A Jane Austen Education

by William Deresiewicz

“Well,” he went on, “Austen is saying that we need to learn to love things, that it doesn’t just happen by itself. That’s not an obvious idea.”

  “No, I guess not,” I said. “Love is supposed to be completely spontaneous and natural, like love at first sight.”

  “Right,” he said, “but the most remarkable thing is, we can learn. And think about what Henry says in response.” He could apparently recite the scene from memory, but I needed a little help.

  “‘Who can tell,’” he quoted, “‘the sentiment once raised, but you may in time come to love a rose? . . . The mere habit of learning to love is the thing.’”

  The habit of learning: if Catherine could learn to love a hyacinth when she was seventeen, my professor was telling me—or rather, Austen was telling me, through my professor—I could keep learning to love new things my whole life. Of course, it was my professor himself who had helped me learn to love Jane Austen in the first place, against expectations at least as stubborn as the ones that Catherine brought to Northanger Abbey. But I was starting to get it now: the wonderful thing about life, if you live it right, is that it keeps taking you by surprise. Just when you think that nothing can be more uninteresting than a hyacinth (or a scene about a hyacinth, or an author who writes scenes about hyacinths), you find it becoming a new source of delight.

  Catherine thought she saw things at Northanger Abbey that weren’t really there, but the novel, my professor explained, was not against imagination. Quite the opposite. It was against delusion, against projection, against thinking the same old thing again and again, whether it’s the idea that all balls are “very agreeable indeed” or that all old houses conceal dark secrets. True imagination, he went on, means the ability to envision new possibilities, for life as well as art. Mrs. Allen and the rest of Austen’s dull adults were not ignorant or stupid so much as they were unimaginative. Nothing was ever going to change for them, because they couldn’t imagine that anything ever would.

  But Austen’s ideas about staying young contained a further paradox. When I went back and looked up that scene for myself, I remembered how Catherine had learned to love a hyacinth. “Your sister taught me,” she said to Henry. “I cannot tell how. Mrs. Allen used to take pains, year after year, to make me like them; but I never could, till I saw them the other day in Milsom Street.” Young people, Austen was saying, need to learn to be young, must be woken up to the world’s physical beauty (the loveliness of hyacinths) as well as to their own moral beauty (their capacity to love them). They need to be taught, somehow, by older people, people who have learned it already—people like the Tilneys, or my professor, or Jane Austen. Taught by example (“I cannot tell how”), not the pedantic taking of pains we can too well imagine Mrs. Allen having employed.

  The need for teachers: there is something in the modern spirit that bridles at the notion. It seems inegalitarian, undemocratic. It injures our self-esteem, the idea of having to confess our incompleteness and submerge our ego beneath another person. It outrages our Romantic temper, which feels that the self is autonomous and the self is supreme. And if the teacher is a man and the student a woman, as they are in Northanger Abbey—and, even worse, an older man and a younger woman—it offends our feminist sensibilities, as well.

  But Austen accepted it, even celebrated it. Nearly all of her heroines have teachers of one kind or another, and in her own life, we know, her mentors were many and crucial. There was James, her oldest brother, ten years older, who had, according to his son James-Edward, Austen’s first biographer, “a large share in directing her reading and forming her taste.” There was Eliza Capot de Feuillide, her glamorous cousin, fourteen years her senior, who became Jane’s friend and idol when she descended upon the Austens from France. There was Anne Lefroy, the wife of a neighboring parson when Austen was a girl—beautiful, spirited, clever, a great reader and wit—her “best loved and admired mentor,” according to Austen biographer Claire Tomalin, a kind of “ideal parent” to whom she could turn for advice and encouragement. And finally, there was Cassandra herself, Austen’s deeply beloved older sister, about whom she would speak “even in the maturity of her powers,” as James-Edward put it, “as of one wiser and better than herself.”

  My professor and I were having another one of those conversations when the subject turned to Austen again, her ideas about mentors and maturation. “Austen is saying that it’s important to spend time with extraordinary people,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “So that’s what I advise you to do: spend time with extraordinary people.”

  I had come to graduate school with a very different idea about what it means to get an education. It was an idea that derived from my father. Here was a man who had earned three university degrees, spoke six languages, and had taught himself all about classical music and European art and Western history—a man who equated being educated with knowing things, knowing facts. And the purpose of knowing things, in a strangely circular way, was simply to “be” educated, to be able to pride yourself on being a “man of culture” (and feel superior to those who weren’t). Knowledge, culture, ego. Mine was a household, growing up, where it was understood that there were certain things one “ought to know,” where “having heard of” Brahms or Giotto was considered a virtue in itself—even if one didn’t know any more about them than that one was a composer, the other a painter—and where one encounter was considered equivalent to “knowing” (or as my father would have put it, “being acquainted with”) a work of art.

  My father had never been very keen on literature—it was just stories, after all; he preferred books that gave you real information—but he began to show an interest once I started graduate school, as a way of sharing the experience. When I took a course on Ben Jonson, he read a biography of the playwright, though not any of his actual plays. When I took a course on Shakespeare, I suggested that he might at least try some of those. “I’ve read them already,” he said. “When I was in my twenties.” And indeed he had, by buying a Complete Works, starting at the beginning, and reading until he had gotten to the end. Another “ought to know” checked off the list.

  Knowledge, culture, ego. Even if my notion of what it meant to know a work of art or literature had become more strenuous than my father’s, that was still pretty much the formula I was working with until well into my time in graduate school—as my freshman English students, not to mention the woman I was in love with the summer that I studied for my orals, as well as the one I was going out with when I first read Emma, could readily attest. But now I was learning a new idea, and learning it with the help of that other “father,” the one I’d been so nervous about getting too close to when I took him up on the apartment. It was a new idea about education, but it was also a new idea about being a man—“of culture” or otherwise. You didn’t have to be certain, I now saw, to be strong, and you didn’t have to dominate people to earn their respect. Real men weren’t afraid to admit that they still had things to learn—not even from a woman.

  For it was Austen, of course, who had ultimately taught me these new ideas about knowledge and education. While she had no patience with ignorance and valued characters who had “information” and “conversation”—people who knew what was going on in the world and could talk about it intelligently—she ridiculed the emphasis, in both the education of children and the self-education of adults, on the mere acquisition of facts. Elizabeth Bennet’s sister Mary wasn’t just pedantic; she was also dense.

  “What say you, Mary?” her father teased her at one point.

  “For you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books and make extracts.”

  Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.

  As for formal education as it existed in Austen’s day—of which there was in any case precious little to be had by girls—she had this to say in a short poem titled “On the Universities”:No wonder that Oxford and Cambridge profound

  In Learning and Science so greatly abound
r />   Since some carry thither a little each day

  And we meet with so few that bring any away.

  When Cassandra visited some friends at a nearby estate, her sister included this bit of invective in one of her letters:Ladies who read those enormous great stupid thick Quarto Volumes, which one always sees in the Breakfast parlour there, must be acquainted with everything in the World.—I detest a Quarto.—Capt. Pasley’s Book is too good for their Society. They will not understand a Man who condenses his Thoughts into an Octavo.

  Quartos were large-format volumes reserved for books that took themselves very seriously; octavos were half the size and much less pretentious. As for Captain Pasley’s work, Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, Austen called it “a book which I protested against at first, but which upon trial I find delightfully written & highly entertaining”—evidence both that she was no stranger to serious works of nonfiction and that she judged whether a book was likely to tell her anything valuable by the way it was written. Her problem with quartos was not their subject matter but their ponderous prose, their “thickness” in both senses.

  Of course, the kind of books she valued most were novels. This was not a fashionable position—novels were considered too trivial and feminine—but she defended it without apology. Writing to Cassandra about a new library that was about to open in the neighborhood (libraries were private businesses at the time and charged a subscription fee), she noted that:As an inducement to subscribe Mrs. Martin tells us that her Collection is not to consist only of Novels, but of every kind of Literature etc. etc.—She might have spared this pretension to our family, who are great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so;—but it was necessary I suppose to the self-consequence of half her Subscribers.

  In Northanger Abbey, a novel about reading novels, John Thorpe marked himself out as just such a snob when Catherine asked if he had read The Mysteries of Udolpho: “Udolpho! Oh, Lord! Not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do.”

  It was a response that Austen had already taught us to disdain. She was not against Udolpho and its kin; she was only against the way that people misread them. And just to make sure that we didn’t miss the point, she made this thundering declaration very early in the book, right after telling us that Catherine read novels herself:Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. . . . There seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss——?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

  So there. As for history, the ultimate in “serious” reading, this was how Catherine, explaining why she hated it, described what it involved: “The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.” It was a great line, that second half, but Austen also intended something deeper by it, a sly reference to her own project. “Hardly any women at all”: in other words—since women had essentially no role in public affairs—nothing about private life, nothing about personal life. Whereas the novel, the great genre of private life, was almost always, in Austen’s day, about women and almost always by them—two of the main reasons that people were so quick to put it down.

  Histories tell us what happened, but novels can teach us something even more important: what might happen. The opening line of Northanger Abbey was a joke about gothic fiction and a way of calling attention to Austen’s own use of conventions, but it was also, I now saw, something still more. “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.” From the humblest beginnings, the greatest possibilities. Catherine never did become a traditional heroine, never did have the wild passions and epic adventures that we’re supposed to find so admirable. Instead, she became something better.

  By waking up to the world, by renouncing certainty and cynicism, by opening herself to new experiences—all of which take real courage, real strength—she turned her life into an adventure that would never end. This, Austen told us, is the true heroism. Life, if you live it right, keeps surprising you, and the thing that keeps surprising you the most, I now understood, is yourself. The caterpillar can’t imagine the butterfly, the child can’t imagine the adult, and no one, before they do it, can imagine what it feels like to fall in love. We can never reach the end of what’s inside us, never know the limit of our own potential.

  These were lessons to explore for a lifetime, but the first place I applied them was the classroom. Instead of thinking of a session as a kind of engineering problem—how to transfer a certain quantity of material from my head to my students’—I started to see it as an opportunity to incite them to discover the powers that were waiting, unborn, within them, and in doing so take both themselves and me by surprise. I went from feeling that a good class was one in which I had “gotten my points across” to regarding it as one in which I had learned something myself—not because my learning was the goal, but because if I had found out something new, it meant that I had given my students the freedom to think their way beyond me.

  All of a sudden, teaching became a joyful experience. I arrived in the classroom with excitement and left it with exhilaration. The time in between, which now seemed as if it was never long enough, began to feel like a collaboration, even an adventure—like I was working a trapeze, and the best moments came when I let go of the bar, let go of my plan, and just flew through the air, confident that someone would be there on the other side to catch me. It was scary, but it was also really fun.

  I began to like my students rather than resent them. They suddenly seemed really smart and interesting—because I was letting them be, instead of having to suppress their talents in order to maintain my fragile sense of intellectual authority. They seemed to start to like me, too, began to come to talk to me, even confide in me. Best of all, a few of them became my friends, in that special way that can happen between a student and a teacher—the way that had happened between me and that extraordinary person whom I felt so privileged to live next door to.

  It turned out that I hadn’t made a mistake by wanting to become a professor, after all. It had just taken me a while to discover my potential. I had started to learn how to teach—but more importantly, after more than twenty years in school, I had finally learned how to learn.

  CHAPTER 4

  mansfield park being good

  That first year in Brooklyn, I sensed my life beginning to grow into a new shape. It was the first time I had had a place of my own, and I could almost feel my arms and legs getting longer with all the psychological space I had to move around in. I got a platform for my futon, bought a nice set of chairs at a stoop sale down the street, even picked up some plants and learned how to keep them alive. (When I asked the clerk at the garden store if my potting soil would go bad if I didn’t, you know, use it up right away, he said, “You wanna know if this dirt is going to get stale? I feel like I’m talking to my little brother!”) My English-muffin-pizza days were over. Instea
d, I picked up The New Basics Cookbook and started having people over for things like minty roasted potatoes and lemon-garlic-rosemary chicken. A few months in, I even acquired a cat—this was some serious responsibility now—a little gray thing who needed a home and who took to curling up beside me on my desk while I was working.

  Living so far from Columbia, I began to see less of my graduate school friends. Instead, I gravitated toward a very different world. Another friend had become involved with a woman who’d been raised on the Upper East Side and gone to a fancy Manhattan private school. Her prep-school crowd was back in the city after college, dabbling in this or that and living the high life, and these were the people I started spending time around. It would have been hard not to. This was the upper crust, the world of Edith Wharton or F. Scott Fitzgerald updated for the nineties: posh, polished young people who gave off a glow of glamour and sophistication that drew me like a moth. I was dazzled, I was seduced. It was an undreamed-of world of privilege, and I was grateful just to be able to watch.

  There was the stunning department-store heiress who ran a chic East Village café and went out with a guy who talked about getting into film. There was the scion of a consumer-products fortune who had married his art-school girlfriend. There was the lovely, blue-eyed daughter of an Ivy League president. And there was one young woman who seemed to be richer than all the others put together—even they grumbled when she took us to a “little place around the corner” where the desserts started at twelve dollars—and who had picked up a tall, Dutch, model-beautiful boyfriend somewhere along the way.

  I went to their openings and partied with them afterward in downtown lofts. I partook of artful brunches and elegant candlelit dinners at a town house in Cobble Hill. I was ushered into the large East Side apartment building where my friend’s girlfriend grew up, to discover that there were only two doors facing us when the elevator opened: one for her apartment and one for the other one. I spent weekends at her family’s summerhouse on Long Island, with four or five bedrooms and a swimming pool and a lawn that rolled down about three hundred feet to the sound.