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

Mary talked, but she could not attend. She had seen him. They had met. They had been once more in the same room.

Soon, however, she began to reason with herself, and try to be feeling less. . . .

Alas! with all her reasoning, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing.

But if the past was instantly revived for Anne, the case was very different for her former fiancé. “Henrietta asked him what he thought of you,” reported Mary in her passive-aggressive way, “and he said, ‘You were so altered he should not have known you again.’”

Yet painful as the meeting was, Wentworth’s arrival began to draw Anne away from her awful family and toward a very different group of people. Wentworth’s fellow officer and close friend, Captain Harville, was now living with his wife in the nearby seaside town of Lyme. When the whole group decided to pay them a visit—Henrietta and Louisa, Charles and Mary, Wentworth and Anne—the heroine discovered a kind of togetherness that she had never suspected.

Captain Harville’s sister had been engaged to a third officer, Captain Benwick, but she had died before the couple could be married. And yet, Anne learned, “The friendship between him and the Harvilles seemed, if possible, augmented by the event which closed all their views of alliance, and Captain Benwick was now living with them entirely.” It was the same note, and the same word—“friendship”—that marked every description of this group of naval companions. When Wentworth had complained to his sister, Admiral Croft’s wife, that women are too delicate to have aboard a ship—she herself having passed many a voyage aboard her husband’s—she pointed out that Wentworth had once transported Captain Harville’s wife and children himself. “Where was this superfine, extraordinary sort of gallantry of yours then?” she teased. “All merged in my friendship,” Wentworth replied. “I would assist any brother officer’s wife that I could, and I would bring anything of Harville’s from the world’s end, if he wanted it.”

Again, when the Harvilles met the visitors in Lyme, “nothing could be more pleasant than their desire of considering the whole party as friends of their own, because the friends of Captain Wentworth, or more kindly hospitable than their entreaties for their all promising to dine with them.” And when “they all went in-doors with their new friends,” the visitors “found rooms so small as none but those who invite from the heart could think capable of accommodating so many.” “Friendship,” “friendship,” “friends,” “friends”: the point was not lost on the heroine, but the more she was pleased by what she saw—the more the captains and Mrs. Harville revealed their mutual warmth and generosity and goodwill—the more she was pained. “‘These would have been all my friends,’ was her thought; and she had to struggle against a great tendency to lowness.”

* * * 

Anne found, at Lyme, what she did not know that she’d been searching for: something to belong to. And as I thought about the novel more deeply than I ever had before, thought about what it was saying about the ways that people attach themselves to one another, the ways that they belong together, I realized that this, and nothing else, was Austen’s image of community—this group of friends.

I had been looking in the wrong place, both in her novels and in my own life. I had come to Austen imagining that I would find a picture of that idyllic rural community that we all carry around in our heads. And I had dimly supposed that if I was ever going to find another community myself, it was going to have to resemble something like that. Now I saw that community, in the modern world, would never be a structure you could put your hands on—something regular or stable or permanent. It would not resemble a kibbutz or a commune, both of which made that exact mistake of trying to turn back the clock to an earlier state of existence. Nor would it resemble a youth movement, which, like the other communities that young people pass through (and which, like me, they often later pine for)—a high school or a college, a sports team or fraternity or summer camp—is the kind of all-encompassing environment that can only exist when you’re young. The modern world, I began to understand, was far too unstable for anything like that, modern relationships too fluid. For adults today, it seemed to me now, community can only be a circle of friends.

Still, that was relatively easy for me to see, two centuries into the modern age and with the help of Austen. The wonder was how she had managed to see it herself, at a time when modernity was still just getting off the ground, and from her little perch in rural England. Because what Persuasion dramatized, I now saw, was nothing less than the passing of the traditional world. The community that Austen was rejecting—or at least, bidding farewell—was rural England itself: the very thing I had come to her to find. Rejecting its hierarchy, the feudal order that the smug and pompous Sir Walter, like the odious Bertrams of Mansfield Park, embodied. Bidding farewell to its sense of rootedness and intimacy and continuity—which she had indeed celebrated, but only once, I now saw, only in Emma, her one truly idyllic work.

Now, the strange thing was that Emma was written immediately before Persuasion. Only four months separated the end of work on one novel and the beginning of work on the next. But Austen could think extremely fast. From her picture of a timeless England she moved in one step to a picture of England in the middle of head-spinning change. Emma, which contained no dates, seemed to occur outside of history. Persuasion, which began with a flurry of dates, was set at a very precise historical moment: the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Austen saw, with amazing clairvoyance, that the world she had always known was about to start to disappear. The old order was yielding, however slowly, to the new. Sir Walter was packing his bags and moving aside for Admiral Croft. Aristocracy was giving way to meritocracy, hierarchy to equality. People would henceforth be bound, more and more, not as master and servant or landlord and tenant (or even as husband and wife, in the traditional, unequal fashion) but rather as friend and friend.

Yet the traditional system that put a Sir Walter above a Captain Wentworth was not the only thing, I saw, that Austen turned away from in Persuasion. As hard as it was to believe, she seemed to turn away from family itself. By gravitating toward the men and women of the navy, Anne was hoping that she wouldn’t have to spend the rest of her life putting up with her miserable father and sisters. In fact, she avoided her family more and more as the novel went on. After the trip to Lyme, the day finally came for her to join Sir Walter and Elizabeth in Bath—not that anybody really wanted it, but she couldn’t stay with her sister Mary forever—yet she tried, when she got there, to spend as little time with them as she could. Instead, she immersed herself in the company of her new friends from the navy, who had come to Bath on holiday, as well.

Indeed, Anne’s disaffection with her family achieved remarkable heights. Late in the novel, she got wind of an intrigue that severely threatened her father and sister’s peace. Ordinarily that sort of development would have moved to the center of the plot, with the heroine hastening to spread the news and avert disaster. Here she never even got around to passing it along. Her family simply didn’t matter to her anymore.

How could this be, I wondered. How could Austen, the great novelist of romance, the great maker of marriages, be against family? Yet when I thought back to her other books, I realized that there was scarcely a happy family among them—ten unhappy ones, by my count, and no more than one of the other kind (and that was only Emma and her father, as much a kind of marriage as a family). And while she always got her heroines married, she never followed their stories beyond the bliss of couplehood and into the complications that followed, the battle of children and parents. Her own family, by all accounts, was happy, and she clearly enjoyed her nieces and nephews, but when she imagined felicity, she always drew a picture of a bond among adults—couples and friends and the little circles, the miniature communities, they make together.

For once I saw this pattern in Persuasion, I looked and found it everywhere. Yes, Austen made sure to find her heroines a husband, but she also took care to build them a community—a sphere of husbands and wives and brothers and sisters to live their marriages within. Pride and Prejudice ended, not with one wedding but with two, a pair of sisters marrying a pair of friends and gathering additional siblings to them. Emma ended with three, and the heroine’s, we were told, was sped along by “the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony.” It was no surprise that one critic called friendship, for Austen, “the true light of life.”

Friends, Austen taught me, are the family you choose. But while the notion has become a commonplace of