Read Online A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz - Free Book Online

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