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

Duty, exertion, resignation, and ultimately, happiness: the same ideas that Austen would later embody in the story of that other Fanny, the one she created and sent to a place that looked a lot like Godmersham Park.

But there was one last form of usefulness (though I never would have thought of it that way) that Austen was keen to teach—so much so that she put it right up front, at the very start of the novel. The ten-year-old heroine had been at Mansfield for a week, sobbing herself to sleep every night, when her cousin Edmund, six years her senior, came upon her in tears on the attic stairs. “And sitting down by her, he was at great pains to overcome her shame, . . . and persuade her to speak openly.” She missed her family, he soon perceived, and so he said, “Let us walk out in the park, and you shall tell me all about your brothers and sisters.” And that was enough to win him a friend for life, the simple act of inviting Fanny to tell her story. No one else had thought to do it; no one else had thought about her at all.

How different this was, I realized, from the kinds of stories I had trained myself to tell my friend and his wife, those polished little anecdotes that had to have a laugh at every turn. “You shall tell me all about your brothers and sisters.” All about: no impatience, no competitiveness, no interruptions, no need to worry about being entertaining, no having to watch your listeners’ eyes glaze over while they thought about what they were going to say when you finally stopped talking already. Did Edmund really care about her brothers and sisters? Probably not. But he cared about her, and she cared about them, and that was enough for him. To listen to a person’s stories, he understood, is to learn their feelings and experiences and values and habits of mind, and to learn them all at once and all together. Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else’s stories—entering into their feelings, validating their experiences—is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.

There’s no doubt about it: fun people are fun. But I finally learned that there is something more important, in the people you know, than whether they are fun. Thinking about those friends who had given me so much pleasure but who had also caused me so much pain, thinking about that bright, cruel world to which they’d introduced me, I saw that there’s a better way to value people. Not as fun or not fun, or stylish or not stylish, but as warm or cold, generous or selfish. People who think about others and people who don’t. People who know how to listen, and people who only know how to talk.

I could drift away from the private-school crowd—which, now that I had gotten my head screwed on a little straighter, is exactly what I did—I could leave New York altogether, as I knew I might someday have to do, but these lessons, I realized, would always apply. Few of us travel in the kinds of upper-class circles of which I’d had a glimpse, but we all live in a world where money and status and celebrity are cherished too highly, and we’re all susceptible to the temptation to value people for things like wealth and glamour and success—to value ourselves for them, and sacrifice what’s really important in order to get them.

The truth is, I never did grow to like Fanny Price, and I never could bring myself to dislike the Crawfords as much as I knew I should. By the same token, I didn’t find it easy to spend less time with my friend and his wife. Fun is fun, and charm is charming, and we can’t really prevent ourselves from feeling drawn to them. But the lesson of Northanger Abbey still applied: “Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves.” Thinking can’t stop us from feeling, but it can stop us from acting. It can prevent us from being taken in by our feelings.

I wasn’t even sure that Austen expected us to like Fanny Price. She knew quite well that Fanny would be tough to love, but she wanted to draw the contrast with people like the Crawfords in the starkest possible terms. By not giving her heroine any kind of wit or charm to distract us, she forced us to focus on the things that really mattered about her. Elizabeth Bennet also had a generous heart, was also capable of being thoughtful and selfless, but with her glorious lovability, who even bothered to notice? Reading about her, it was all too easy to imagine that Austen only cared about sparkle and wit.

That was why she had to make her heroine in Mansfield Park so dull. This time, she took Elizabeth and split her personality in half: Mary got the charm, Fanny got the goodness, and we had to decide which one was better. Austen wasn’t really condemning brightness and energy, I realized; she was just showing us that they aren’t the most important things in life. “Wisdom is better than Wit,” she wrote to Fanny Knight the very year that Mansfield Park was published, “& in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.” Choosing Fannyness over Mary-ness does not come naturally and is not always particularly pleasant, but, Austen was telling us, it is what we need to do.

And so, it is what I began to try to do. I knew perfectly well that I fell far short of the standards that Austen was holding up, so I started to watch myself, and I started, yes, to exert myself. I made a deliberate effort to be useful to the people around me, whether it was something small, like showing up on time for dinner, or something bigger, like proofreading a friend’s dissertation. Most of all, I practiced sitting still and listening—really listening. To friends, to students, even just to people I met, as their stories came stumbling out in the awkward, unpolished way that people have when you give them the freedom to speak from the heart. People’s stories are the most personal thing they have, and paying attention to those stories is just about the most important thing you can do for them. I never did come to like Fanny’s story, but that’s the deepest lesson that finally listening to it had taught me.

Chapter 5 persuasion true friends

Meanwhile, as I stumbled in and out of the social elite, I spent the bulk of my time slaving away at, procrastinating on, whimpering about, and otherwise slogging through my dissertation. There’s nothing quite like writing a dissertation. You’ve gone through almost twenty years of school, including your first few years as a graduate student, and you’ve always had someone there to tell you what to do: take these courses, do this reading, answer these questions. You’ve also always had other people around to share the experience with—sit next to in class, bitch to about your teachers, study with for exams.

Then, all of a sudden, you’re on your own. It’s like being left in the woods without a map. Good luck, sucker. Drop us a line if you make it out alive. All you know is that you have to go off by yourself for four or five or six years and write what amounts to a book. You’ve never written a book, you have no idea how to write one, and no one, you quickly realize, is going to teach you, because the only way to learn is just to do it. Plus, you have to make up your own topic. And, oh yes, it has to be completely original.

I had decided to write my dissertation about community in nineteenth-century English fiction. The Austen chapter would be followed by ones on George Eliot (yes, the once-dreaded Middlemarch) and Joseph Conrad (my old standby). It was a very personal decision. The most important experience of my life had been the years I had spent in a Jewish youth movement during high school. For most people, that kind of thing is an eye-rolling waste of time—a nerd festival that your parents force you into when you’d rather be out behind the mall, smoking cigarettes and trying to get to second base.

But this was different, at least for my friends and me. We ran the thing on our own, more or less—even the “adults,” who had gone through the movement themselves, were mainly in their early twenties—and it was about discovering our own values and developing our own sense of authenticity. It was a national movement, too, with chapters and regions and camps, and kids who came from exotic places like Oregon and Illinois. It was, to the extent that we could manage it, a complete world, or at least, a complete worldview, and we were there because it gave us all the things we couldn’t find in the high-school jungle: a feeling of acceptance, an outlet for idealism, a sense of being part of something bigger than ourselves.

In a word—and it was a word that we used all the time—community. The dream we all had was to move to Israel and live on a kibbutz, a sort of Jewish version of a commune. It was a dream about sharing everything and being together forever. But however naïve the idea might have been, it meant that while we were dreaming about community, we were also living it. We would come together, in our dozens or our hundreds, for meetings and weekends and trips and summers; for songs, games, campfires, and an endless string of nights when we just stayed up and talked.

We talked about social justice and social action, idealism and identity, being Jewish and being human. We talked, until we could barely keep our eyes open, just to have an excuse to stay up together, just to feel each other nearby. We were going to change the world, but along the way, without even noticing it, we changed ourselves. It