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

their mother and younger sister were going to be displaced by their half brother, John, and his wife, Fanny. John “was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted, and rather selfish, is to be ill-disposed,” and Fanny was even worse. He might have allowed the Dashwood women to remain at Norland, if only grudgingly, but she was determined to send them packing, especially once Elinor had struck up a friendship with her brother Edward.

Bland and halting and practically paralyzed by shyness, with no conspicuous talents and no particular ambitions, Edward was the very opposite of Willoughby, and no one’s idea of a lover. The poor guy wasn’t even handsome. But then again, Elinor was not exactly going to set the world on fire herself. Prudent where Marianne was passionate, merely pretty where she was beautiful, proper where her sister scorned conventional expectations, she did everything she could to restrain and downplay her feelings (and caution Marianne about not running away with her own). She and Edward had become friends, but their attachment hardly seemed to go any deeper than that.

In what counted for Elinor as an unguarded moment, she admitted to her sister that, as she put it in her typically schoolmarmish way, “I have seen a great deal of him, have studied his sentiments, and heard his opinion on subjects of literature and taste; and, upon the whole, I venture to pronounce that his mind is well-informed, his enjoyment of books exceedingly great, his imagination lively, his observation just and correct, and his taste delicate and pure.” It was a wonder that she managed to stay awake until the end of the sentence. Pressed a little harder, she rose to what passed with her for passion: “I do not attempt to deny that I think very highly of him—that I greatly esteem, that I like him.” She seemed to be willing to use every word but the one we wanted to hear. “Esteem him! Like him!” Marianne replied, as if she were reading our minds. “Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment.”

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And yet it was Elinor and Edward’s tepid relationship, not Marianne and Willoughby’s wild, impassioned romance, that turned out to be the novel’s idea of true love. Elinor’s way was validated, as the plot went on to unfold, Marianne’s discredited. I understood, of course, from having absorbed Austen’s lessons about growing up, that Marianne put too much faith in her feelings, was too much of a capital-R Romantic. It took her seven exclamation points, after all, just to say good-bye to their old house. (“Dear, dear Norland! . . . when shall I cease to regret you! . . . Oh! happy house!”) Yes, Marianne was often made to look naïve and overwrought, but that only told me how biased Austen was against her, as well as how hard the author needed to work to convince us—at times, it seemed, to convince herself—of the superiority of Elinor’s version of love. I knew that Austen wanted us to place reason over feeling, but choosing Elinor-love over Marianne-love was not about doing that. It was about choosing between two kinds of feeling, two notions of what love really means.

When we think about love, we think about Romeo and Juliet, that idea of romance—just as they did in Austen’s day, just as they did in Shakespeare’s day, just as we always have and always will. We believe, like Marianne, in love at first sight. She scarcely had an opportunity to even glance at her rescuer, that very first day, but she saw enough to know that “his person and air were equal to what her fancy had ever drawn for the hero of a favourite story,” and she thirsted to learn all about him. A second meeting, the next day, only confirmed what she already felt. Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Marianne had been hit with “the thunderbolt.”

We also believe, like Marianne, that true love happens only once. Marianne was staunchly against second attachments, as they called them at the time, and thus, second marriages. Shorter life expectancies made second unions as normal in Austen’s day as divorce makes them in our own. Of course, we’re free today, as Marianne and her contemporaries certainly were not, to have as many relationships, marital or otherwise, as we want. But while we may not put the matter quite as squarely as she did, we tend to believe that only the last, only the one we finally arrive at, is the real thing. All the others were mistakes. Marianne believed that just the first connection counted, we believe that just the last one does, but we both agree that true love is a onetime thing.

Despite the way our lives have changed, we also still believe, like Marianne, in young love. At least, to judge from a host of books and songs and movies, we want to believe in it. Juliet was thirteen, not because people married that young in Shakespeare’s day—they didn’t—but because we have always imagined that true love is inseparable from the ardor and freshness and innocence of youth. Love, we think, is springtime and beginnings. Marianne was sixteen, Austen’s youngest heroine. For her, “a woman of seven-and-twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again”—exactly what everyone thought about Anne Elliot in Persuasion, too—and a man of thirty-five “must have long outlived every sensation of the kind.” If we no longer agree with Marianne’s arithmetic, it is not because we have changed our ideas about love; it is because we feel young and stay young for so much longer than people did in Austen’s day.

We believe in soul mates, believe that there is one true love out there for us in the world and that the stars will guide her to us. In Yiddish, they call that person your bashert, your destiny. Of all the myths of love that have come down to us from ancient Greece, the one that we cherish the most is the story told by Plato, that humans were originally one creature with four arms and four legs, and that the gods separated us because we were too powerful in that idyllic state. Now we roam the world, looking for our other half and seeking to reunite our bodies in love. “You complete me,” we say, reflecting the same kind of feeling.

And so, like Marianne, we think that true love means perfect agreement in taste and perfect freedom from conflict—ideas embodied in the dating sites, with their careful alignment of personal characteristics and their names like Perfect Match and eHarmony. The true lover, we think, is a second self. And thus, conversely, the loss of love is tantamount to death. Romeo, believing that Juliet was dead, committed suicide; Juliet, awakened from her deathlike slumber, ended her own life in turn.

Marianne came close to suffering the same fate. After weeks of bliss, her great affair quite suddenly collapsed, and it almost took her with it. One day Willoughby was about to propose, the next he was gone without a trace. Marianne was thrown into a fever of anxiety: what could it mean? She followed him to London, sent note after note, refused to tell her sister what was going on, and finally tracked him down at a ball, only to be jilted in the most public and brutal way (for reasons we discover only later). Now the heroine lost all interest in life, spiraling into depression and openly courting the illness that almost killed her. If there was only one true love for her, and it was gone, then what was left to live for?

Love, we think, is something that happens to us, a force that comes upon us unawares and makes of us its plaything. It acts without regard to our intentions, cares nothing for our welfare, bends our will to its own. Cupid shoots his arrow out of a clear blue sky, driving us mad with desire. In Dante’s Inferno, Paolo and Francesca, the first and most sympathetic of the sinners, are whirled about by Love like particles in a force field, helpless before its power. In Greek myth, love literally tears people apart. Love is not just a god but the greatest of the gods, before whom even the others are helpless. Like a flame, it consumes everything in its path.

And thus we feel, like Marianne, that true love is wild and free, that it knows no bounds or rules. We skip classes, make love outdoors, take crazy risks that turn us into people our friends don’t recognize. When Marianne and Willoughby first got together—this was what frightened her sister the most—they threw propriety to the wind, shamelessly displaying their intimacy for all to see, neglecting their obligations toward their neighbors (and laughing behind their backs about it), driving alone around the countryside in the most scandalous way. For Marianne—as for Romeo and Juliet, who came from feuding clans, and Paolo and Francesca, who committed adultery—true love proves itself by overrunning conventional boundaries and norms. It is, by its very nature, illicit, dangerous, rebellious.

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I could certainly relate to what Marianne was going through. I had once felt something like it myself, the summer I was eighteen. It happened at camp, in youth movement, but it didn’t even wait until we got to camp to start. We were milling around the movement office in New York, waiting for the bus to take us up, when I rounded a corner and felt my face go hot. My body must’ve gotten the message before my brain figured out what was happening. There she was, sitting on a desk like she’d been waiting for me, the most beautiful girl I had ever seen —no, the only girl I had ever seen. “Hi!” she said, with a smile like the blue sky. “Hi,” I replied, beating an unsteady retreat, kind of blown back by the power of it all and not exactly sure where my arms and legs were at the moment.

But I had managed, in that split second, to catch a look on her face that told me that it wasn’t a question of