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

Elizabeth cringed at every turn—if “her family made an agreement to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would have been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit or finer success”—and I suffered along with her. Her family was blowing it for Jane, the only one of them, other than Elizabeth herself, who was worth a damn. But it was too late; Darcy had seen enough. He didn’t care, it seemed, that his friend and Jane were in love. The next thing the Bennets knew, the young men were gone, and it looked like they’d never see Bingley again. Jane was crushed. Elizabeth was furious. I wanted to wring Darcy’s neck.

This was a completely different experience than reading Emma, and not just because I’d already become a convert. Emma showed me from the very beginning just how desperately wrong its heroine was. I couldn’t stand her—until Austen showed me how much I resembled her. But here I was, halfway through Pride and Prejudice, and not only was I head over heels for Elizabeth, I agreed with everything she said and every judgment she made. I loved her friends and hated her enemies. I would have taken her side against the world.

But then, as if a switch had been flipped, everything got turned upside down. Elizabeth ran into someone she never expected to see again. He made a declaration she never expected to hear. She lashed out in a fit of resentment. He responded with a long, coolly argued letter that threw all the events of the first half of the novel into a completely different light. She read it once and rejected its claims. She read it again—and suddenly saw she’d been utterly wrong all along.

Because Jane’s love for Bingley was so clear to her, Elizabeth now realized, she’d assumed that it was clear to everyone else. Because her sister was so wonderful, she’d refused to believe, when push came to shove, that their family’s behavior would prevent Jane from marrying well. Because Elizabeth was so proud herself, she’d disdained the pride of others when she found it aimed in her direction. But worst of all, she now saw, was her judgment of character—the very thing on which she most congratulated herself. She had thought that she could read a man the very first time she met him. She had made the mistake of believing that if a young man was affable and friendly, he must be good, and that if he was cold and arrogant and reserved, he must be bad.

But now she saw how completely mistaken she’d been. Her verdict, delivered with all her characteristic bluntness and courage, was uncompromising: “blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.” “How despicably I have acted!” she exclaimed to herself. “I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities!”

But of course, if Elizabeth had been wrong about everything, then so had I. I had made the very same judgments that she had, and I had made them every bit as badly. This was indeed a different experience from reading Emma. That novel had invited me to laugh at its heroine, with all her ridiculous schemes. But this time, the joke was on me.

So enthralled had I been by Elizabeth’s intelligence and charm that I had never once thought to question her. No doubt self-flattery had played a big role there. Austen had seduced me into identifying with her heroine, and I had been only too happy to comply. Now it turned out that if I did indeed resemble her, it was not for the reasons I’d supposed. Elizabeth trusted her judgment way too much—just as I did. She was so much cleverer than everyone she knew except her father—who was always telling her how clever she was—that she imagined that everything she believed must be true, just because she believed it. She didn’t think she needed to give other people a fair hearing. What could they possibly have to say? She already knew everything she needed to know.

The novel’s original title had been First Impressions. Elizabeth was not prejudiced in the modern sense of the word. She didn’t judge people before she met them, because of the group they belonged to. She judged them the moment she met them, because she thought she could already tell everything about them. “First impressions”: it seemed to me now that the phrase did double duty. It referred to the heroine’s tendency to jump to conclusions, and it also pointed to ours, as we put ourselves in her place.

There was a third meaning, too. “First” as in “early”—as in, the things that happen to you when you’re first starting out in life. The novel, I saw, wasn’t finally about prejudice, or pride, or even love. Elizabeth was all of twenty, and her mistakes were errors of youth—the mistakes, precisely, of a person who has never made mistakes, or at least, who has never been forced to acknowledge them. Beneath the polished wit that she flashed at the world like a suit of armor, Elizabeth was still scarcely more than a girl. “If I were determined to get a rich husband, or any husband”: that was the statement, not of someone who knew what she wanted from life, but of someone who hadn’t even started to figure it out. When she had her epiphany—“blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd”—she added a final count to her indictment: “Till this moment I never knew myself.” Darcy’s pride and Elizabeth’s prejudice, his prejudice and her pride: these may have set the plot in motion, but by putting me through Elizabeth’s experiences—by having her make mistakes and learn from them, and having me stumble and learn right there along with her—what the novel was really showing me was how to grow up.

Growing up may be the most remarkable thing that anybody ever does. One day we’re hitting our little brother over the head with a wooden duck, and a few days later we’re running a business, or writing a book, or raising a child of our own. How do we do it? The physical part is easy. A little food, a little exercise, and without ever having to think about it, we gradually find ourselves getting older, and taller, and hairier. But the other part— what about that? We come into the world as a tiny bundle of impulse and ignorance—how do we ever become fit for human company, let alone capable of love?

This, I discovered that summer, was what Jane Austen’s novels were about. Her heroines were sixteen or nineteen or twenty (people married young in those days, especially women). We followed them for a few weeks, or a few months, or a year. They started out in one place, and gradually—or sometimes, quite suddenly—they ended up somewhere else. They opened their eyes, let out a scream, took a few frantic breaths, then settled down and looked around at the strange new world in which they’d come to find themselves. They started out as girls, and day by day, page by page, before our very eyes, they turned into women.

It was the way they did it, though, that came as such a revelation to me. I was used to thinking about growing up in terms of going to school and getting a job: passing tests, gaining admissions, accumulating credentials, acquiring the kinds of knowledge and skills that made you employable—the terms in which my parents (and everyone else, for that matter) had taught me to think about it. If I had been asked to consider what kinds of personal qualities it might involve—which I doubt I ever was—I would have spoken of things like self-confidence and self-esteem. As for anything like character or conduct, who even used such words anymore? Their very sound was harsh to me: so demanding, so inflexible. They made me think of school uniforms, and nuns with rulers, and cold baths on winter mornings—all the terrible things that people used to inflict on their children.

But Austen, it turned out, did not see things that way. For her, growing up has nothing to do with knowledge or skills, because it has everything to do with character and conduct. And you don’t strengthen your character or improve your conduct by memorizing the names of Roman emperors (or American presidents) or learning how to do needlework (or calculus). You don’t do so, she believed, by developing self-confidence and self-esteem, either. If anything, self-confidence and self-esteem are the great enemies, because they make you forget that you’re still just a bundle of impulse and ignorance. For Austen, growing up means making mistakes.

That was the first lesson that Pride and Prejudice taught me. Elizabeth’s errors were not accidents she could have avoided; they were expressions of her character—in fact, of the very best parts of her character, that quickness and confidence for which I loved her so. You don’t “fix” your mistakes, Austen was telling me, as if they somehow existed outside you, and you can’t prevent them from happening, either. You aren’t born perfect and only need to develop the self-confidence and self-esteem with which to express your wondrous perfection. You are born with a whole novel’s worth of errors ahead of you. No, my father couldn’t save me from my mistakes, but maybe my mistakes could save me, from myself.

Elizabeth and I were young, and like most young people, we didn’t see how young we really were. If anything, people in their twenties have the opposite idea about themselves. When he was Elizabeth’s age, T. S. Eliot wrote poems about how terribly, terribly old he felt. It’s that sense, now that your childhood is over, of being ever so jaded and world-weary and wise. You put on a trench coat or dress in black, to show how over it you are. You say “Whatever” a lot, or “Duh!”—because it’s all just so boring and predictable. If you’re Elizabeth Bennet, you swear you’ll never marry, or you declare, about your very biggest mistake, “I beg your pardon;—one knows exactly what to think.”

The amazing thing is just how serene Austen was about this. When most people think back to the way they