A Jane Austen Education

None of this was merely theoretical for her. Austen was called upon to give some real-life romantic advice at a certain point, and she put her money where her mouth was. When Fanny Knight, her favorite niece, was twenty-one, she was trying to decide whether to marry a local young gentleman, John Plumptre. The young lady had her doubts. He seemed a little stiff, a little too religious and moralistic, and in any case, she wasn’t sure that she loved him enough. So in the course of two long exchanges, she hashed it all out with her wise Aunt Jane.

The correspondence was top secret: Fanny concealed the first letter in a package of sheet music, and even Austen’s sister, Cassandra, was not allowed to be in on it. “I do not know how I could have accounted for the parcel otherwise,” Austen said approvingly, “for tho’ your dear Papa most conscientiously hunted about till he found me alone in the Dining-parlor, Your Aunt C. had seen that he had a parcel to deliver.—As it was however, I do not think anything was suspected.” The second letter, though, began to make her sweat. “I shall be most glad to hear from you again my dearest Fanny,” she said, “but . . . write something that may do to be read”—that is, read aloud—“or told.”

Austen examined the letters, as may be imagined, with keen attention. “I read yours through the very evening I received it,” she replied, “getting away by myself—I could not bear to leave off, when once I had begun.” This was no mean trick in such a tight-knit household, with three other women—Cassandra, their mother, and Austen’s best friend, Martha Lloyd—breathing down her neck. “Luckily,” she explained, “Your Aunt C. dined at the other house, therefore I had not to manoeuvre away from her;—& as to anybody else, I do not care.”

Austen’s response to her niece’s dilemma, however, was more ambivalent. “My dearest Fanny,” she interrupted herself at one point, “I am writing what will not be of the smallest use to you. I am feeling differently every moment, & shall not be able to suggest a single thing that can assist your Mind.” Fanny quite plainly felt otherwise, though, and in talking out the arguments on both sides of the question, Austen not only helped her niece reach a decision, she affirmed the romantic beliefs that her own novels expressed. What she urged on her readers was good enough for her own flesh and blood.

The problem was this. On the one hand, Mr. Plumptre was clearly a very worthy young man. On the other, Fanny’s affection for him, as Austen saw, was already on the decline. But as she consoled her niece, by reflecting on the young man’s qualities, for having made the mistake of thinking herself in love in the first place, Austen’s mind began to change once more: Oh! my dear Fanny, the more I write about him, the warmer my feelings become, the more strongly I feel the sterling worth of such a young Man & the desirableness of your growing in love with him again. I recommend this most thoroughly.—There are such beings in the World perhaps, one in a Thousand, as the Creature You & I should think perfection, where Grace & Spirit are united to Worth, where the Manners are equal to the Heart & Understanding, but such a person may not come in your way.





In choosing a mate, she was telling her niece, the most important thing is character. Grace and spirit and manners—the kinds of qualities that attracted Marianne to Willoughby—are wonderful to have, but they are no substitute for the Edwardlike attributes of worth and heart and understanding. All of Austen’s heroes had the second; only a couple were also blessed with the first.

Yet talking Fanny into the match was the last thing that Austen wanted to do. “You frighten me out of my Wits,” she said at one point. “Your affection gives me the highest pleasure, but indeed you must not let anything depend on my opinion. Your feelings & none but your own, should determine such an important point.” Feelings, not arguments. You shouldn’t marry someone because of his character; you should marry him because of the emotions that his character inspires. “Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection,” Austen reminded her niece, “and nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without Love.”

Still, feelings can change, and we can do something about it. “The desirableness of your growing in love with him again”: it sounded like Austen were asking her niece to perform the impossible. Surely you can no more choose to grow in love than you can decide to grow taller. Yet Austen believed that if a person’s character is good, love increases with simple familiarity. She said “grow,” not “fall”—a gradual, organic process, not a bolt from the blue. “I should not be afraid of your marrying him,” she explained; “with all his Worth, you would soon love him enough for the happiness of both.”

“Marrying” as opposed to becoming engaged to. The problem was that Mr. Plumptre’s financial circumstances were not going to allow the two of them to formalize their union anytime soon. “You like him well enough to marry,” Austen told her niece, “but not well enough to wait.” Love, again, depends on chance—and in more ways than one. No, the perfect man may never arrive, but Fanny was only twenty-one, and, Austen insisted,When I consider how few young Men you have yet seen much of—how capable you are (yes, I do still think you very capable) of being really in love—how full of temptation the next 6 or 7 years of your Life will probably be—(it is the very period of Life for the strongest attachments to be formed)—I cannot wish you with your present very cool feelings to devote yourself in honour to him.





What was more, “It is very true that you never may attach another Man, his equal altogether, but if that other Man has the power of attaching you more, he will be in your eyes the most perfect.”

Better to love than be loved—something we never had to learn from the novels, where feelings, by authorial grace, were always perfectly reciprocal. As for “Poor dear Mr. J. P.,” Austen said, “I have no doubt of his suffering a good deal for a time, a great deal, when he feels that he must give you up;—but it is no creed of mine, as you must be well aware, that such sort of Disappointments kill anybody.” As it turned out, Fanny took her aunt’s advice, and nobody died. John Plumptre married three years later, had three daughters, and approved of Mansfield Park, on account of its stern morality. Fanny waited six years, just as her aunt suggested, married a man a dozen years her senior with six children from a first marriage, and had nine more kids of her own.





Austen was not against romance, she was against romantic mythology. No one who wrote as many novels about love and marriage as she did can fairly be accused of being unromantic. If anything, simply believing that people should marry for love, that “nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without Love,” made her all too romantic by the standards of the day. People wrote stories of crazy love, then as now, and some people, especially young people, believed them, but when it came time to lay it on the line and commit themselves for life, most were far more apt to forget about love altogether.

Those were the days of the marriage market, when young people were auctioned off according to a strict system of equivalences. Men offered money and status, women offered money, if they had any, and beauty, and the exchange rates were calculated to a hair. Here was Elinor and Marianne’s odious half brother, John Dashwood, who would never have dreamed of marrying for love, handicapping the heroines’ chances. Elinor had just informed him that her sister (in the wake of Willoughby’s rejection) had taken ill:I am sorry for that. At her time of life, any thing of an illness destroys the bloom for ever! Her’s has been a very short one! She was as handsome a girl last September, as any I ever saw; and as likely to attract the men. . . . I remember Fanny [his wife] used to say that she would marry sooner and better than you did. . . . She will be mistaken, however. I question whether Marianne now, will marry a man worth more than five or six hundred a year, at the utmost, and I am very much deceived if you do not do better.





The worst thing about this system was that no one forced you into it. Parents could pressure their children not to “marry down,” could disown them for doing it or even thinking of doing it, but the days of arranged marriages were long over. Young people had a choice, and made a choice, but so thoroughly had they internalized the values of the marriage market—marry prudently, marry “well,” don’t worry about love—that they acted just as if their parents still decided for them.

“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance,” said one of Austen’s young ladies, “and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.” “There is not one in a hundred of either sex who is not taken in when they marry,” said another. “It is a manoeuvring business,” “of all transactions, the one in which people expect most from others, and are least honest themselves.” If happiness was simply a matter of chance, if marriage was just a maneuvering business, then you might as well go for the gold.

This kind of attitude, as much as the romantic dreams of a Marianne Dashwood, was what Austen wrote her novels to rebuke. The first of those young ladies was Elizabeth Bennet’s friend Charlotte, who went on to marry the most ridiculous—and surely, for a wife, the most distasteful—man in the world. “I am not romantic,” she explained; “I never was. I ask only a comfortable home; and considering Mr. Collins’s character, connection, and situation in life”—yes, that Mr. Collins, one of the greatest fools in English literature—“I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on entering the marriage state.” No doubt. The second young lady was Mary Crawford in Mans field Park, who couldn’t bring herself to marry the man she loved. Two versions, for their creator, of self-damnation.





Austen was no fool. She neither demonized wealth nor idealized poverty. Among the factors weighing in Mr. Plumptre’s favor, she told her niece when she gave her romantic advice, was that he was “the eldest son of a Man of Fortune.” He may not have had much money yet, in other words, but he was going to have an awful lot eventually. “What have wealth or grandeur to do with happiness?” said Marianne, in high romantic mode. To which her older sister replied, “Grandeur has but little, but wealth has much to do with it.” All that Austen claimed—it was revolutionary enough, if put into practice—was that wealth can be no substitute for love.

In fact, her heroines did put it into practice, and so did she. Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, turned down a match that would have made her rich. Elizabeth Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, turned down two. Austen’s niece—as the daughter of Austen’s wealthy brother Edward, a young woman accustomed to a style of life that only marrying very well would have allowed her to maintain—turned down that “eldest son of a Man of Fortune” on her aunt’s advice. And Austen herself, coming to the end of her chances for any kind of match at all, turned down the hand of Harris Bigg-Wither (her friends’ brother, the man whose offer she accepted just a few days shy of her twenty-seventh birthday, only to change her mind that very night), who was also the heir to a large fortune—a man who would have made her rich indeed.

The stakes, in those decisions, could not have been higher. For Fanny Price, for Elizabeth Bennet, and most of all, for Austen herself, accepting the man in question would not only have saved them from lives of deprivation and insecurity, it would have gone a long way toward saving their families, too. By marrying Harris, as Austen biographer Claire Tomalin put it, Austen would have been able “to ensure the comfort of her parents to the end of their days, and give a home to Cassandra,” and she would probably also have been in a position to help her brothers in their careers. She would have become a benefactor rather than a dependent, a great lady instead of a poor relation. And yet, despite it all, she didn’t do it. She valued love too much: real love, not storybook love. Valued it enough not to profane it for comfort’s sake, and to devote her career to defending it.





What about sex? Jane Austen the prudish spinster is a figure of legend and nothing more. The author who had Mary Crawford joke in Mansfield Park that “Of Rears, and Vices, I saw enough,” a pun about anal sex between men, was no shrinking violet. She could crack a bawdy remark of her own, too. Writing to her sister, Cassandra, about the family’s upcoming move to Bath, she deadpanned that “we plan having a steady Cook, & a young giddy Housemaid, with a sedate, middle aged Man, who is to undertake the double office of Husband to the former & sweetheart to the latter.—No children of course to be allowed on either side.” Of a woman who had just given birth for the eighteenth time, she told an unmarried niece, “I would recommend to her and Mr. D. the simple regimen of separate rooms.” Elsewhere she remarked more seriously, of the figure of Don Juan, “I must say that I have seen nobody on the stage who has a more interesting Character than that compound of Cruelty & Lust.”

If she didn’t put sex in her novels, it wasn’t because she was ignorant of it, or frightened of it, or because people didn’t write such things in those days. In fact, they wrote them all the time. The books that she read as a teenager were ripe with lurid sexuality: abductions, seductions, cries, and caresses; bared bosoms and eager kisses; cads and rakes and libertines; slavering monks and ravished maidens, callous bawds and poxy whores; adultery, voyeurism, incest, and rape. If those kinds of things were missing from her books, it was because she chose to keep them out.

But they weren’t completely missing. In Mansfield Park, a married woman abandoned her husband to throw herself into the arms of a lover. In Pride and Prejudice, a teenage girl was seduced by a smiling deceiver. In Sense and Sensibility, Austen gave us both scenarios: a young woman bore the child of an adulterous affair, then that child, a generation later, was seduced, impregnated, and abandoned in turn. It was enough to fill a novel—but not an Austen novel. That episode, like the two in the other books, occurred offstage; in each case, we heard of it only by report. Austen did not want to tell the kind of story about young women that everyone else was telling. Her heroines weren’t passive, weren’t piteous, weren’t victims, weren’t playthings. They controlled their destinies; they stood as equals.

In her age, that meant controlling their impulses, too. How her ideas about sex might have changed in a world of reliable birth control, no-fault divorce, and women’s economic independence we cannot say. It is certainly by no means clear that she would have denounced the moral standards of today. But that is really beside the point. She didn’t condemn sexual impulsiveness just because it could lead to ruin. She condemned it because she thought it was a stupid reason to get married, too. Her novels were stocked with intelligent men who’d made the mistake of marrying vapid beauties and lived to regret it for the rest of their lives.

Mr. Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice—condemned to doing battle with his wife’s eternal “nerves”—was one. Sir Thomas Bertram, in Mansfield Park—the proud possessor of a useless trophy wife—was another. In Sense and Sensibility, a certain Mr. Palmer made a third—having married a silly little dumpling with “a very pretty face” who “came in with a smile, smiled all the time of her visit, except when she laughed, and smiled when she went away,” and whom her husband, only twenty-five or -six, had already made a habit of ignoring.

Somehow, though she died a virgin, Austen understood all this. For her heroes and heroines, sexual attraction was always the last thing, never the first. It didn’t create affection, it flowed from it. Her heroines were usually not paragons of beauty. (If we think otherwise, that is, once again, because of the movies.) Anne Elliot, in Persuasion, was faded. Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, was “not plain-looking.” Catherine Morland, in Northanger Abbey, was “almost pretty.” And Elizabeth Bennet, of course, was “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.” Other young ladies—Jane Bennet, Isabella Thorpe, Mary Crawford, Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove—often overshadowed them. But their looks grew on you, snuck up on you, as you got to know them, until one day you found yourself considering them, as someone finally said about Elizabeth, “one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance.” As for Austen’s heroes, they tended to the quiet, steady, sensitive type. It often took a while to be attracted to them, too. Her villains were the dashing ones, the flashy ones, the talkers and the flirters. She liked the kind of man who let his character speak for itself.

But none of this meant that her lovers—or her stories, or Austen herself—were passionless. If that was less obvious than many readers through the years have wanted it to be—Charlotte Bront? missing “what throbs fast and full,” Mark Twain feeling “like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven”—it wasn’t out of bloodlessness, but tact. Sir Walter Scott himself, in one of the earliest reviews of Austen’s work, had lodged the same complaint. In Emma, he said, “Cupid walks decorously, and with good discretion, bearing his torch under a lanthorn [i.e., lantern], instead of flourishing it around to set the house on fire.” The key word there, however, is “discretion.” If Elinor refused to admit that what she felt for Edward was love, that was only because, unlike her histrionic sister, she wanted to preserve her privacy. Such feelings were too precious to violate by talking about.

Her creator felt the same. Of course her lovers were passionate—even Elinor and Edward, as I now saw: more deeply, more truly passionate than a butterfly like Willoughby could ever understand. All the more reason, then, to shield their intimacy from our prying eyes. The most remarkable thing about the love scenes with which her novels culminated, I realized—another thing the movies never stand for—was that she always turned away at the moment of truth. The hero was about to propose, the heroine was about to accept—their passion was about to be revealed at last—and Austen knew we wanted nothing more than to hear the words that sealed their happiness. And yet she always teasingly withheld them. “In what manner he expressed himself,” we read in Sense and Sensibility, “and how he was received, need not be particularly told.” “What did she say?” she asked of Emma. “Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.” It was too private; it was none of our business. And that was the most romantic thing of all.





What did that happiness consist of—the happiness her lovers achieved? The critic who said that friendship was “the true light of life” in Austen’s view was only, I saw, half right. Friendship, he meant, as opposed to love. But for Austen, friendship was the very essence of love. However mad the statement made both Marianne and us, Elinor was onto something after all: “I do not attempt to deny that I think very highly of him—that I greatly esteem, that I like him.” When I went back and looked at the other novels, I found the very same ideas. “She respected, she esteemed, she was grateful to him,” I read of Elizabeth Bennet, “she felt a real interest in his welfare.” “He is very good natured,” said Emma’s ditzy friend Harriet Smith, getting it wrong for the right reasons, “and I shall always feel much obliged to him, and have a great regard for—but that is quite a different thing from—.” No, I finally saw, it’s exactly the same.

If love begins in friendship, I was now able to see, it has to adhere to the principles of friendship as Austen understood them. The lover’s highest role, like the friend’s, is to help you to become a better person: push you, if necessary, even at the risk of wounded feelings. Austen’s lovers challenged each other: to be less selfish, more aware, kinder, more considerate—not only toward each other but to everyone around them. Love, I saw, for Austen—and what a change this was from the days of my rebellious youth—is an agent not of subversion, but of socialization. Lovers aren’t supposed to goad each other toward extremes of transgression, the way that Marianne and Willoughby did; they’re supposed to teach each other the value of behaving with propriety and decorum, show each other that society’s expectations are worthy, after all, of respect. Love, for Austen, is not about remaining forever young. It’s about becoming an adult.

Austen understood, even cherished, the passions of youth, but she also knew that that is all they are. “There is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind,” said an older character of Marianne, “that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.” It’s natural to believe the things that Marianne and I had believed about love, but it’s also necessary, if melancholy, to give them up. Austen had respect for Elinor, but it was perfectly clear that the character she loved the most in Sense and Sensibility was her sister. Yet just because she loved her so much, she loved her enough to want to see her happy. And for Austen, as I already knew, the key to happiness was letting life surprise you.

The only thing that’s shocking about the way young lovers act, I realized now, is how predictable it is. Of course Marianne and Willoughby fell in love. It’s what everyone knew they were going to do; it was what they knew there were going to do, even before they met each other. But making a mature decision, patiently feeling and thinking your way toward mutual respect and regard and esteem, accepting the responsibility of challenging and being challenged, refusing both the comforts of fantasy and the cynicism of calculation—that is the really radical, the really original, the really heroic move. That is the true freedom; that is the way you lift yourself above the bondage of impulse and cliché. The marriages that ended Austen’s novels, I now went back and saw, were always unexpected. Marianne and Willoughby were supposedly perfect for each other, but the men that Austen’s heroines actually married were always the “wrong” person: the wrong class, the wrong age, the wrong temperament. Emma, Elizabeth, Anne—nobody around them saw their happiness coming. Not even, most importantly, themselves.

True love takes you by surprise, Austen was telling us, and if it’s really worth something, it continues to take you by surprise. The last thing that lovers should do, despite what Marianne and I imagined, is agree about everything and share all of each other’s tastes. True love, for Austen, means a never-ending clash of opinions and perspectives. If your lover’s already just like you, then neither one of you has anywhere to go. Their character matters not only because you’re going to have to live with it, but because it’s going to shape the person you become.

For Charles Musgrove, who married Anne Elliot’s whiny, trivial sister Mary in Persuasion, “a woman of real understanding might have given more consequence to his character, and more usefulness, rationality, and elegance to his habits and pursuits. As it was, he did nothing with much zeal but sport; and his time was otherwise trifled away.” That was a quiet tragedy, but it was a tragedy nonetheless. With a better choice of mate, even John Dashwood, Elinor and Marianne’s repulsive half brother, might well have been saved: “Had he married a more amiable woman, he might . . . have been made amiable himself; for he was very young when he married, and very fond of his wife. But Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself;—more narrow-minded and selfish.” “A strong caricature of himself”: wanting to be with someone who’s exactly like you, I now saw, isn’t really love; it’s only self-love. When Marianne finally did find a husband, Austen made sure to give her a man who was as different from her as possible.

And that was the most momentous revelation of all. Not only does your happiness depend upon your choice of mate, your very self depends upon it—your character, your soul. Love is more than just good feelings. A friction-free relationship, supposing that such a thing were even possible, would, I now saw, be a desert. Conflict is good, disagreements are good, even fights can be good. These were astounding new ideas to me. Committing yourself to someone doesn’t have to limit your growth; it can be the door to perpetual growth. Austen had finally done what I never imagined possible. She had started to make me feel like getting married might not be such a terrible thing.