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

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,