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

lack of romantic cachet and looking forward to the day when our professional accomplishments would make us desirable to glamorous women (if there was anyone who wanted to see her man distinguished, it was her): “You guys are lunch meat now. Wait a few years—you’ll be sirloin steak.”

Well, I didn’t want to treat anyone like a piece of meat anymore, and I didn’t want to be treated like one myself, not even metaphorically. But what was the alternative? It wasn’t just my friends and their glamorous crowd. I had been learning to measure myself in terms of success—academic success, professional success—for as long as I could remember, and everything in the culture around me (New York was only an extreme example) instructed me that money and status were the keys to happiness.

So I kept thinking about that word, “nothing.” Who, after all, was “nothing” if not Fanny Price—“lowest and last,” as her awful Aunt Norris reminded her. Forget Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey: if anyone didn’t seem like she was born to be a heroine, it was Fanny. And yet that was exactly what Austen had made her. Indeed, more than Catherine or Emma or Elizabeth Bennet, she was a heroine in the oldest sense—not just a protagonist but a role model, someone we were being asked, however improbably, to emulate. Her very insignificance, I now saw, was designed to provoke us into trying to figure out what her creator found so admirable about her.

Fanny, I realized, was not just different from the privileged people around her; she was their exact opposite. They had everything and wanted more; she had little and was willing to make do with less. Instead of responding to adversity with petulance and spite, she handled it with fortitude, resilience, and, when necessary, resignation. She had hated having to leave her family and come to Mansfield when she was a little girl, but “learning to transfer in its favour much of her attachment to her former home,” she “grew up there not unhappily among her cousins.” “Learning” was interesting: she had to teach herself to do it, it didn’t just happen by itself. “Not unhappily” was even more interesting. She wasn’t happy, and given the circumstances, she didn’t look like she was ever going to be, but by accepting the situation and making the best of it, she managed at least to avoid being unhappy—which was more than you could say for most of her cousins, most of the time.

Whereas Henry and the rest, always able to command amusement, were constantly dogged by the threat of boredom, Fanny had created a rich inner life for herself. The East room, her little space upstairs, was like a diorama of her mind, a place where she could always find “some pursuit, or some train of thought. . . . Her plants, her books, . . . her writing-desk, . . . her works of charity and ingenuity.” She was quiet and shy, yes, but she had a lot going on beneath the surface. For that was the big surprise about her, one that it took me a very long time to see. Mary, lovely and charming, was far better able to incite emotions, but Fanny felt them much more keenly. She may have been prudish and prim, but she was also, of all things, intensely passionate.

Shame, gratitude, terror, happiness, jealousy, love: her emotions were not always pleasant, but she felt them with her whole body. “Fanny’s feelings on the occasion were such as she believed herself incapable of expressing; but her countenance and a few artless words fully conveyed all their gratitude and delight.” “He saw her lips formed into a no, though the sound was inarticulate, but her face was like scarlet.” Life was simply much more real to her than it was to Mary or Henry or Tom or Maria. Its risks were more threatening, its pleasures more precious. One of Austen’s highest lessons, I realized, is that the only people who can really feel are those who have a sense of what it means to do without.

Which was not an endorsement of poverty, either. The glimpse we got of Fanny’s original family made it quite clear that Austen was not foolish enough to romanticize deprivation. The Price household was loud, chaotic, and dirty, with no more consideration for other people’s feelings than prevailed at Mansfield itself. Austen’s point was subtler. Being a valuable person—a “something” rather than a “nothing”—means having consideration for the people around you. Too much money renders that unnecessary; too little makes it very difficult. Fanny was a heroine, finally, because she was able to put herself aside for other people.

One of the novel’s most important words was “exertion” (meaning exertion on behalf of others), and another one was “duty”—two concepts we don’t hear very much about anymore, in this age of do-your-own-thing and every-man-for-himself. Fanny exerted herself for Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris all the time—patiently, uncomplainingly—but she also coached Maria’s dull-witted fiancé when he was trying to learn his lines for the play (even though she frowned upon the project) and, a far more painful sacrifice, swallowed her feelings to help Edmund rehearse his scenes with the dreaded Mary.

As for “duty,” the word connected the obligations that Fanny understood herself to have as a niece, cousin, and friend with the responsibilities that Edmund looked forward to assuming as a clergyman and that William embraced as a naval officer—exactly the ideal of selfless conduct that Austen saw among the professional men in her own family (her clergyman father, her sailor brothers). The Crawfords, of course, had a different and more modern interpretation of the concept. “It is everybody’s duty,” Mary said, “to do as well for themselves as they can.”

But the novel’s most important word of all was “useful.” “It is not in fine preaching only,” Edmund told Mary, “that a good clergyman will be useful in his parish.” Henry had sense enough to put “usefulness” next to “heroism” (the “glory” of usefulness, no less) in his admiration of William Price. Lady Bertram, not surprisingly—it was the worst thing that Austen could say about her—“never thought of being useful to anybody.”

I resisted accepting this, for a long time, as a standard of behavior. It seemed so, well, utilitarian—so petty and practical. Is that the best we could do for one another, be “useful”? What about support and compassion and love? But eventually I started to see the point. Usefulness—seeing what people need and helping them get it— is support and compassion. Loving your friends and family is great, but what does it mean if you aren’t actually willing to do anything for them when they really need you, put yourself out in any way? Love, I saw, is a verb, not just a noun—an effort, not just another precious feeling.

Because Fanny had to work hard, set aside her feelings, and sacrifice herself for others—to be, in a word, useful—only she possessed the moral strength to rise to the challenge when circumstances arrived—it was the climax of the novel—that put everyone to the test. As for the others (always excepting her cousin Edmund), their money had given them too much freedom. They had never had to make the kinds of tough choices that build character, and in the crunch they were, precisely, useless.

Such circumstances, Austen knew, will always eventually arrive. They came for her own family when the wife of that same wealthy brother Edward died a few days after giving birth to their eleventh child. The oldest, Fanny Knight, her favorite niece, was still only fifteen. “Edward’s loss is terrible,” Austen wrote her sister Cassandra, who had gone once more to Godmersham for the lying-in,

& must be felt as such, & these are too early days indeed to think of Moderation in greif, either in him or his afflicted daughter—but soon we may hope that our dear Fanny’s sense of Duty to that beloved Father will rouse her to exertion. For his sake, & as the most acceptable proof of Love to the spirit of her departed Mother, she will try to be tranquil & resigned.

What Austen recommended to us, she urged upon her nearest and dearest, too. Love means effort and self- control—for the sake of others, and thus, ultimately, for your own:

Dearest Fanny must now look upon herself as his prime source of comfort, his dearest friend; as the Being who is gradually to supply him, to the extent that is possible, what he has lost.—This consideration will elevate & cheer her.

And so it proved to be. Writing to Cassandra a few months later—her sister was still at Godmersham, being useful herself, while Austen cared for Edward’s oldest boys, who had been away at school when their mother died —she was able to say this:

You rejoice me by what you say of Fanny. . . . We thought of & talked of her yesterday . . . & wished her a long enjoyment of all the happiness to which she seems born.—While she gives happiness to those about her, she is pretty sure of her own share.