The 12 Days of Books – Day 8 – The Write Teacher(s)

The eighth book of Christmas is A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz.

A few years ago, I read Excellent Sheep by Deresiewicz and had mixed feelings about his opinions. That book was about the current structure of post-secondary education in the United States and Deresiewicz’s proposals to reform the system. I agreed with him on most of the problems, but disagreed with most of his solutions.

I say all of this because, in Excellent Sheep, he used Middlemarch to illustrate a lot of his points. Middlemarch is one of my favorite books and I was thrilled to find another person who was so enthusiastic about Eliot’s work. However, I disagreed with his analysis of the main character. When I picked up A Jane Austen Education, I fully anticipated that I would disagree with the majority of his opinions.

I was way off.

Not only did I enjoy Deresiewicz’s discussion of Jane Austen, I was absolutely absorbed by his story of how her worked affected him. I had never read a male perspective on Austen and I am sorry it took me so long to do so. He pointed out that women have been identifying with male heroes for centuries. Why is there little to no demand that males identify with female heroines? In his journey with Jane, he found a way to identify with each of her heroines in ways I had never considered.

Frankly, the only thing I really disagreed with was his brief analysis of Jane Eyre in the Pride and Prejudice chapter. His summary of Jane Eyre was “Emotion and Ego Overcome all Obstacles.” Jane Eyre was not consumed by emotion or ego, her actions were more calculated and thought-out than Deresiewicz gives her credit for. I think Karen Swallow Prior said it best in Booked, “Jane Eyre is a revolutionary character because she chooses the integrity of her nature and self over social convention, material comfort, and even passionate love. She found true freedom”

A Jane Austen Education offered me a fresh perspective on all of her novels and confirmed that her writing is not just for the women who are in love with Colin Firth.

Deresiewicz will make you see Jane Austen in a new light. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Each of the chapters served as an essay about one of Austen’s novels. I have taken a passage from each chapter to pique your interest and compel you to read the book for yourself.

Emma: Everyday Matters

“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.” (p. 12)

Pride and Prejudice: Growing Up

“For [Austen], growing up has nothing to do with knowledge or skills, because it has everything to do with character and conduct. And you don’t strengthen your character or improve your conduct by memorizing the names of Roman emperors (or American presidents) or learning how to do needlework (or calculus). You don’t do so, she believed, by developing self-confidence or self-esteem either. If anything, self-confidence and self-esteem are great enemies, because they make you forget that you’re still just a bundle of impulse and ignorance. For Austen, growing up means making mistakes.” (p. 51-52)

Northanger Abbey: Learning to Learn

“The job of a teacher, I now understand, is neither to affirm your students’ notions nor to fill them with your own. The job is to free them from both.” (p. 103)

Mansfield Park: Being Good

“Elegant manners and active minds are two completely different things; fat wallets and interesting thoughts have no particular connection.” (p. 149)

Persuasion: True Friends

“Yes, Austen made sure to find her heroines a husband, but she also took care to build them a community – a sphere of husbands and wives and brothers and sisters to live their marriages within.” (p. 184)

Sense and Sensibility: Falling in Love

“Austen was not against romance, she was against romantic mythology.” (p. 227)