In an earlier Heroes & Heartbreakers post, I confessed that I’ve never actually read a Jane Austen novel—it was something that was overlooked in my schooling. (When it came to 19th-century English literature, I was only ever officially exposed to Dickens and Hardy in high school, and then the Brontë sisters in college.) As I was getting ready to correct that oversight, I stumbled upon William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter. Well, I said to myself, this could be helpful.
This is actually the second book Deresiewicz—a former English professor at Yale and a highly regarded book critic in venues from The New York Times to Bookforum—has written about Austen; I haven’t seen Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets (2005) yet, but it sounds like the sort of scholarly work that would be best appreciated after I have the six novels under my belt. A Jane Austen Education, on the other hand, is a more informal project: an outline of an autobiography tracking the twenty-something Deresiewicz’s moral development through his reading, starting with Emma, which made him realize “I’d have to somehow learn to stop being a defensive, reactive, self-enclosed jerk,” all the way through to Sense & Sensibility, which is about finding a partner who can spur you towards becoming a better person: “less selfish, more aware, kinder, more considerate.” It was almost enough to make me think I haven’t really been missing out on much by not reading Austen after all, if I was just going to receive 200-year-old moral instruction.
Fortunately, Deresiewicz loves the stories for their own sake, and he clearly revels in presenting us with his favorite moments, quoting from Austen’s dialogue at every opportunity. That heartfelt affection, however, is linked to a belief that novels aren’t just narratives but also philosophical arguments: “training grounds for responding to the world,” as he puts it, and “imaginative sanctuaries in which to hone and test our ethical judgments and choices.” When Austen wrote Pride & Prejudice, he says, she wasn’t just trying to entertain readers, she was trying to convince them that, like Elizabeth, they needed to think past their feelings; Northanger Abbey, too, is about learning that you ought to subject your feelings to intense scrutiny and weigh their validity with respect to the world around you.
It’s a very calculating view of Austen’s artistry, to be sure. Deresiewicz sometimes seems to have particular admiration for those moments where Austen has steered us towards infatuation with particular characters, then catches us off-guard by revealing their true natures, forcing us to re-appraise our own earlier enthusiasm. He realizes, though, that any lessons she intended would fall on deaf ears if the stories did not work as stories, if they weren’t driven by “a language that didn’t call attention to itself in any way, but just rolled along as easily as breathing.” That naturalism, he understands, is what made it so easy for him to see his own life reflected in her novels.
As far as the personal revelations go, however, A Jane Austen Education is still a work of (pop) literary criticism, not Eat Pray Love. Deresiewicz gives us broad strokes of his life in college and graduate school, but they’re largely anecdotal: He chafes under his father’s continued influence; he becomes disillusioned with his socialite friends; he has a long-distance relationship that ends disastrously.
The problem is that the only person who emerges from these stories with any real sense of personality is William Deresiewicz—hardly anybody else, not even “my professor” or “my best friend” or even the woman he eventually married, gets so much as a name. (Well, the professor and the wife do get shoutouts in the acknowledgments, afterwards.) When a stray remark causes him to realize he’s fallen in with a pack of social climbers, readers have no real basis for that judgment other than his conviction that he was a lot like Fanny in Mansfield Park, but we also haven’t been close enough to his friends to much care (beyond, perhaps, a nagging doubt that perhaps they’d have their own story to tell, if they could). Consequently, the only relationship of import to Deresiewicz’s life story is the one between him and the Austen novels. After the first few chapters, once you’ve figured out the structure, you may well find yourself asking, “OK, what’s he going to learn from Persuasion now?”
If you haven’t read much Austen, though—and, truth be told, I’m still just getting started—A Jane Austen Education makes for a good introduction. You’ll come away with the basic plots and character relationships of all six novels, but not so much detail that the novels will no longer be able to surprise you. And you’ll have a solid grasp on why these books are still capable of striking a chord with contemporary readers, even if you don’t derive the same moral lessons Deresiewicz found when you do, finally, read Austen for yourself.
Ron Hogan is the founding curator of Beatrice.com, one of the first websites to focus on books and authors, and the master of ceremonies for Lady Jane’s Salon, a monthly reading series in New York City for romance authors and their fans.
