A Jane Austen Education (27 page)

 

 

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.

 

 

Yet there was still one lesson more for me to absorb. Of all of Austen’s beliefs about love, the hardest one to accept was this: not everyone is capable of it. The evidence was overwhelming, once I was willing to face it. John Dashwood was not, his wife was not, and neither, I realized, were many other characters in Austen’s books—most of the Elliots, in
Persuasion,
most of the Bertrams, in
Mansfield Park,
and lots of others everywhere: the cold ones, the grasping ones, the ones who thought only of themselves. The essential requirement for love, in Austen’s view—before the work, before the courage—is simply to possess a loving heart. And not everyone, she thought, is born with one of those.

That was what she meant when she assured her niece, while giving her romantic advice, “I do still think you
very
capable of being really in love.” On hearing of Captain Benwick’s second engagement in
Persuasion
, Anne Elliot thought, “He had an affectionate heart. He must love somebody.” The disposition to love is the thing. If you have it, someone will come along to satisfy it. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter what happens. People can grow, Austen thought, but they can’t fundamentally change.

By the same token, I now recognized, the great maker of fictional matches did not believe that most marriages work out very well. People marry for the wrong reasons, or they choose the wrong person, or circumstances are against them, or they just stop trying, or they aren’t the kind of people who should marry in the first place. After a long, perilous process of maturation and mutual discovery, her heroes and heroines could look forward to a happy future, but of the unions her novels actually showed us (parents and neighbors and so on), the overwhelming number—something like sixteen out of twenty—were failures.

So where did that leave me? Austen reassured her niece, but what would she have said to me? Did I have a loving heart, or did all of my breakups, all of my bitterness, all of my failures to stay committed mean that I was one of those people who shouldn’t even think of getting married? Maybe I had had the right idea from the start; maybe I’d been trying to tell myself something. After six years and six novels, these were the questions to which Jane Austen had brought me. But the answers, I knew, would not be found in any book.

 

 

There was one person, we can be sure, who did have a loving heart—Austen herself. That is the great question that hangs above her life. Not, how a person who never married could have known so much about love. The mysteries of genius are enough to explain that conundrum. But rather, why a person who knew so much about love, and had such a clear capacity for it, never did get married herself.

She might have been about to once, when she was Elizabeth Bennet’s age. The record of Austen’s letters opens like a novel. She is twenty, and writing to her sister in a rush of high spirits about the ball she has gone to the night before:

“My Irish friend” was Tom Lefroy, nephew of Anne Lefroy, Austen’s beloved older friend and surrogate mother, on a Christmas visit to his cousins at their home at Ashe, a couple of miles from the Austens’ place at Steventon. (Tom’s father had settled in Ireland as a young man.) Their romance evidently flared up very quickly. Three evenings were enough—three evenings of dancing and flirting and talking, of hopes and glances and laughter—to seal their mutual attachment. Six days later, the day before the ball at Ashe, Austen wrote to her sister again:

The feeling, as always, was hedged by a laugh, but it was no less in earnest for that. The moment of truth, Austen felt sure, was about to arrive. “I look forward with great impatience to it,” she said of the next day’s ball, “as I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening.” Yes, an offer—a proposal.

And yet it was not to be. We do not know what happened that night—the record of Austen’s letters breaks off at that point (Cassandra burned everything she deemed too sensitive), and the next one dates from the following summer. But we do know that Tom’s family took stock of the situation and decided to put a stop to it. Tom was the oldest son of a large and by no means wealthy family. He was studying for the bar and still making his way in the world, and he could not afford to engage himself, or so it was thought, to a fortuneless young woman. As his cousins later said, their mother sent him off posthaste so “that no more mischief might be done.”

Would he have proposed, as Austen expected, had he not been interfered with? We cannot know. Did he return her love in equal measure? Of that we can be sure. Decades later, as an old man—he had married (an heiress) three years later, fathered nine children, and risen to become Lord Chief Justice of Ireland—“he said in so many words,” according to a nephew, “that he was in love with her, although he qualified his confession by saying it was a boyish love.” A boyish love it may have been, at least from the perspective of old age, but twenty-one years after their brief romance—the only time they ever met—he had traveled back to England (no small journey) to pay his respects after learning of her death. Still later he had bought, at an auction of the publisher’s papers, the rejection letter that Austen had received for the first version of
Pride and Prejudice.
His feelings, it seemed, had never died.

As for Austen’s, it is harder to say. His only other mention in her letters came almost three years after that fateful Christmas season. Anne Lefroy, his aunt, had just been visiting, and, Austen reported:

The tone is unmistakable: lingering resentment, continued curiosity, and yet, as well, a sense that she has gotten over it. Tom Lefroy had taught her what it meant to be in love, but Austen was no Anne Elliot, pining away for Wentworth. It was not disappointment that made her a spinster.

 

 

For one thing, there were other opportunities. Austen was, by all accounts, an attractive young woman: tall and slender, with bright hazel eyes; long, curly, light brown hair; a clear and glowing complexion; and a light, firm step that spoke of health and animation. Of her charms of conversation, her playfulness and wit, there can be, of course, no doubt. Tom Lefroy was hardly the only young man to be drawn to her. There was “Mr. Heartley & all his Estate,” and Charles Powlett, who wanted to kiss her, and who knows how many other “Admirers.” After Tom there was that friend of Anne Lefroy’s, the one that Austen mentioned in the letter three years later, a young clergyman who had expressed regard and interest. There was a young gentleman in a seaside place—the details are as hazy as the setting, for Cassandra divulged the episode only years after her sister’s death—“whose charm of person, mind, and manners,” according to a nephew, “was such that Cassandra thought him worthy to possess and likely to win her sister’s love,” who took his leave “expressing his intention of soon seeing them again”—but who, a short time later, suddenly died. And then, of course, there was Harris Bigg-Wither.