A Jane Austen Education(30)

My professor and I were having another one of those conversations when the subject turned to Austen again, her ideas about mentors and maturation. “Austen is saying that it’s important to spend time with extraordinary people,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “So that’s what I advise you to do: spend time with extraordinary people.”





I had come to graduate school with a very different idea about what it means to get an education. It was an idea that derived from my father. Here was a man who had earned three university degrees, spoke six languages, and had taught himself all about classical music and European art and Western history—a man who equated being educated with knowing things, knowing facts. And the purpose of knowing things, in a strangely circular way, was simply to “be” educated, to be able to pride yourself on being a “man of culture” (and feel superior to those who weren’t). Knowledge, culture, ego. Mine was a household, growing up, where it was understood that there were certain things one “ought to know,” where “having heard of” Brahms or Giotto was considered a virtue in itself—even if one didn’t know any more about them than that one was a composer, the other a painter—and where one encounter was considered equivalent to “knowing” (or as my father would have put it, “being acquainted with”) a work of art.

My father had never been very keen on literature—it was just stories, after all; he preferred books that gave you real information—but he began to show an interest once I started graduate school, as a way of sharing the experience. When I took a course on Ben Jonson, he read a biography of the playwright, though not any of his actual plays. When I took a course on Shakespeare, I suggested that he might at least try some of those. “I’ve read them already,” he said. “When I was in my twenties.” And indeed he had, by buying a Complete Works, starting at the beginning, and reading until he had gotten to the end. Another “ought to know” checked off the list.

Knowledge, culture, ego. Even if my notion of what it meant to know a work of art or literature had become more strenuous than my father’s, that was still pretty much the formula I was working with until well into my time in graduate school—as my freshman English students, not to mention the woman I was in love with the summer that I studied for my orals, as well as the one I was going out with when I first read Emma, could readily attest. But now I was learning a new idea, and learning it with the help of that other “father,” the one I’d been so nervous about getting too close to when I took him up on the apartment. It was a new idea about education, but it was also a new idea about being a man—“of culture” or otherwise. You didn’t have to be certain, I now saw, to be strong, and you didn’t have to dominate people to earn their respect. Real men weren’t afraid to admit that they still had things to learn—not even from a woman.





For it was Austen, of course, who had ultimately taught me these new ideas about knowledge and education. While she had no patience with ignorance and valued characters who had “information” and “conversation”—people who knew what was going on in the world and could talk about it intelligently—she ridiculed the emphasis, in both the education of children and the self-education of adults, on the mere acquisition of facts. Elizabeth Bennet’s sister Mary wasn’t just pedantic; she was also dense.

“What say you, Mary?” her father teased her at one point.

“For you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books and make extracts.”

Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.



As for formal education as it existed in Austen’s day—of which there was in any case precious little to be had by girls—she had this to say in a short poem titled “On the Universities”:No wonder that Oxford and Cambridge profound

In Learning and Science so greatly abound

Since some carry thither a little each day

And we meet with so few that bring any away.





When Cassandra visited some friends at a nearby estate, her sister included this bit of invective in one of her letters:Ladies who read those enormous great stupid thick Quarto Volumes, which one always sees in the Breakfast parlour there, must be acquainted with everything in the World.—I detest a Quarto.—Capt. Pasley’s Book is too good for their Society. They will not understand a Man who condenses his Thoughts into an Octavo.





Quartos were large-format volumes reserved for books that took themselves very seriously; octavos were half the size and much less pretentious. As for Captain Pasley’s work, Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, Austen called it “a book which I protested against at first, but which upon trial I find delightfully written & highly entertaining”—evidence both that she was no stranger to serious works of nonfiction and that she judged whether a book was likely to tell her anything valuable by the way it was written. Her problem with quartos was not their subject matter but their ponderous prose, their “thickness” in both senses.

Of course, the kind of books she valued most were novels. This was not a fashionable position—novels were considered too trivial and feminine—but she defended it without apology. Writing to Cassandra about a new library that was about to open in the neighborhood (libraries were private businesses at the time and charged a subscription fee), she noted that:As an inducement to subscribe Mrs. Martin tells us that her Collection is not to consist only of Novels, but of every kind of Literature etc. etc.—She might have spared this pretension to our family, who are great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so;—but it was necessary I suppose to the self-consequence of half her Subscribers.