if, but when. After that, no matter where I was—on the bus ride up, during our first few days at camp—it felt as though I had a rope coming out of the back of my head that was connected to wherever she happened to be, as if she were always somehow standing right behind me. It didn’t take long before we started spending an awful lot of time together. My heart had stopped flopping around quite so clumsily by then and we seemed to be drawn together by a kind of gravitational pull. Without ever planning it, we always just happened to end up sitting together, or walking together, or finally—well, finally, we became a couple.
I was eighteen, for God’s sake. There was nothing but her face, nothing but her eyes. The summer held its breath for us. I’d never said “I love you” before, and now it seemed beside the point to ever say anything else. I walked around in a trance: I couldn’t believe that anything could feel so strong, feel so pure. We kissed until our lips were chapped. One afternoon, we were sitting there beneath an apple tree. “Do you ever feel like we’re the same person?” I said. She looked down. She looked up. “Yes,” she said.
The summer breathed out: it was over. Camp was over; life was over. I felt like I was splitting apart, like there was a hole between my arms where her body was supposed to be. She was from Texas, and still in high school. We’d never said it out loud, but we both knew that we’d come to the end. We had no e-mail, of course, no long-distance, no control over our lives and no hope of seeing each other again. Even writing seemed beside the point. The only thing that didn’t seem beside the point was curling up in a ball and trying to disappear.
So I completely sympathized with Marianne. Like everyone else, I believed in her idea of love, and it drove me crazy that Austen didn’t seem to. Or at least, she didn’t seem to in Sense and Sensibility. Weren’t her other books incredibly romantic? Was I missing something here?
The movie of the novel only left me more perplexed. How had the filmmakers managed to endow the same story with so much feeling? When I went back and looked more carefully, I realized how: by cheating. They didn’t change Marianne and Willoughby’s story—they didn’t need to—but they sure changed Elinor and Edward’s. They gave Edward an adorably dry sense of humor. They gave him a sweet, big-brotherly relationship with Margaret, the youngest Dashwood sister, who scarcely appeared in the novel as more than a name. Of course, they also had him played by Hugh Grant, who not only bumbles more charmingly than anyone since Jimmy Stewart, but who’s as handsome as they come. And by granting Elinor herself a new depth of feeling— taking leave of Norland, she stroked a horse in pensive farewell, a scene that was absent from the novel—they made that character lovable, too.
The same went for the other match that ended the story—which was, in the book, even more unromantic than Elinor and Edward’s. In Austen’s version Marianne was more or less forced to marry a man she had just begun to like and certainly didn’t love, and the whole business was dispatched, as a kind of afterthought, in barely more than a page, as if to openly defy our resistance. But the movie borrowed flourishes from Austen’s other books—the surprise gift of a piano from Emma, the murmuring of verse à deux from Persuasion—to give the thing the lineaments of romance.
Now it was easy to see why both couples would fall in love. But that only left me more puzzled as to why Austen had made it so hard. The novel may have been an early effort, but it wasn’t as if she lacked the means—or desire—to write a ravishing love story at that point in her career. She had already written Pride and Prejudice, her most devastating romance of all.
And then I finally remembered two things. One was Mansfield Park, the other novel that had seemed to stand against everything that I thought Austen believed. The other was my relationship with the woman I had met at the wedding in Michigan. Of course, I thought. How could I have been so blind? I had just had a Marianne-and-Willoughby romance, and it had crashed and burned in no time flat. Fate, soul mates, love at first sight, throwing caution to the wind—it had had all the elements, adhered to all the myths, and it had all been totally wrong.
Maybe the problem, I finally realized, was the myths. Marianne thought that Willoughby reminded her of the heroes of her favorite stories, and I had clung to that relationship because the way it started seemed like something from a movie. We had both been deluded by our expectations about what love was supposed to look like. It was Northanger Abbey all over again: conventional beliefs, derived from fiction, that turned out to bear no relationship to reality.
But didn’t Austen’s other books promote those same beliefs? Now that I really thought about what made them feel romantic, I saw to my chagrin that the answer was no. She made us adore her heroines and admire her heroes, made us long to see them get together, devised ingenious ways to keep them apart and finally unite them, teased us with a whole array of traps and feints and surprises, but search as I might, I could never find a single one of those clichés in which I’d put such faith.
I had simply imposed my ideas of romance on Austen’s novels without really thinking about it—just as the people who make those adaptations always seem to do. The Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice may not alter the basic story, but it does embellish it with all the trappings of movie love: swelling music, windswept vistas, glowing sunsets. Elizabeth strikes moody poses, her lover strides towards her through waving fields of grass, the two lock lips with hungry urgency. But why shouldn’t they? The young woman whom Mr. Darcy called “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me” is drop-dead gorgeous now. Patricia Rozema’s travesty of Mansfield Park (the one with Harold Pinter as Sir Thomas) turns prudish little Fanny Price into a naughty and bold young rebel with teasing eyes and a sensuous mouth. The 1995 Persuasion ends, unthinkably, with a public, premarital kiss. Even the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice, more faithful to Austen than most, plunges the overheated hero into the water (a sigh goes up around the world) in scarcely more than his skivvies.
But Austen, of course, was way ahead of us. She knew what we’d be thinking, and in Sense and Sensibility, I now saw, she headed us off at the pass. Which was where Mansfield Park came in. That novel told us something essential—that goodness was more important than wit— that her other books allowed us to miss. And it did so by separating the two qualities into different characters (Fanny on the one hand, Mary Crawford on the other) and challenging us to go against our instincts as to which one we ought to prefer. So it was, I now saw, here. Austen’s other novels were all so romantic in obvious ways that we didn’t need to pay attention to what really made them so. Now, by putting the two on different sides, she forced us to tell them apart. Elinor was to Marianne what Fanny was to Mary Crawford: the less appealing choice, but the right one. Marianne got the storybook romance; Elinor got what Austen called true love.
* * * Once I opened my mind to this possibility, it started to make perfect sense. For Elinor-love—and Elizabeth- love and Emmalove and love in all the other novels, now that I really thought about it—was perfectly consistent with everything else I’d learned from Austen: about goodness, about growing up, about learning, about friendship.
For her, I saw, love is not something that happens to you, suddenly or otherwise; it’s something you have to prepare yourself for. As long as Elizabeth thought that she was right about everything, as long as Emma disdained the people around her, as long as Marianne ignored her sister’s advice about the things she owed her neighbors and family, their hearts remained closed. For Austen, before you can fall in love with someone else, you have to come to know yourself. In other words, you have to grow up. Love isn’t going to magically transform you, make you into a better or even a different person—another myth that I’d bought into—it can only work with what you already are.
Like it said in Northanger Abbey, we have to learn to love. I knew those words applied to loving things like hyacinths or novels, but I never really thought that they applied to, you know, love love, romantically loving another person. What could be more natural than falling in love? Strange as it seemed, however, Austen was saying that we aren’t actually born knowing how. Youth is not a necessity in her idea of romance; it’s an impediment. Yes, most of her heroines were quite young by our standards, but by the time they fell in love, they had shed their innocence and ignorance. One, of course, was even as old as Marianne’s dreaded twenty-seven, and two of Austen’s heroes were at least thirty-five. As for Marianne herself, she began the novel at sixteen but ended it some three years older—as old as her sister, and finally as wise, as when the story started.
But knowing yourself, Austen taught me, is not enough. You also need to know the person you fall in love with, and despite what Marianne and I believed, this doesn’t happen overnight. To Austen, love at first sight is a
