A Jane Austen Education

One can only imagine the fun that Austen would have made of Facebook or MySpace or Twitter, with their comparable illusion of instantaneous intimacy. Isabella Thorpe tried to pull the same kind of thing with Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, but in her later books, Austen moved on to more adult forms of insincerity. Social climbers, she knew, can exercise their limbs on friendship as well as marriage, and the world of Persuasion was crawling with them. The town of Bath was a full immersion in the tepid waters of social ambition. Mrs. Clay, the oily widow, had hooked herself onto Elizabeth Elliot to see how far the ride would take her, her ultimate purpose being to inveigle Sir Walter into making her his second wife—at which point, we could be sure, the new Lady Elliot would no longer bother being deferential to her “friend.” “Frenemy,” we sometimes call this sort of person now, the kind who’s nice just long enough to get whatever they think they can out of you.

The novel’s most avid lickspittle, however, turned out to be none other than Sir Walter himself. This made perfect sense once I thought about it. Anyone that invested in distinctions of social rank had to be as obsequious to those above him as he was contemptuous of those below. Just as bullies are cowards in disguise, snobs are secret grovelers—another reason Austen so adored the aristocracy. The object of Sir Walter’s particular veneration was a cousin, the Viscountess Dalrymple, and her daughter, Miss Carteret, a pair of mediocrities who turned out to have nothing going for them but their pedigree:Anne had never seen her father and sister before in contact with nobility, and she must acknowledge herself disappointed. She had hoped better things from their high ideas of their own situation in life, and was reduced to form a wish which she had never foreseen,—a wish that they had more pride; for “our cousins Lady Dalrymple and Miss Carteret,” “our cousins, the Dalrymples,” sounded in her ears all day long.





But the friendship of a Sir Walter or a Mrs. Clay was not likely to take in anyone less susceptible to flattery than their intended targets. Far more dangerous, Austen wanted us to know—and far more insidious—were the friends who actually did mean well but couldn’t tell the difference between what was good for you and what was only good for them. Such a friend was Lady Russell, and the saddest thing about Anne’s relationship with her, her surrogate mother and only intimate, was just how much the heroine actually valued her, how little she could afford to let herself see the older woman’s limitations. Anne thought, early on, “of the extraordinary blessing of having one such truly sympathising friend as Lady Russell,” but only after the perfectly blasé reception she received at the Musgroves’ (that lesson “in the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle”). Even her sister Mary had treated the whole trauma of surrendering the family estate, which Anne had been suffering through for weeks, as a matter of utter indifference. Anyone was going to look good compared to that.

Yet it was that same Lady Russell who had pressured the heroine into making the worst mistake of her life, rejecting Captain Wentworth. Of course, she did it for what she thought were all the right reasons. Still, late in the novel, when she was presented with the same kind of situation again, she gave, unbelievably, the same advice—even though she knew perfectly well how terribly alone Anne was and how miserable she had been for all those years. But even Anne, by then, could see the truth. Lady Russell, whether she recognized it or not, was trying to protect her own dignity, not her friend’s. She was the person she was trying to save from being connected with someone as lowly as a naval officer.

This was a woman, after all, who thought that kissing up to the Viscountess Dalrymple sounded like a really good idea. Indeed, once the heroine took a hard look at her friend, she figured out that there wasn’t a whole lot of difference, in their ideas about class and manners and what really mattered in a person, between Lady Russell and her own father. And so, once Anne had made up her mind about how she was going to live her life—uninfluenced, this time, by any of her “friends”— “there was nothing less for Lady Russell to do,” if she wanted to stay on good terms with the heroine, “than to admit that she had been pretty completely wrong, and to take up a new set of opinions.” In plain language, Anne told Lady Russell to go soak her head. The heroine had walked away from her father and sisters, and she was strong enough now to do the same to anyone else who stood in the way of her happiness.

I saw this kind of thing all the time back then—friends who thought they were looking after your happiness when they were really just trying to protect their own. People pressuring you to break up with someone they didn’t like, or stay together with someone they did. People wanting you to get married already, like they had, or stay single, because they didn’t want to be the last ones left alone. I’m sure I did that sort of thing myself. There’s nothing deliberate about it, as Austen knew; it just takes a lot of self-awareness, as well as a lot of generosity, to remove your own desires from the equation.

The couple who introduced me to the private-school crowd, needless to say, did not possess a great deal of either. “Thank God that’s over!” they said when I told them about a certain new relationship—“that” being my long string of romantic failures, the source of all those funny stories I used to entertain them with. However kindly it was meant, the statement came to exert an unmistakable pressure, as the months went by and the relationship soured, to stay coupled up. “That” was supposed to be over; I couldn’t disappoint them by going back to “that.” And when I did finally break off the relationship, their response, while undoubtedly well intentioned, was not exactly consoling. “We’re just sorry that there won’t ever be any little Billys running around.” Wait—ever? You mean you’re closing the books on me? It sure sounded like they were—like I had proved to them, for once and for all, just how completely hopeless I was.





True friendship, like true love, was pretty rare in Austen’s view. “Here and there, human nature may be great in times of trial,” said a character in Persuasion, “but generally speaking . . . it is selfishness and impatience rather than generosity and fortitude, that one hears of. There is so little real friendship in the world!” The person who made that statement, a Mrs. Smith, had had a difficult life. She had traveled, Anne reflected, “among that part of mankind which made her think worse of the world than she hoped it deserved”—that is, than Anne hoped it deserved. But that was all that she could do—hope. She knew that Mrs. Smith, who “had lived very much in the world,” had seen a great deal more of life than had the sheltered heroine herself. And after all, her new acquaintance with the people of the navy notwithstanding, her own experience offered precious little with which to dispute the other woman’s views.

Yet Anne’s relationship with Mrs. Smith turned out to be one of those rare, true friendships itself. The two had known each other at the boarding school where Anne was sent in the wake of her mother’s death, “grieving for the loss of a mother whom she had dearly loved, feeling her separation from home, and suffering as a girl of fourteen, of strong sensibility and not high spirits, must suffer at such a time.” The future Mrs. Smith, three years older, “had shewn her kindness, . . . had been useful and good to her in a way which had considerably lessened her misery.” Usefulness and kindness—those same standards of human decency that Austen had championed in Mansfield Park, and that mattered to her more than all the wit in the world.

Now it was the turn of Mrs. Smith to need some kindness. Having lost her husband, her money, and even the use of her legs, she was living, when Anne rediscovered her, in a couple of dark, comfortless rooms with scarcely a soul even to help her get from one to the other. Sir Walter couldn’t believe his ears when he got wind of the fact that his daughter had taken to seeing such a person. “‘Westgate Buildings!’ said he; ‘and who is Miss Anne Elliot to be visiting in Westgate Buildings? A Mrs. Smith. A widow Mrs. Smith. . . . And what is her attraction? That she is old and sickly. Upon my word, Miss Anne Elliot, you have the most extraordinary taste!’”

But the truest act of friendship belonged, in the end, to Mrs. Smith herself. She knew something, it turned out: something about someone very close to Anne, something that all the rules of propriety—and far more important, something that her own dire self-interest—dictated that she not reveal. Yet Anne’s own welfare did dictate that she reveal it. Mrs. Smith was no saint. She struggled with what to do. She had very few hopes of improving her wretched situation in life, and by revealing what she knew, she would destroy the newest and the best of them. It would have been far better for her if she had simply kept her mouth shut. But she took a deep breath, and she said what she had to say.




Putting your friend’s welfare before your own: that was Austen’s idea of true friendship. That means admitting when you’re wrong, but even more importantly, it means being willing to tell your friend when they are. It took me a long time to wrap my head around that notion, because it flew so strongly in the face of what we believe about friendship today. True friendship, we think, means unconditional acceptance and support. The true friend validates your feelings, takes your side in every argument, helps you feel good about yourself at all times, and never, ever judges you. But Austen didn’t believe that. For her, being happy means becoming a better person, and becoming a better person means having your mistakes pointed out to you in a way that you can’t ignore. Yes, the true friend wants you to be happy, but being happy and feeling good about yourself are not the same things. In fact, they can sometimes be diametrically opposed. True friends do not shield you from your mistakes, they tell you about them: even at the risk of losing your friendship—which means, even at the risk of being unhappy themselves.

My commitment to this frightening new idea was put to the test the summer after I had finally finished my Austen chapter. My best pal from college had gone off to graduate school in another city, and as the years went by I started to feel as if I knew him less and less. Not because we lost touch, but because he never seemed to say anything real about himself when we were in touch. Not coincidentally, it became more and more clear to me, the few times I did see him, that he was becoming a pretty serious alcoholic.

One weekend he was back in the city, and we arranged a night to catch up. His wife was on his case about the drinking by this point, but she let him out on my recognizance for a harmless beer at the local bar—or so at least we all imagined as the two of us set out.

Well, before we could make it through the initial pleasantries, he had managed to get three drinks down his throat. By about the middle of the second, he had completely checked out of the conversation, at least as far as anything personal was concerned. Before long, I was trying to get the evening over with as quickly as possible and wanted nothing better than to call a cab. But he insisted on driving me home, if only to maintain the pretense that everything was perfectly fine, and I was so afraid of a confrontation that I let him do it.

Then, on the way, he made a wrong turn and ended up—what do you know?—in our old stomping grounds of the East Village. We just had to go to the Blue & Gold for old times’ sake, didn’t we? So he had another bourbon while I sipped my beer and watched him and wondered what the fuck had happened to the friend I used to know, and then another quick one, and then, what the hell, one more for the road.

We both managed to make it home in one piece, but once my anger wore off, I realized that I had failed him too—not just because I’d let him drive, but because I hadn’t had the guts to tell him the truth about himself. Yet we were really still just college buddies, and we simply had no vocabulary with which to talk about anything that grave. I tried to write the next week, starting off all breezy as usual, pretending once again like nothing had happened, but I quickly ground to a halt. There was an elephant in the room that we weren’t talking about, and I finally understood that we weren’t going to be able to talk about anything else anymore until we did.

It took me another month to screw up the courage to try again. I didn’t even tell him that he needed to deal with his drinking. I just told him that I didn’t feel like we had a relationship anymore, and that that was really too bad. I knew that he would understand the rest.

Months went by without my hearing from him. I thought our friendship was over. But when he did finally get in touch, it was to tell me he had gotten sober—joined AA and everything—and that my letter had been one of the reasons why. Few things had ever felt better or made me prouder. But as I knew perfectly well, that letter had a coauthor, and it was Austen.





However glad I was that I could be a true friend to someone else, I was even gladder to realize that I had always had one myself. She was that last remaining friend from youth movement, the person who knew me better than I knew myself. The one thing that had always bothered me about her was her tendency to call me on the stupid things I did. Like the time she cut me off—“Billy, she’s already heard them all”—before I could make those idiotic puns about her friend Honour’s name. She always tried to do it as unobtrusively as possible, but it invariably stung, would make me feel a little small and foolish. Only once I had learned Austen’s lessons about humiliation, on the one hand, and friendship, on the other, did I realize how much reason I had to thank my friend for having been on my case for all those years. She had been trying to make me into a presentable person—maybe the person she thought I could be—and she was willing to have faith that it might someday happen.

Predictably, people used to ask me why the two of us didn’t get together. The question made me mad. Couldn’t men and women be friends without having sex? Apparently not, according to what everyone seemed to believe. I finally did see When Harry Met Sally . . . , only to discover that the whole point of the movie was that men and women can’t, in fact, be friends, “because the sex thing gets in the way.” It was the same wherever I looked. People of the opposite sex might claim to be “just friends,” the message was, but count on it, there was always something going on underneath.

The most annoying thing about this apparently universal belief was that it implied that sex was all that men and women could really be interested in each other for. Conversation or collaboration or any other kind of common activity seemed to be out of the question. As if we weren’t just different genders, but different species.

Well, that was another idea that Austen refused to believe. In fact, as I learned, she was one of the first to challenge it, and she never challenged it more directly than she did in Persuasion. Once the people at Lyme got properly introduced to one another, on that visit—Anne and Mary and so forth on the one hand, the Harvilles and Captain Benwick on the other—the heroine always seemed to find herself with Benwick. The two had a lot in common. Both were grieving for lost loves—Anne for Wentworth, Benwick for his fiancée, Captain Harville’s late sister. Both were shy, gentle, thoughtful souls. And both, it turned out, were great readers of poetry. Not once or twice, but three times in the space of an evening and a morning—“Anne found Captain Benwick getting near her. . . . Anne found Captain Benwick again drawing near her”—the two young people, both single and unattached, fell into deep, heartfelt conversation about the leading poets of the day, Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott.

And yet there wasn’t the slightest spark, on either side, of sexual interest. Austen was daring us to expect that the two would get together, and she was doing so to teach us a lesson. A man and a woman, even two young, available ones, could talk to each other, understand each other, sympathize with each other, be drawn to each other, even share their intimate thoughts and feelings with each other—as Anne and Benwick did—without having to be attracted to each other—as Anne and Benwick clearly weren’t. They could, in other words, be friends.

Nor was Benwick the only man the heroine befriended. Captain Harville was another—someone safer, perhaps, as a married man, but no less unusual as the friend of a woman, and even to this day, almost as liable to raise eyebrows. Their big scene came toward the end of the novel. In the midst of a crowd of other people, Harville, with “the unaffected, easy kindness of manner which denoted the feelings of an older acquaintance than he really was,” invited the heroine over for a chat. Their talk soon turned to the relative constancy of the sexes. Who loved longer and with deeper feeling, men or women? The two each argued, of course, for their own side, until Harville produced what he thought to be decisive evidence: “Let me observe that all histories are against you; all stories, prose and verse. If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.”

“Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”





“The pen has been in their hands”: but not, of course, anymore. The moment was exhilarating—Austen’s crowning declaration as a writer, the feminist flag she planted on the ground of English fiction. But the scene did not just make a feminist argument, it was a feminist argument. Anne and Harville shared a common footing in the conversation, debating each other with mutual respect and affection and esteem. Men and women can be equals, Austen was telling us, so men and women can be friends.





Fortunately, blessedly, I already knew that. (It was one of the things I had learned in youth movement.) And it was through that same best friend that I began at last to be drawn into the kind of friendship circle, the kind of floating community, for which I’d been longing for so many years. She had a friend from graduate school whose family owned a place in New England—the sweetest old house you could imagine, with a wide front porch that opened up like a grandmother’s lap and a big, cozy living room where they used to hold the dances when the place belonged to the town. The kitchen clock was stopped at 10:36—the perfect time, we used to joke, A.M. or P.M.—not too early and not too late.

The situation bore uncanny resemblances to Persuasion. The house was by the water, like Lyme. (In fact, it wasn’t far from Lyme—the one in Connecticut.) The guy whose family owned it was a sailor, with a sailor’s bluff practicality and the kind of unpretentious warmth that so delighted Anne among the people of the navy. Like the Harvilles, he invited from the heart. Like the Harvilles, he accommodated as many friends as wanted to come, and anyone who came became a friend. Like the Harvilles, in short, he made you feel at home.

On weekends when the weather was mild, his friends would be drawn to the place from all over the Northeast. I would come up from the city, my friend would drive down from New Hampshire, a few Connecticut people would stop by, and we’d spend the weekend just being lazy and silly together. The light would slant in from the water, the gulls would call and circle overhead, we’d pass the days playing ball and eating clams, the nights drinking beer, playing guitar, and talking, talking, talking. As time went on, we became as comfortable with one another as a pair of old shoes. We listened to one another’s stories, met one another’s boyfriends and girlfriends, and tolerated and even grew fond of one another’s faults.

We were all drawn there for the same reasons, all feeling that sense of loss that comes, in your early thirties, when you’ve finally separated from your parents. Some of us were already paired up in long-term relationships, some of us weren’t—it didn’t matter, in that sense. In another sense, of course, it mattered very much. So when, the autumn after I finished my Austen chapter, our host fell suddenly and deeply in love, we all came up one weekend—they were already living together, it happened so fast—to meet his girlfriend.

There were about eight of us sitting around the kitchen table that night, smacking our lips over some dessert she had made. The candles were burning low, her cats were nosing their way among our legs, someone had just cracked a joke. I leaned back, I looked around, and I thought, Yes, I’ve found my family.