Those first years in graduate school, I lived in a dingy little university apartment that I shared with a random series of business students who’d been assigned to the same space. They would go to corporate-sponsored happy hours and come back flushed with cocktails and job prospects, or bring their friends back to the apartment and whoop it up in front of the TV. I’d hole up in my room, burrowing like a hamster. And quite a little den it was. My desk was a slab of wood over two filing cabinets; my bed was a pancaked old futon that I rolled right out on the floor. A hard chair, a narrow bookcase, a secondhand computer—that was pretty much it. I would sleep till noon, then stay up reading until four or five in the morning, blocking the glare from the security lights in the airshaft with an old woolen blanket that hung from a couple of nails I had pounded into the window frame. When it was time for my 3:00 A.M. dinner of ramen noodles or English-muffin pizza, I’d wait a few seconds after turning on the kitchen light, to give the roaches a chance to hide.
I was in my late twenties, in other words, and still living like a college student. I was having trouble growing up—one of the reasons, in fact, that I’d gone back to school in the first place. I’d been out in the world for a few years, had had a couple of jobs, but I still hadn’t learned how to cope with life on my own. Simple things, like buying a bottle of shampoo, would make me catatonic with confusion. I’d stand there in the store with the bottle in my hand like a sleepwalker who had just woken up, wondering how I had gotten there and what I was supposed to do next. Yes, right, I would think. You’ve come in here because you need this. To wash your hair. Now go to the front of the store and pay for it.
If I was having trouble becoming an adult, it wasn’t a big surprise. As the youngest in a family of three kids—and the youngest by a lot, almost six years—I had always been treated like the baby. My mother was very loving and supportive—I was “her” child, the one who looked like her and reminded her of her own adored father—yet she also tended to infantilize me. But the more important presence was my father, the figure who dominated the household. Simultaneously demanding and undermining, he infantilized me without being loving and supportive. He expected everything, but he gave me the unmistakable message that he didn’t really think I could do anything.
In retrospect, it’s clear that he was haunted by a sense of financial and even physical insecurity. He and his parents had been refugees from World War II, having escaped from Europe—that is, from the Holocaust—at the last possible moment. Much of his family had not escaped, and although he had erased his Czech accent by sheer force of will, he was still profoundly marked by his early experiences. He never spent a dime he didn’t have to, never threw away so much as a paper clip. With us he was not only stern and withholding, a shouter and hitter who demanded top grades, he was also overprotective to the point of being overbearing.
He didn’t want his sons to take risks or explore options or strike out on our own; he wanted us to follow the plan that he’d laid out for us: major in science—he was an engineer himself—go to medical school, and start earning a living as quickly as possible. Don’t waste time, don’t get distracted. The world was a dangerous place, and the fewer wrong turns you made, the better. He’d figured out what you needed to do to ensure yourself a secure life, and there was no point in our figuring it out all over again for ourselves.
When my father saw me struggling with something—whether I was ten and having trouble opening a jar or fifteen and trying to write a paper—he would rush in and take care of it instead of letting me work things out on my own. His intentions were good; he wanted to save me the pain and trouble of floundering around until I got it right. “I’ve already made those mistakes,” he would say. “I want you to learn from my experience.” But his strategy overlooked the fact that he wasn’t always going to be there to take care of me. So I never learned how to look after myself, how to deal with salespeople or handle money, how to make my own way in the world. There I was, twenty-eight years old and still staring at the shampoo.
I hadn’t helped myself by going back to school at Columbia. My father was on the faculty, and because it had been free for us, I had already gone there for college. I could have gone to Chicago this time, but the prospect of moving to an unfamiliar city, hundreds of miles away from almost anyone I knew, was not something I could even begin to imagine. So there I was again, back in the same old place, living in an apartment that was practically around the corner from his office.
I’d drop by every once in a while, and he would take me out for Chinese food. He wasn’t very happy that I was studying English—he figured he would wind up supporting me for the rest of his life—and we would struggle about it over the chow fun. “If I had my own business,” he would say, “I would offer to take you in. But you wouldn’t do it anyway!” I’d remind him that that was exactly what had happened between him and his own father, who had owned a little business in the Garment District (my father hadn’t wanted to sell zippers any more than I wanted be a doctor), but it didn’t cut much ice.
The fact is, he never thought I’d get through graduate school. He hadn’t even thought I’d get in to graduate school. Whatever the next challenge was, he was sure I couldn’t meet it. After all—the logic was perfectly circular—hadn’t he always had to help me out with everything? He didn’t think I’d make the cut after the first year, and because I’d gotten C’s in high-school French—he spoke six languages himself—he was sure I’d never complete my language requirements. “I appreciate the support,” I’d say, and then I’d thank him for lunch and head back to my crummy apartment.
I was living in that apartment when I read Emma and broke it off with my girlfriend, and I was still living there a year later when I read my way through the rest of Jane Austen. It was the summer after my third year in graduate school. I had finished my courses (and yes, completed my language requirements), and now I was studying for the dreaded oral qualifying exams, which I would have to take that fall. It was the ultimate academic endurance test. I had four months to read about a hundred books, and then I’d be shut in a room with four professors who would grill me about them for two hours. It was also a rite of passage. Once I got through it—if I got through it—I’d be one step closer, in professional terms, to growing up and becoming one of those professors myself. (My father, of course, was sure I’d never pass. “You have your work cut out for you!” he said.) As for growing up in any other sense, I still didn’t see that I might have a problem.
I had the place to myself that summer—the second of the business students, a rich preppy from Dartmouth, had cleared out for nicer digs—and I read from the time I got up until the time I went to sleep. I read while I was brushing my teeth, I read while I was eating my ramen noodles, I even read while I was walking down the street (which takes a fair amount of coordination, I discovered). And one of those days, about halfway through the summer, I very suddenly, and very unexpectedly, fell in love.
The object of my infatuation, of course, was Elizabeth Bennet. Why should I have been able to resist the heroine of Pride and Prejudice any better than anyone else? She was the most charming character I had ever met. Brilliant, witty, full of fun and laughter—the kind of person who makes you feel more alive just by being around. When her older sister, Jane, was gushing that a certain new acquaintance was “just what a young man ought to be,” “sensible, good-humoured, lively,” Elizabeth dryly replied, “He is also handsome, which a young man ought likewise to be, if he possibly can.” Yet Elizabeth was also strong and openhearted and brave, the devoted friend who’d protect you like a lioness. When Jane got sick while visiting some wellborn friends at a nearby estate, Elizabeth thought nothing of tramping three miles through the mud to take care of her—and didn’t give a damn if her sister’s friends thought it made her look déclassé to do so.
Like me, Elizabeth had a difficult family to deal with. Jane was a dream—sweet, kind, patient, the perfect confidante. But their three little sisters were impossible. Mary, the middle girl, was a pedantic bore who got all her ideas from books (“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously . . .”). Kitty and Lydia, the youngest two, were empty-headed flirts. Their father was a clever man—I sat up a little straighter every time he opened his mouth, and his relationship with Elizabeth was fun and playful—but he spent most of his energy sparring with their ridiculous mother, an overwrought bundle of foolishness. The two of them were like a long-running comedy act, and all the worse because they knew it. “You take delight in vexing me,” Mrs. Bennet complained. “You have no compassion on my poor nerves.” “You mistake me, my dear,” her husband shot back. “I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these last twenty years at least.”
I also loved the fact that Elizabeth had as little interest in getting married as I did (and with parents like hers, who could blame her?). “If I were determined to get a rich husband,” she remarked at one point, “or any husband . . .” Of course, that didn’t stop her mother from having her own ideas. As the curtain opened, Mrs. Bennet, whose every waking thought was devoted to getting her daughters married, was nagging her husband to introduce himself to Charles Bingley, a wealthy young man who had just moved in to the neighborhood, before the other mothers could get their hands on him.
Soon the sisters had met both him and his even wealthier friend, Mr. Darcy. The two couldn’t have been more different. Bingley was as cheerful and eager as a beagle. “Upon my honour,” he told his friend at the first ball, “I never met with so many pleasant girls in my life as I have this evening.” But Darcy was as haughty as a Siamese cat, practically licking himself clean whenever someone touched him the wrong way. He even had the gall to snub Elizabeth before he had so much as met her. “She is tolerable,” Darcy protested when his friend suggested that he ask her to dance, “but not handsome enough to tempt me”—a statement I took as a personal affront. What kind of idiot would not find Elizabeth Bennet every bit as adorable as I did? The heroine agreed. While her sister and Bingley fell quickly in love (he was the “just what a young man ought to be” whom Jane was gushing about), she wrote Darcy down as an insufferable prig. Soon a third young man arrived who, having known Darcy as a child, confirmed all of her suspicions about his character.
Darcy, meanwhile, viewed Bingley’s courtship with alarm, and he was not one to keep his opinions to himself. Not only was Jane beneath his friend in social terms, but other than herself and Elizabeth, their entire family was unspeakably vulgar. A dance at Bingley’s sealed Jane’s fate. Everyone was there, providing the Bennets with the maximum opportunity to make a spectacle of themselves. Mrs. Bennet crowed loudly about the impending match—“It was, moreover, such a promising thing for her younger daughters, as Jane’s marrying so greatly must throw them in the way of other rich men”—oblivious to the way she was coming across and the fact that the wrong people might be listening. “What is Mr. Darcy to me,” she snorted, when Elizabeth tried to quiet her down, “that I should be afraid of him?” Mary, with more affectation than talent, tried to show off, badly, on the piano. And as for the Bennets’ clergyman cousin, Mr. Collins, one of the greatest fools in literary history, pompous and obsequious at the same time (“I consider the clerical office as equal in point of dignity with the highest rank in the kingdom—provided that a proper humility of behaviour is at the same time maintained”), he committed the unpardonable faux pas of addressing himself to Mr. Darcy without a formal introduction.
Elizabeth cringed at every turn—if “her family made an agreement to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would have been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit or finer success”—and I suffered along with her. Her family was blowing it for Jane, the only one of them, other than Elizabeth herself, who was worth a damn. But it was too late; Darcy had seen enough. He didn’t care, it seemed, that his friend and Jane were in love. The next thing the Bennets knew, the young men were gone, and it looked like they’d never see Bingley again. Jane was crushed. Elizabeth was furious. I wanted to wring Darcy’s neck.
This was a completely different experience than reading Emma, and not just because I’d already become a convert. Emma showed me from the very beginning just how desperately wrong its heroine was. I couldn’t stand her—until Austen showed me how much I resembled her. But here I was, halfway through Pride and Prejudice, and not only was I head over heels for Elizabeth, I agreed with everything she said and every judgment she made. I loved her friends and hated her enemies. I would have taken her side against the world.
But then, as if a switch had been flipped, everything got turned upside down. Elizabeth ran into someone she never expected to see again. He made a declaration she never expected to hear. She lashed out in a fit of resentment. He responded with a long, coolly argued letter that threw all the events of the first half of the novel into a completely different light. She read it once and rejected its claims. She read it again—and suddenly saw she’d been utterly wrong all along.
Because Jane’s love for Bingley was so clear to her, Elizabeth now realized, she’d assumed that it was clear to everyone else. Because her sister was so wonderful, she’d refused to believe, when push came to shove, that their family’s behavior would prevent Jane from marrying well. Because Elizabeth was so proud herself, she’d disdained the pride of others when she found it aimed in her direction. But worst of all, she now saw, was her judgment of character—the very thing on which she most congratulated herself. She had thought that she could read a man the very first time she met him. She had made the mistake of believing that if a young man was affable and friendly, he must be good, and that if he was cold and arrogant and reserved, he must be bad.
But now she saw how completely mistaken she’d been. Her verdict, delivered with all her characteristic bluntness and courage, was uncompromising: “blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.” “How despicably I have acted!” she exclaimed to herself. “I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities!”
But of course, if Elizabeth had been wrong about everything, then so had I. I had made the very same judgments that she had, and I had made them every bit as badly. This was indeed a different experience from reading Emma. That novel had invited me to laugh at its heroine, with all her ridiculous schemes. But this time, the joke was on me.
So enthralled had I been by Elizabeth’s intelligence and charm that I had never once thought to question her. No doubt self-flattery had played a big role there. Austen had seduced me into identifying with her heroine, and I had been only too happy to comply. Now it turned out that if I did indeed resemble her, it was not for the reasons I’d supposed. Elizabeth trusted her judgment way too much—just as I did. She was so much cleverer than everyone she knew except her father—who was always telling her how clever she was—that she imagined that everything she believed must be true, just because she believed it. She didn’t think she needed to give other people a fair hearing. What could they possibly have to say? She already knew everything she needed to know.
The novel’s original title had been First Impressions. Elizabeth was not prejudiced in the modern sense of the word. She didn’t judge people before she met them, because of the group they belonged to. She judged them the moment she met them, because she thought she could already tell everything about them. “First impressions”: it seemed to me now that the phrase did double duty. It referred to the heroine’s tendency to jump to conclusions, and it also pointed to ours, as we put ourselves in her place.
There was a third meaning, too. “First” as in “early”—as in, the things that happen to you when you’re first starting out in life. The novel, I saw, wasn’t finally about prejudice, or pride, or even love. Elizabeth was all of twenty, and her mistakes were errors of youth—the mistakes, precisely, of a person who has never made mistakes, or at least, who has never been forced to acknowledge them. Beneath the polished wit that she flashed at the world like a suit of armor, Elizabeth was still scarcely more than a girl. “If I were determined to get a rich husband, or any husband”: that was the statement, not of someone who knew what she wanted from life, but of someone who hadn’t even started to figure it out. When she had her epiphany—“blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd”—she added a final count to her indictment: “Till this moment I never knew myself.” Darcy’s pride and Elizabeth’s prejudice, his prejudice and her pride: these may have set the plot in motion, but by putting me through Elizabeth’s experiences—by having her make mistakes and learn from them, and having me stumble and learn right there along with her—what the novel was really showing me was how to grow up.
Growing up may be the most remarkable thing that anybody ever does. One day we’re hitting our little brother over the head with a wooden duck, and a few days later we’re running a business, or writing a book, or raising a child of our own. How do we do it? The physical part is easy. A little food, a little exercise, and without ever having to think about it, we gradually find ourselves getting older, and taller, and hairier. But the other part—what about that? We come into the world as a tiny bundle of impulse and ignorance—how do we ever become fit for human company, let alone capable of love?
This, I discovered that summer, was what Jane Austen’s novels were about. Her heroines were sixteen or nineteen or twenty (people married young in those days, especially women). We followed them for a few weeks, or a few months, or a year. They started out in one place, and gradually—or sometimes, quite suddenly—they ended up somewhere else. They opened their eyes, let out a scream, took a few frantic breaths, then settled down and looked around at the strange new world in which they’d come to find themselves. They started out as girls, and day by day, page by page, before our very eyes, they turned into women.
It was the way they did it, though, that came as such a revelation to me. I was used to thinking about growing up in terms of going to school and getting a job: passing tests, gaining admissions, accumulating credentials, acquiring the kinds of knowledge and skills that made you employable—the terms in which my parents (and everyone else, for that matter) had taught me to think about it. If I had been asked to consider what kinds of personal qualities it might involve—which I doubt I ever was—I would have spoken of things like self-confidence and self-esteem. As for anything like character or conduct, who even used such words anymore? Their very sound was harsh to me: so demanding, so inflexible. They made me think of school uniforms, and nuns with rulers, and cold baths on winter mornings—all the terrible things that people used to inflict on their children.
But Austen, it turned out, did not see things that way. For her, growing up has nothing to do with knowledge or skills, because it has everything to do with character and conduct. And you don’t strengthen your character or improve your conduct by memorizing the names of Roman emperors (or American presidents) or learning how to do needlework (or calculus). You don’t do so, she believed, by developing self-confidence and self-esteem, either. If anything, self-confidence and self-esteem are the great enemies, because they make you forget that you’re still just a bundle of impulse and ignorance. For Austen, growing up means making mistakes.
That was the first lesson that Pride and Prejudice taught me. Elizabeth’s errors were not accidents she could have avoided; they were expressions of her character—in fact, of the very best parts of her character, that quickness and confidence for which I loved her so. You don’t “fix” your mistakes, Austen was telling me, as if they somehow existed outside you, and you can’t prevent them from happening, either. You aren’t born perfect and only need to develop the self-confidence and self-esteem with which to express your wondrous perfection. You are born with a whole novel’s worth of errors ahead of you. No, my father couldn’t save me from my mistakes, but maybe my mistakes could save me, from myself.
Elizabeth and I were young, and like most young people, we didn’t see how young we really were. If anything, people in their twenties have the opposite idea about themselves. When he was Elizabeth’s age, T. S. Eliot wrote poems about how terribly, terribly old he felt. It’s that sense, now that your childhood is over, of being ever so jaded and world-weary and wise. You put on a trench coat or dress in black, to show how over it you are. You say “Whatever” a lot, or “Duh!”—because it’s all just so boring and predictable. If you’re Elizabeth Bennet, you swear you’ll never marry, or you declare, about your very biggest mistake, “I beg your pardon;—one knows exactly what to think.”
The amazing thing is just how serene Austen was about this. When most people think back to the way they behaved when they were young, they want to curl up in a ball, and when they see someone acting the same way now, they want to smack them in the head. But Austen observed it all with perfect humor and understanding. She sympathized with it, even though she recognized how foolish it was. But here’s the really incredible thing. When she started working on Pride and Prejudice, she was still only twenty herself.
In writing about Elizabeth’s situation, in other words, she was also writing about her own. Elizabeth loved to dance, and so did her author. Elizabeth loved to read, and so did her creator. Elizabeth loved to walk, and so did Jane Austen. As Elizabeth had Jane, so did Austen have Cassandra, a milder and properer two-years-older sister—confidante, sounding board, best friend—to adore and admire. (“If Cassandra were going to have her head cut off,” their mother once said, “Jane would insist on sharing her fate.”) Most importantly, Austen gave Elizabeth her own qualities of mind: a piercing wit and a wicked sense of humor. Like Elizabeth’s high-wire conversations with Mr. Darcy, Austen’s letters to Cassandra were an opportunity to show off both. Elizabeth said things like, “I am perfectly convinced . . . that Mr. Darcy has no defect. He owns it himself without disguise.” Austen let herself go at greater length. Here she was, dishing the dirt on a ball she’d just attended:
There were very few Beauties, & such as there were, were not very handsome. Miss Iremonger did not look well, & Mrs. Blount was the only one much admired. She appeared exactly as she did in September, with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, & fat neck.—The two Miss Coxes were there; I traced in one the remains of the vulgar, broad featured girl who danced at Enham eight years ago. . . .—I looked at Sir Thomas Champneys & thought of poor Rosalie [a maid who’d caught his eye some years before]; I looked at his daughter & thought her a queer animal with a white neck.—Mrs. Warren, I was constrained to think a very fine young woman, which I much regret. She has got rid of some part of her child, & danced away with great activity, looking by no means very large. Her husband is ugly enough; uglier even than his cousin John; but he does not look so very old.—The Miss Maitlands are both prettyish; very like Anne; with brown skins, large dark eyes, & a good deal of nose.—The General has got the Gout, & Mrs. Maitland the Jaundice.—Miss Debary, Susan & Sally, all in black, . . . made their appearance, & I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow me.
Ouch. But however wickedly she may have laughed at her neighbors in private, Austen went out of her way to protect their feelings when it came to her public behavior. In the very same letter—in fact, the very next thought—she talks of visiting a friend the following Thursday, unless she stays for another ball that night. But, she adds, “If I do not stay for the Ball, I would not on any account do so uncivil a thing by the Neighborhood as to set off at that very time for another place, & shall therefore make a point of not being later than Thursday morning.”
Her sense of humor could be savage, but her heart was generous, and she endowed Elizabeth with that very same balance of wit and warmth. No wonder the heroine of Pride and Prejudice remained her author’s favorite for the rest of her life. “I want to tell you that I have got my own darling Child from London,” she wrote Cassandra upon receiving the first copies of the novel, and it’s not entirely clear if she meant the book or its heroine. “I must confess,” she went on, “that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.”
A few months later, on a trip to London, she searched the galleries for pictures of Elizabeth and Jane. “I was very well pleased,” she wrote Cassandra, having found a painting that matched her mental image of the latter. “I went in hopes of seeing one of her Sister,” she went on, but there was none to be found. “I can only imagine,” she concluded, that Elizabeth’s new husband “prizes any Picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye.—I can imagine he would have that sort of feeling—that mixture of Love, Pride & Delicacy.” It’s a lovely conceit, and it tells us two things. Austen was every bit as enraptured by Elizabeth’s marriage as the heroine was herself, and no painting could measure up to Austen’s image of her. The first person to fall in love with Elizabeth Bennet, it seems, was her creator.
All the more telling, then, that Austen didn’t fool herself into thinking that her offspring was perfect. She knew that Elizabeth had a lot of growing up to do—which means that she recognized that she herself did, too. Indeed, as Austen grew older, her letters lost most of their sharpness and snark. Though she began Pride and Prejudice when she was barely out of her teens, it wasn’t published until she was thirty-seven—First Impressions, the original version, was rejected by a publisher sight unseen, and she didn’t return to it for many years—and by that point her letters made a very different sound than that freeswinging tale of the ball.
“Wisdom is better than Wit,” she told her favorite niece around this time, “& in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.” The niece, Fanny Knight, now twenty-one herself, was trying to decide whether to marry a certain young man, serious and thoughtful but a little wanting in manner and grace. Aunt Jane wasn’t sure: did Fanny love him enough? But one thing she was certain of. “His uncommonly amiable mind, strict principles, just notions, good habits—all that you know so well how to value, All that really is of the first importance—everything of this nature pleads his cause most strongly.” Good character, she was reminding her niece, is more important than liveliness and spirit.
Saying as much, she was watching over Fanny’s own character, just as she had long done with all her brothers’ many children (of whom she would live to see more than two dozen born). She wasn’t a mother herself, but she had a mother’s care for her nieces and nephews—especially Fanny and her siblings, her brother Edward’s children, whose own mother died giving birth to the last. “They behave extremely well in every respect,” she wrote of his two oldest boys, sent from boarding school to be cared for by their aunt and grandmother in the wake of the tragic event, “showing quite as much feeling as one wishes to see, and on every occasion speaking of their father with the liveliest affection.”
Of her brother Charles’s oldest girl, some years later, she was less complimentary: “That puss Cassy, did not shew more pleasure in seeing me than her Sisters, but I expected no better;—she does not shine in the tender feelings.” “Nature has done enough for her—but Method” (i.e., what her parents have done) “has been wanting.” Yet two years later, much of it spent under the guidance of Jane and Cassandra and their mother, little Cassy gave signs of improvement. “Her sensibility seems to be opening to the perception of great actions,” her aunt wrote, and she has become, for her father, “a comfort.” Soon, Austen was looking out for a new generation, her niece Anna’s children. “Jemima has a very irritable bad Temper,” she told a correspondent. “I hope as Anna is so early sensible of its’ defects, that she will give Jemima’s disposition the early & steady attention it must require.”
The emphasis, as it always was when Austen wrote about children, was on character. Not beauty or creativity or even intelligence, but conduct and temperament and the capacity for empathy and feeling. She watched her nieces and nephews grow; she shaped that growth when she could; she knew that it would be a difficult process. Austen understood that kids are going to make mistakes, and she also understood that making mistakes is not the end of the world.
Finally, by reading Pride and Prejudice, I had come to understand it, too. Being right, Austen taught me, might get you a pat on the head, but being wrong could bring you something more valuable. It could help you find out who you are. Still, that wasn’t the whole story. If I only needed to make mistakes, growing up would have been easy. I made mistakes all the time. In fact, I tended to make the same mistakes over and over again, just like Elizabeth. Making mistakes, I learned, was only the first step. Elizabeth’s youngest sister, Lydia, loud, wild, and brazen, made flagrant mistakes all the time, too—yawning in people’s faces, wasting money on trifles, shamelessly flirting with the young officers—and she was clearly never going to grow up. Elizabeth’s mother’s entire life was one long series of embarrassments, blunders, and miscalculations, including the whole way she raised her daughters and went about finding them husbands, yet she remained the same anxious, foolish, self-centered person that she’d always been.
It wasn’t even enough, Austen showed me, to have your mistakes pointed out to you. Our brains are very good at figuring out what to say when people call us out on something that we’ve done. We scurry around like beavers, shoring up the walls of our self-esteem. Who, me? No, you must be wrong. That’s not what I meant. Was it really such a big deal? It was an accident. It’ll never happen again. That was the first time, I swear. Mistake? What mistake?
Austen’s heroines, I discovered that summer, had their mistakes pointed out to them over and over again, only it never did them any good. They didn’t grow up until something terrible finally happened. When maturity came to them, it came through suffering: through loss, through pain, above all, through humiliation. They did something really awful—not just stupid, but unjust and hurtful—and they did it right out in the open, in front of the very person whose opinion they cared about more than anyone else’s. Emma insulted Miss Bates in the most callous fashion. Elizabeth leveled a whole series of mistaken accusations. And then someone forced them to see, in a way that they could not deny, just how very badly they had acted.
These were not easy scenes to read. They were almost as painful for me as they were for the heroines themselves. I grieved for these young women, because they were, at the moment of their humiliation, so very, very exposed. At first, all that most of them could do was burst into tears. Elizabeth was luckier. She learned the truth by letter, so at least she could be alone with her feelings. But the revelation of her many errors, when she finally did let it in, was no less crushing. She had been wrong about Jane, she had been wrong about her family, she had been wrong about everything. “Blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd”: that wasn’t just an intellectual judgment; it was a feeling that burned to the core. “How humiliating is this discovery!” she exclaimed to herself, “Yet, how just a humiliation!” And it was then, and only then, that she made her climactic discovery: “Till this moment I never knew myself.”
In drama, this is known as the moment of recognition. Oedipus discovers his horrible crime. King Lear understands how terribly he has wronged his youngest daughter. Fortunately, the errors that Elizabeth made were neither so dire nor so final. Pride and Prejudice was a comedy, after all, not a tragedy, as stories about young people, who have time to correct their mistakes, usually are. But at that moment, after she had come to her awful knowledge, a tragedy was exactly what it looked as if the novel might become. Elizabeth not only saw how badly she had acted, she realized what it had cost her. A great happiness had been within her grasp, she now understood, and pride and prejudice had made her fling it away.
None of us, I knew, would ever wish this on ourselves, let alone on our children. But if we are lucky, Austen was telling me, it will happen nonetheless. Because my father was wrong: you can’t learn from other people’s mistakes; you can only learn from your own. Austen was making her beloved Elizabeth miserable because she knew that that’s what growing up requires. For it is never enough to know that you have done wrong: you also have to feel it.
If there was ever a time that I felt it, it was that very summer. The truth is that Elizabeth Bennet was not the only woman I was in love with then. I was also in the throes of a gigantic crush on a woman I had met that spring. I was twenty-eight, she was twenty-one—the ages, come to think of it, of a hero and heroine in a Jane Austen novel. She was just graduating from college, and my feelings for her were an agonized confusion of desire and protectiveness. She was lovely and gentle and smart, with a slow smile that seemed to light up from within and an ironic sense of humor that came out with a raucous laugh. Our friendship flared up fast and bright. Here was someone, I saw, who could be a true companion.
My life got very simple that summer. My exams and her were the only things in it. Sharpening my brain against those hundred books, and wringing my heart for the want of her. The two ran together. She became my muse, my goal, the face that I saw when I looked through the page. Spending time in her company was the one exception I made to my rule of monastic seclusion. We would walk around the city, talking for hours about art and ideas and all the people we knew. We went to museums, we went to the theater, we would joke and compare notes and trade observations.
But none of it was any good. Because reliably, pretty much every time we got together, I would manage to say something idiotic and hurtful: pretentious or sexist or condescending. “Notice the way Matisse plays with color” (as if I were some kind of audio guide), or, “You should really read some more Freud” (though she’d probably read more than I had), or, “You’ll understand these things when you get to be my age” (my age! all of twenty-eight!). It was a kind of compulsion. Reading Emma had helped me to become more aware of the people around me and how I affected them, and it certainly enabled me to become less callous and mean, and yet still, like Elizabeth, I thought I was just so damn smart that I couldn’t stop myself from giving the rest of the world the benefit of my wisdom. My ego was so wrapped up in feeling superior that I had to parade it even (or maybe especially) to the person I loved. And every time I did, she would just look at me, wary but brave, and let me know what a complete jerk I was being. And every single time, I wanted to sink into the ground. Because I had blown it again; now, I thought, she would never want to be with me.
And in fact, she never did. She was my friend, but she never became my girlfriend. Yet the shame of it all, and the grief at what it had cost me, burned those lessons into my brain. She wasn’t the first person to tell me I was arrogant and condescending—far, far from it—but because she mattered so much more to me than anyone ever had, she was the first to get through.
So when, after a couple of months of this, I read Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s experiences made perfect sense to me—or I should say made perfect sense of me, of what I had been going through. Our egos, Austen was telling me, prevent us from owning up to our errors and flaws, and so our egos must be broken down—exactly what humiliation does, and why it makes us feel so worthless. “Humiliation,” after all, comes from “humility.” It humbles us, makes us properly humble. So just as Pride and Prejudice taught me that it’s okay to make mistakes, it also told me that it’s okay to feel bad about them. Austen understood that growing up hurts—that it has to hurt, because otherwise it won’t happen. And if it was too late, by the time I read the novel, to have the kind of happy ending that Elizabeth eventually did, it made me see that growing up can be a kind of happy ending in itself. Or at least, the promise of one to come.
Shame, humiliation, disgrace: hard feelings to accept if you’ve been brought up to believe that you should never have to experience any pain. In fact, Austen provided a perfect example of the kind of young person who doesn’t accept them—Lydia Bennet, Elizabeth’s youngest sister—and what can happen as a result. Because Lydia was exactly like her mother—it was all too easy to imagine the empty-headed flirt that Mrs. Bennet must once have been—she had always been overindulged: never criticized, never restrained, coddled and fussed over no matter what she did. It was a classic case of overidentification: the mother eager to hold on to the last remnants of her youth by reliving it through her youngest daughter, the daughter only too happy to comply.
By the time she turned fifteen, Lydia was completely unmanageable. Always loud, always laughing, always flirting, never taking anything seriously—never taking her own life seriously. She was an embarrassment, and when she finally did something truly disgraceful, she became more than an embarrassment; she became a scandal. Yet there she was at the end of the novel, still laughing, still perfectly pleased with herself. “I am sure my sisters must all envy me,” she somehow managed to say, though her sisters probably wanted to drown her in a lake. “I only hope they may have half my good luck.” No matter how much pain she caused her family, Lydia was never going to feel the slightest bit of discomfort herself.
No suffering, no growth—and no recollection, no suffering. We have to see what we’ve done, we have to feel it, and finally, we have to remember it. Even after her disgrace, Lydia seemed to have “the happiest memories in the world. Nothing of the past was recollected with pain.” Why was she able to have so clear a conscience about the things she’d done? Because she just pretended that they never happened. Nor was she the only one; the Bennets’ whole social circle was no better. After they discovered the awful truth about a young gentleman with whom they had all been delighted, “every body declared that he was the wickedest young man in the world; and every body began to find out, that they had always distrusted the appearance of his goodness.” It takes courage, Austen was telling us, to admit your mistakes, and even more courage to remember them.
How tempting it is to rewrite our personal history in a more flattering way, and how familiar we all are with the person who experiences a moment of self-knowledge—after a breakup or a failure or a sin—only to go right back to being the same person they always were. For Austen, maturation means refusing to forget. Humiliation, for her, is a gift that keeps on giving. “Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure,” Elizabeth remarked at the end of the novel, but as usual, she was being ironic. In fact, she said it to the very person who she knew would keep her honest by continuing to point out her mistakes and remind her of what she had done.
Elizabeth had come to understand, at last, what growing up means, and she had also come to recognize that if you do it right, it never stops. Not only wasn’t I born perfect, in other words, I was never going to be perfect, either. Becoming an adult was not going to give me the right to become complacent. Again, Austen offered a perfect example of what not to do. Elizabeth’s father was a good man who had allowed his character to go to seed by choosing a wife who was never going to be able to challenge him, someone to whom it was far too easy to feel superior. Living with a woman like Mrs. Bennet had made him self-satisfied and morally lazy, and his children suffered as a result. He could have done a lot more to make his daughters financially secure, and when the great crisis came for his family, he turned out to be pretty much useless. If I was going to keep growing, Austen was telling me, I needed to stay on my toes. Fortunately, I had something to help me do so that Elizabeth and her father didn’t. I had Pride and Prejudice.
Jane Austen was about a year old when another English author wrote a statement that could serve as a motto for all her books. “Life is a comedy for those who think,” said Horace Walpole, “and a tragedy for those who feel.” Everyone thinks, and everyone feels, but Jane Austen’s question was, which are you going to put first? Comedies are stories with happy endings. I could grow up and find happiness, Austen was letting me know, but only if I was willing to give up something very important. Not my feelings, but my belief in my feelings, my conviction that they were always right.
This was not easy to swallow. We tend to believe that our emotions are reliable indicators of the way things are in the world. How many times have you heard someone say, “I have a good feeling about this”—a college application, a lottery ticket, a new relationship—only to discover that things don’t necessarily work out just because we have a good feeling about them? Older relatives are particularly fond of these kinds of pronouncements. “I know you’ll do well.” “I can’t imagine they won’t hire you.” “I’m sure everything will work out fine.” Really? You’re sure? What makes you so sure? Just because you happen to like me?
This was exactly Elizabeth’s problem, I realized, as Pride and Prejudice began. She thought she was right because she felt she was right. Mr. Darcy offended her, so he must be a terrible man. Her sister Jane was lovable, so how could anyone not want his friend to marry her? Elizabeth thought she was thinking, but she was really only feeling—resentment, affection, desire—and her great intelligence made her more susceptible to this delusion, not less. Only later did she realize, after the humiliating recognition of her many mistakes, that head and heart can disagree, and that when they do, the head should win.
This was the conflict that Austen expressed in the title of her very first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, and embodied in its two main characters. Elinor Dashwood was sensible; her little sister Marianne was full of sensibility or feeling. Early in the book, the two had an argument that laid out the matter very squarely. “I am afraid,” Elinor said, rebuking Marianne for having gone about unchaperoned with a young man, “that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.” The fact that something feels good, in other words, does not make it right. “On the contrary,” Marianne replied, “nothing can be a stronger proof of it . . . if there had been any real impropriety in what I did, I should have been sensible of it at the time, for we always know when we are acting wrong.”
We always know when we are acting wrong: how simple life would be if only that were true. Marianne was a romantic, in both senses. She believed that love is more important than anything else, and certainly more important than what her straitlaced older sister thought was proper. And she was also a devotee of the Romantic movement that was sweeping the West in Austen’s day. Austen viewed that movement with alarm precisely because of what it said about the proper relationship between feeling and reason. Romanticism taught that society and its conventions are confining and artificial and destructive, and that reason was simply another one of those conventions, not a source of truth. It taught that the real source of truth was Nature, and that if we only followed the nature within us—our spontaneous impulses and feelings—we would be good and happy and free. A romantic is someone who thinks that if their heart is in the right place, it doesn’t matter where their brain is. That was what Marianne meant: that our emotions are a moral compass that can never steer us wrong. If something is pleasant, it must be proper. If it feels good, it is good.
In terms of cultural history, Austen was fighting a losing battle. The Romantic idea gave rise to almost all the great art of the last two centuries. It gave us Wordsworth and Byron, Whitman and Thoreau, modern dance, expressionist painting, Beat poetry, and much, much more. It has set the terms for the way we think and feel ever since the time of Austen, and in particular, for the way we think and feel about thinking and feeling. The most important word in popular music today is not “love,” it’s “I.” And the second most important is “wanna.” Popular music is one giant shout of desire, one great rallying cry for freedom and pleasure. Pop psychology sends us the same signals, and so does advertising. “Trust your feelings,” we are told. “Listen to your heart.” “If it feels good, do it.”
These can be the right lessons to learn at a certain point in life. They certainly were for me. I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community: there were a lot of restrictions, a lot of rules. Don’t eat pork. Don’t play music on the Sabbath. Don’t go out with non-Jewish girls. Don’t stray outside the bounds of the group. Every action was prescribed by an ancient tradition, every choice circumscribed by the values of a tight-knit community. Keep your head covered. Say your prayers three times a day. Get A’s, go to a good college, make your parents proud. Learning that my feelings mattered—learning to figure out what my feelings were in the first place—was extremely liberating as I got older. I needed to realize that I could do what I wanted with my life and that I could do it just because I wanted to. Accepting that my emotions were valid and important and morally significant—that they should have a bearing on how I act—was a crucial part, at that point, of growing up.
Some of Austen’s heroines had to learn this lesson, too. They were inexperienced and needed to discover their feelings, or they were neglected and needed to stand up for them. But Elizabeth and Emma and Marianne had already figured out how to do those things. They trusted their gut. They listened to their heart. If it felt good, they did it. Their problem, like that of so many young people, was that they had too great a belief in their own feelings. They had achieved the relative autonomy of adolescence—learning to trust yourself—but now they had to take the next step, into the full autonomy of adulthood. They needed to learn to doubt themselves.
And that was what Elizabeth finally did. That was what happened when she read the letter that overturned her beliefs—and why she had to read it twice. Its arguments—its infuriatingly rational arguments—flew in the face of her feelings, and the first time through, her feelings rebelled. But the second time, her honesty forced her to listen—forced her to think. By telling us Elizabeth’s story, I saw, Austen was calling us to do something very difficult, something that violates our instincts and intuitions. But of course it does. She was telling us, precisely, to question our instincts and intuitions. She wanted us to override our emotions, which dwell within us and urge us to do what we want, and replace them with reason—with logic, with evidence, with objectivity—which stands outside us and doesn’t care what we want.
Learning this lesson was oddly liberating. Just because I thought that another person had done something to me, I was now forced to acknowledge, didn’t mean that I was right. I might be offended by something they had said, but maybe I’d misunderstood them. I might be mad because they were getting ugly with me, but maybe I had started it. Feelings are always about something, and that “something” is not itself a feeling. It’s an idea, a perception of a situation, just as Elizabeth’s feelings were based on her perceptions of certain situations. Everyone could see that Jane loved Bingley; Elizabeth’s family wasn’t really all that bad; Mr. Darcy was insufferably proud: these were the perceptions, the ideas, on which her feelings were based, and they all turned out to be wrong. And because ideas can be wrong, the emotions that are based on them can also be wrong. So now I had a way to let go of my feelings when they weren’t legitimate—when they weren’t correct. I could acknowledge my emotions, but I didn’t have to be controlled by them.
Needless to say, not everybody wants to hear that their feelings aren’t necessarily valid. In fact, a lot of people hate Jane Austen for just that reason. They see her as cold and prudish, a schoolmarm and killjoy. In graduate school, we split into two camps over the question—Jane Austen, pro or con—and emotions ran high. At a certain point, we were each expected to teach a class that included one nineteenth-century novel. Now, there are a lot of great nineteenth-century novels, but almost all of us chose one of only two: Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre. It may seem like a small matter, but great issues were felt to be at stake (as they always are in graduate school). The decision wasn’t just a pedagogical choice, it was a statement of faith, a declaration of self, for the books represented the strongest possible expressions of two diametrically opposed views of life.
In Pride and Prejudice, reason triumphs over feeling and will. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë’s own typically Romantic coming-of-age story, emotion and ego overcome all obstacles. Those of us who chose Pride and Prejudice couldn’t imagine how you could stand to read anything as immature and overwrought as Jane Eyre. Those who chose Jane Eyre couldn’t believe that you would subject your students to something as stuffy and insipid as Pride and Prejudice. Our choices, of course, reflected our personalities. The Brontë people, we Austenites felt, tended to go in for self-dramatization and ideological extremism. We regarded ourselves as a cooler, more ironic bunch.
Brontë herself, in a letter to a friend, articulated the indictment against her illustrious predecessor:
She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well; she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood; even to the feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition. Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through—this Miss Austen ignores.
But Austen did not ignore the feelings—Elizabeth and her story were full of them—and she certainly knew about the passions. Lydia was nothing but the passions, and Elizabeth was tossed by her share as well. “How despicably I have acted!” was not the declaration of a passionless person. Austen valued the feelings and passions; she just didn’t think we should worship them.
Yet my Brontëan peers rejected the older novelist for a deeper reason as well, one that Brontë herself would not have understood. To assert that reason should govern emotion is to defy the modern dogma that the two cannot be disentangled in the first place. In the past hundred years, Freud and others have brought us to the view that objectivity is an illusion, that our rational conclusions are merely manifestations of hidden impulses or covert expressions of self-interest—above all, when it comes to ideas regarding our own conduct and judgment, which is, of course, what Jane Austen’s novels are about.
But Austen didn’t buy it. In the letter that changed Elizabeth’s mind about everything, her correspondent had this to say about whether Jane had seemed indifferent to Bingley’s attentions: “That I was desirous of believing her indifferent is certain—but I will venture to say that my investigations and decisions are not usually influenced by my hopes or fears. I did not believe her to be indifferent because I wished it;—I believed it on impartial conviction.” The first half of this, with its smug tone, might strike us as insufferable, and the second might strike us as improbable, but Austen meant us to accept it all. “Impartial conviction”—the ability to think our way above our limited point of view—was a real human possibility for her, and the person who wrote that letter was capable of it. For Elizabeth, growing up meant learning to become capable of it, too.
By making mistakes, and recognizing her mistakes, and testing her impulses against the claims of logic, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice learned the most important lesson of all. She learned that she wasn’t the center of the universe. Growing up, for her creator, means coming to see yourself from the outside, as one very limited person. This was Austen’s vision of redemption, just as the moment of humiliation—that excruciating scene of exposure—was Austen’s vision of grace.
In the terms in which both comedies and tragedies have been understood since the time of Aristotle, Pride and Prejudice pivoted on a pair of twinned events: a recognition and a reversal. The heroine saw something—about herself, about her actions—and as a result, her fortune changed. But Austen also altered the traditional pattern in an enormously profound way. In the classic comic plot, a pair of young lovers are kept apart by some external obstacle, some “blocking figure” that represents the eternal antagonism of age and youth: a possessive father, a jealous old husband, the laws and customs of an antiquated, repressive society. Austen changed everything by putting that obstacle on the inside. Now we ourselves are the blocking figures who are causing us so much trouble. We are the ones standing in the way of our own happiness. Once Elizabeth was ready to be happy, it didn’t matter what any of the grown-ups thought. For Austen, reason is liberation, and growing up is the truest freedom of all.
So it was with me. Early that fall, after a summer spent reading like I had a gun to my head and a final night of sleepless terror, I crept into the examination room to face my inquisitors and staggered out two hours later having passed my qualifying exams. Afterward, one of the professors—that Clark Gable lookalike with the cigarette voice—asked me if I had plans to get started on my dissertation.
“I think I need to take it easy for a while,” I said.
“That’s a good idea,” he replied. “You should let your mind lie fallow.”
“Lie fallow?” I said. “Lie prostrate.”
But the truth is, I did have a plan. After reading my way through Jane Austen’s stories about growing up, I decided that the time had come for me to do a little growing up of my own. I could no longer stay in that dingy room, with those random roommates, in that neighborhood where I had spent almost all of my life since I was seventeen. Most importantly, I could no longer live in my father’s shadow. A lot of my friends had moved downtown by that point, or out to Brooklyn, and I decided I was going to join them. I would find my own place, I would get some real furniture, and I would finally learn how to live on my own.
My father took me to lunch the next day—at the faculty club this time, by way of celebration. As we ate our baked salmon, I told him about the exam, but the mood turned sour when I explained what I planned to do next. He didn’t like it one bit. “It’s going to cost you a lot more!” he warned. That wasn’t really true. It was going to cost me more, but not a lot more. Besides, his answer was to pull some strings to get me a better place within university housing—rushing in to solve the problem once again, or what he wanted to think was the problem—which would have cost me just as much.
In any case, money wasn’t the point. He sensed, even if he couldn’t say it, what the real point was. By moving away from the neighborhood, I was moving away from him, and that’s exactly what he was trying to head off. Brooklyn? What was Brooklyn? Brooklyn was where he lived when he came over before the war. It was the place you got out of, not the one you went back to. Why would anyone want to move out there?
But I knew why. Moving to Brooklyn might turn out to be a huge mistake, but if so, it was a mistake that I was going to make on my own. I was tired of being infantilized, tired of being afraid: afraid to fail, afraid to disappoint him by failing. I had had enough of our old drama of criticism and defiance, protection and rebellion. I was ready for a new chapter. Like Elizabeth Bennet, I had found my freedom.