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

was the place where I made my closest friends, found my voice, and learned to think about the world. Where I kissed my first girl one summer and lost my virginity a couple of summers after that. Where I felt more at home than I did in my actual home.

We were escaping from high school, but it was not lost on us, even then, that a lot of us were also escaping from our families. That’s a natural thing to want to do when you’re a teenager, but I, like many of my friends, had a good deal of extra incentive.

Things were not good at home, and they never had been. The same emotional violence that my father inflicted on us, he also inflicted on my mother. I’m not sure which was worse for me. With me and her, it had always been the most primitive, unspoken kind of monkey love—the deep comfort, even as a teenager, of just being around her. We’d hang out in the kitchen sometimes after school, and I would listen to her stories, which were all about the happy life she’d lived growing up in Toronto, before she met my father. (She, too, had been in a Jewish youth movement, and she totally understood why it meant so much to me. My father was more ambivalent. He liked that it kept me affiliated, so long as I didn’t take that kibbutz stuff too seriously.) Even then I sensed that somehow, by listening, I was making it up to her for my father’s rage and ridicule, just as she had always tried to shield and solace me. We were secret allies with a common foe, even if we couldn’t come right out and say it.

But then my father would explode into the house, and all bets were off. He was really quite inventive when it came to finding ways of tormenting her. A memory from early childhood: My mother comes into the living room to announce that supper’s ready—the supper she’s been working on the whole afternoon. My father ignores her and keeps on reading the paper. He’ll be damned if he’s going to give her the satisfaction. Something like half an hour later, so much later that my mother’s announcement has started to feel like a dream—he couldn’t have just ignored her, right?—I realize how hungry I am and dare to ask, “Didn’t Mommy say that supper was ready a long time ago?”

Such was the level of emotional discourse, and that was a relatively placid evening, because they hadn’t been screaming at each other from the moment he’d come home. A lot of days were like a running battle, a knife fight with words. Years later, I was bickering with a girlfriend one night before dinner. As I sat down to eat with a gut so clenched that I could barely choke back the food, I was hit by a wave of nostalgia. Yes, I thought, I know this feeling. This is what my childhood felt like.

Was it any wonder that I clung to the movement like a cat on a tree? We clung to each other, my friends and I; we were all, in some way, in flight.

But youth movement ended, because youth does. Like a lot of my friends, I became one of those “adults” myself in college—a counselor, a leader. But eventually we all just, so to speak, ran out of movement to be part of. We had no choice but to go our separate ways, and I was left wandering the world to mourn that titanic experience, wondering how I was ever going to find something like it again. By the time I moved to Brooklyn, seven years later, I was going in the opposite direction fast, into the solitude of my apartment and the loneliness of my work. College itself was long gone, my grad-school classmates were tunneling into their own dissertations, and what friends I still had, from the movement or elsewhere, had scattered themselves across the country.

One was in Boston, doing a postdoc; one was in Chicago, studying religion; one was in Kansas, becoming a mom; one was in California, working in film. My very closest friend, the one who knew me better than I knew myself—she was also just about my last remaining link to the movement—had settled in New Hampshire and was starting her own design business. They were all living their separate lives, and the older we grew, the worse it got. The prospect of recapturing that sense of community, that feeling of belonging to something, seemed more remote than ever. So when I had to choose a topic for my dissertation, I decided to study what I couldn’t experience. It was a classic academic move. Since I didn’t have community, I would spend my time thinking about it.

Two years into Brooklyn, I was still working on my Austen chapter. The thing was like a chronic illness, my only comfort being the grad-school adage that once you’ve finished your first chapter, you’re halfway through the dissertation, because writing the first one teaches you how to write the rest.

I had chosen to begin with Austen not only because I loved her work so much, but also because she seemed to me to represent the perfect starting point for my investigation: a writer who had celebrated community in its most basic and traditional sense—the settled, stable rural world, that good green place where everybody knows you and everybody belongs, the exact image of what I was trying to recapture in my own life. I had also decided to focus on my two favorite among her novels—Pride and Prejudice, of course, and the book that had long since won a special place in my heart, and now increasingly reflected my state of mind, Persuasion.

Austen’s final work, Persuasion was unique among her novels for its layered emotional texture and profound depth of feeling. The mood was wistful, melancholy, autumnal, projecting an atmosphere of nostalgia and regret that was unlike anything she had created before. A work of loneliness and loss, the novel was completed less than a year before Austen’s death. Whether she knew that she was dying by then— the illness that came upon her in the middle of writing the book was mysterious and, for a long time, intermittent— it was impossible to say. What seemed clearer—Austen turned forty during the novel’s composition—was that Persuasion reflected the ripened outlook of a woman who felt herself to be passing into the next phase of life.

The novel’s special place among her work was clear from its very first chapter. The heroine, Anne Elliot, was not a blooming girl of seventeen or twenty, a Catherine Morland or Elizabeth Bennet springing lightly over the threshold of adulthood and into the adventure of romance; she was already twenty-seven, still young by our standards but well past her prime by those of Austen’s day. Anne had already had her novel, so to speak, and it had ended in failure. Eight years earlier, she had fallen rapidly and deeply in love with a dashing young naval officer named Captain Wentworth. Wentworth was modeled on Austen’s brother Frank. Both made captain at a young age; both fought in the great Battle of San Domingo. Even their first names were similar: Wentworth’s was Frederick. Both also came ashore after that momentous engagement to get themselves a wife, but while Frank did marry his bride in that summer of 1806, Anne and Wentworth’s romance only led to grief.

He was “a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit, and brilliancy.” She was “an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling.” But she also came from a family of aristocratic snobs that made the Bertrams of Mansfield Park look like socialists. A young man without wealth or pedigree was just not going to do. Anne’s father, the odious Sir Walter—spiteful, shallow, and vain —“thought it a very degrading alliance” and “gave it all the negative of great astonishment, great coldness, great silence, and a professed resolution of doing nothing for his daughter” (that is, refusing to give her a dowry). Anne’s mother, Lady Elliot, a warm and decent woman whose excellent judgment had saved her husband from the worst consequences of his character, might have seen to it that justice was done after all, but she had died when Anne was fourteen, and her place in Anne’s life had been taken by Lady Elliot’s best friend, Lady Russell.

Lady Russell appreciated the heroine as her father never did—Anne’s virtues were far too fine for Sir Walter to know how to value them—but she was no more cheerful about the match. “Anne Elliot, with all her claims of birth, beauty, and mind, to throw herself away at nineteen! . . . Anne Elliot, so young; known to so few, to be snatched off by a stranger without alliance or fortune!” It was the same snobbery with a kinder face. And so, without a friend to take her side, Anne was pressured into breaking the engagement. Wentworth went off in anger and resentment, and Anne, her bloom ruined and her spirits sunk, was left to waste her youth in the bitterness of futile regret.

Flash forward eight years, and the heroine was more alone than ever now, alone in a way that none of Austen’s other characters were. Even Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, had her cousin Edmund and her brother William and the genuine if lazy affection of her aunt Lady Bertram. But while Anne still had Lady Russell, for what she was worth, that was all she had. Having never gotten over Captain Wentworth, she had refused the hand of a local gentleman a few years later, and she seemed to have no chance of ever being offered someone else’s. Her younger sister, Mary, had gotten married herself (to Charles Musgrove, the same local man whom Anne refused). Her older sister, Elizabeth, was as cold and mean as their father—one of the things that made her Sir Walter’s favorite—and equally awful to Anne. Isolated in her own family, the heroine “was nobody with either father or sister; her word had no weight, her convenience was always to give way: she was only Anne.”

Fanny also had Mansfield Park to hold on to, but now Anne was even going to lose her own beloved home. Sir Walter, with a very high opinion as to what so great a man deserved, had run himself into such a morass of debt