A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that Janeites will read anything about Jane Austen – and it’s also a truth universally acknowledged that this opening ‘bit’ is wildly overused. Sorry about that. Anyway, I can’t remember exactly where I heard about A Jane Austen Education (2011) by William Deresiewicz, but I was delighted when my friend Malie got it for my birthday last year. It seemed like the right sort of book for all this *gestures at world* – and I was sucked in straight away by this opening paragraph:

I was twenty-six, and about as dumb, in all human things, as any twenty-six-year-old has a right to be, when I met the woman who would change my life. That she’d been dead for a couple of hundred years made not the slightest difference whatsoever. Her name was Jane Austen, and she would teach me everything I know about everything that matters.

It’s rare to find a man writing a non-academic book about Austen, and Deresiewicz certainly owns up to some masculine prejudice at the outset. He was a graduate student at an American university, doing a six-year PhD programme. Apparently specialising comes quite late in the day in American PhDs, so the first years were spent covering a lot of literary ground – and that included reading Jane Austen. Deresiewicz was much more concerned with the big men of American fiction, and didn’t want to bother with the quiet manners that he perceived he’d find in Austen. Starting with Emma.

At first, he hates it. He hates Emma’s poor decision making and small world. Still more, he hates the boring Miss Bates and the interminable Mr Woodhouse. But he gradually realised that they were meant to be boring and interminable – and a whole lot more than that too, of course. It is the famous Box Hill scene that finally changed this mind.

And that was when I finally understood what Austen had been up to all along. Emma’s cruelty, which I was so quick to criticise, was nothing, I saw, but the mirror image of my own. The boredom and contempt that the book aroused were not signs of Austen’s ineptitude; they were the exact responses she wanted me to have. She had incited them, in order to expose them. By creating a heroine who felt exactly as I did, and who behaved precisely as I would have in her situation, she was showing me my own ugly face. I couldn’t deplore Emma’s disdain for Miss Bates, or her boredom with the whole commonplace Highbury world, without simultaneously condemning my own.

This passage does also reveal one of the few issues I had with A Jane Austen Education – that Deresiewicz leans a little too heavily on the idea of discovering ‘the’ point that Austen was trying to make, rather than landing on one particular interpretation. His moments of revelation are nuanced and intriguing – like Northanger Abbey helping him realise he should ask better questions, or Mansfield Park making him a better listener – but I wish he had more openly recognised that there is no singular conclusion that can come from any novel. As a PhD in literature, he surely knows this full well.

Through the book, each of Austen’s novels gets a chapter – his reading of the book going alongside his own life, including failed relationships (romantic and otherwise), stalled academic work, and a difficult engagement with his father who wanted a different career path for his son. I love books that interweave the personal and the interpretive. This has become increasingly the way that creative non-fiction is written, and I think it has enriched the genre no end; A Jane Austen Education is perhaps most similar to Nell Stevens’ wonderful Mrs Gaskell and Me, though without a particularly biographical slant to his writing. I would have welcomed even more autobiography, but he is excellent at intertwining literary criticism and self revelation. I’d love to know more suggestions in this genre.

Over the course of the book, Deresiewicz goes from an Austen sceptic to regarding her as his favourite author – and the reader, who probably started far further down that spectrum, can forgive him his early hesitancy. I loved seeing his unusual perspectives on the novel, learning about him, and marvelling again at the way that Austen speaks across the centuries in a way that very few other authors have managed or are likely to manage. And, like all of Austen’s heroines, Deresiewicz’s journey through A Jane Austen Education isn’t in learning more about literature or the people around him – it’s a journey to better understand himself, and start changing where he needs to change.

14 thoughts on “A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz

  • February 15, 2021 at 10:04 am
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    Ooh this sounds excellent. I don’t like TOO much of the author’s life in non-fiction books, esp if it seems bolted on (Simon Barnes’ On the Marsh is a great example where it works) but this sounds just right.

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    • February 16, 2021 at 6:07 pm
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      Yeah, I hope you’ll find enough to enjoy here – it’s definitely more about the books than about him.

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  • February 15, 2021 at 4:16 pm
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    I’m intrigued. Definitely intrigued enough to hunt this out. Thanks!

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    • February 16, 2021 at 6:07 pm
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      Brilliant, hope you enjoy!

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  • February 15, 2021 at 5:59 pm
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    I loved this one and think it’s among the best of the recent Austen books out there. I read it shortly after it was released but it’s stuck with me since then.

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    • February 16, 2021 at 6:06 pm
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      There are SO many Austen books that I get quite snowblind

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  • February 15, 2021 at 6:22 pm
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    Rather ironically, I’ve read as many of these sorts of ‘discovering Austen’ books as I’ve read novels by Austen herself! (All Roads Lead to Austen by Amy Elizabeth Smith & Among the Janeites by Deborah Yaffe / Mansfield Park & Pride and Prejudice) I know you enjoyed All The Lives We Ever Lived by Katharine Smyth. Somewhat similar books I’d recommend are The Possessed by Elif Batuman and The Road to Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead.

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    • February 16, 2021 at 6:03 pm
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      Oo I don’t know those two Austen books – but I do have the Mead and Batuman waiting on my shelves!

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  • February 15, 2021 at 8:05 pm
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    I just finished a book about Jane Austen but that means I have a spot on my TBR shelf for another one. This sounds like just the thing.

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    • February 16, 2021 at 6:02 pm
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      Perfect! There can never be enough.

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    • February 16, 2021 at 6:01 pm
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      Interesting, why?

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  • February 17, 2021 at 11:44 pm
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    I checked his acknowledgements to see if he mentioned who his mentor was. I was pleased to find out that said mentor was Ursula K. LeGuin’s brother!

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    • February 23, 2021 at 12:31 am
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      Oh, fun!

      Reply

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