A Jane Austen Education

Title: A Jane Austen Education
Author: William Deresiewicz
Pub Date: 2011
Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
Nutshell: A young man learns that some of life's most important lessons can be found in the works of Jane Austen

I picked this up on a whim while wandering the college library and read it in one afternoon. It's a small book, with a chapter devoted to Jane Austen's six major novels: Emma, Pride & Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Persuasion and Sense & Sensibility. A hardcore modernist, Deresiewicz encounters Jane in graduate school and comes to realize that many of the lessons he most needs to learn in life are present in these supposedly "girly" and "inconsequential" works of fiction. Of course, loves of Jane Austen don't necessarily need to be told this, but many Austenites are females and so it's interesting to hear a guy's perception of what these books mean.

Probably it's a bit too neat to boil each novel down to one overarching life lesson. I don't necessarily think that Austen was trying to have a moral to every story--she was writing in part to help pay the bills, after all, and if she had wanted to be moralizing she certainly could have been heavier with it. Such was the age. But this is a critique of English lit after all, and I at least enjoyed his interpretations more than the overheated analytic hoo-ha I myself had to endure during my own graduate school experience. 

There are no great revelations in this book to my mind, but it was at least an interesting insight into Austen and what one guy feels she was trying to get at with her work. Deresiewicz himself comes across as fairly likable, naive, young, willing to learn in the end. If the life events that coincide with the books are maybe a bit too on-the-nose for my liking, that certainly isn't an argument that they didn't happen, or that the way he tells his narrative isn't effective. This isn't just a book for Austenites -- it's almost a self-help personal growth sort of book, about becoming an adult in a world where many of us have a great deal of trouble ever figuring out how to grow up.