A Jane Austen Education(51)

I saw this kind of thing all the time back then—friends who thought they were looking after your happiness when they were really just trying to protect their own. People pressuring you to break up with someone they didn’t like, or stay together with someone they did. People wanting you to get married already, like they had, or stay single, because they didn’t want to be the last ones left alone. I’m sure I did that sort of thing myself. There’s nothing deliberate about it, as Austen knew; it just takes a lot of self-awareness, as well as a lot of generosity, to remove your own desires from the equation.

The couple who introduced me to the private-school crowd, needless to say, did not possess a great deal of either. “Thank God that’s over!” they said when I told them about a certain new relationship—“that” being my long string of romantic failures, the source of all those funny stories I used to entertain them with. However kindly it was meant, the statement came to exert an unmistakable pressure, as the months went by and the relationship soured, to stay coupled up. “That” was supposed to be over; I couldn’t disappoint them by going back to “that.” And when I did finally break off the relationship, their response, while undoubtedly well intentioned, was not exactly consoling. “We’re just sorry that there won’t ever be any little Billys running around.” Wait—ever? You mean you’re closing the books on me? It sure sounded like they were—like I had proved to them, for once and for all, just how completely hopeless I was.





True friendship, like true love, was pretty rare in Austen’s view. “Here and there, human nature may be great in times of trial,” said a character in Persuasion, “but generally speaking . . . it is selfishness and impatience rather than generosity and fortitude, that one hears of. There is so little real friendship in the world!” The person who made that statement, a Mrs. Smith, had had a difficult life. She had traveled, Anne reflected, “among that part of mankind which made her think worse of the world than she hoped it deserved”—that is, than Anne hoped it deserved. But that was all that she could do—hope. She knew that Mrs. Smith, who “had lived very much in the world,” had seen a great deal more of life than had the sheltered heroine herself. And after all, her new acquaintance with the people of the navy notwithstanding, her own experience offered precious little with which to dispute the other woman’s views.

Yet Anne’s relationship with Mrs. Smith turned out to be one of those rare, true friendships itself. The two had known each other at the boarding school where Anne was sent in the wake of her mother’s death, “grieving for the loss of a mother whom she had dearly loved, feeling her separation from home, and suffering as a girl of fourteen, of strong sensibility and not high spirits, must suffer at such a time.” The future Mrs. Smith, three years older, “had shewn her kindness, . . . had been useful and good to her in a way which had considerably lessened her misery.” Usefulness and kindness—those same standards of human decency that Austen had championed in Mansfield Park, and that mattered to her more than all the wit in the world.

Now it was the turn of Mrs. Smith to need some kindness. Having lost her husband, her money, and even the use of her legs, she was living, when Anne rediscovered her, in a couple of dark, comfortless rooms with scarcely a soul even to help her get from one to the other. Sir Walter couldn’t believe his ears when he got wind of the fact that his daughter had taken to seeing such a person. “‘Westgate Buildings!’ said he; ‘and who is Miss Anne Elliot to be visiting in Westgate Buildings? A Mrs. Smith. A widow Mrs. Smith. . . . And what is her attraction? That she is old and sickly. Upon my word, Miss Anne Elliot, you have the most extraordinary taste!’”

But the truest act of friendship belonged, in the end, to Mrs. Smith herself. She knew something, it turned out: something about someone very close to Anne, something that all the rules of propriety—and far more important, something that her own dire self-interest—dictated that she not reveal. Yet Anne’s own welfare did dictate that she reveal it. Mrs. Smith was no saint. She struggled with what to do. She had very few hopes of improving her wretched situation in life, and by revealing what she knew, she would destroy the newest and the best of them. It would have been far better for her if she had simply kept her mouth shut. But she took a deep breath, and she said what she had to say.




Putting your friend’s welfare before your own: that was Austen’s idea of true friendship. That means admitting when you’re wrong, but even more importantly, it means being willing to tell your friend when they are. It took me a long time to wrap my head around that notion, because it flew so strongly in the face of what we believe about friendship today. True friendship, we think, means unconditional acceptance and support. The true friend validates your feelings, takes your side in every argument, helps you feel good about yourself at all times, and never, ever judges you. But Austen didn’t believe that. For her, being happy means becoming a better person, and becoming a better person means having your mistakes pointed out to you in a way that you can’t ignore. Yes, the true friend wants you to be happy, but being happy and feeling good about yourself are not the same things. In fact, they can sometimes be diametrically opposed. True friends do not shield you from your mistakes, they tell you about them: even at the risk of losing your friendship—which means, even at the risk of being unhappy themselves.