but also of the special kind of provincialism that belongs to people who think of themselves as cosmopolitan. Once I realized this, I began to see it all around me, including—or especially—coming out of my own mouth. At least people from smaller places recognize that there are other things out there in the world. But if you live in “the center of the universe”—London in Austen’s day or New