A Jane Austen Education, William Deresiewicz

A Jane Austen Education
William Deresiewicz
ISBN: 978-159420-2889
Penguin Press, 2011


I have a complicated relationship with Jane Austen.  As a self-proclaimed hopeless romantic with a serious pragmatic streak, I have difficulties with the Austen/Bronte dichotomy that popular culture and academic culture alike have deemed insurmountable.  I really like Jane Eyre, I really do. And I hate Wuthering Heights with a burning passion.  I also think that Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, and Mansfield Park are quite lovely, and I still wish that I could get my hours back from Emma and Persuasion. 

Therefore I feel a little unsuited to review this (at times uncomfortably obsessive) tribute to Austen and her ability to use her novels as object lessons to teach people how to be decent human beings.  (I also question the parenting involved that leaves someone in their post-graduate work to realize that they are being schooled in how to be decent human beings.)

Our boy Will apparently grew up under a rock, or had his head so far up his nether regions as a child and young adult that I find it hard to believe that he had any long-term friends at all.  Once he made the acquaintance of the delightful Ms Austen's writings, he began to slowly work his way intellectually into the social niceties of not being a self-absorbed twit. 

Over the course of a review of the six main Austen works (likely much cross-pollinated with his graduate thesis and subsequent publication on roughly the same topic) Will realizes that Austen was purposefully creating main characters with character flaws, so that the reader would be tricked into identifying with them, and then subsequently shamed by their close identification when the character realizes their lapses (or not, as the case may be) and suffers the obvious consequences. 

Perhaps I was read too many moralizing tales as an impressionable child, but I really do have to wonder how someone gets to be an adult without realizing much of what Will seems to attribute directly to the near-divine wisdom imparted by Austen's pen.  Perhaps our social circles are simply very different.

In any case, while the rhapsodizing gets a little overwhelming at times, the voice is charming and self-deprecating enough that one doesn't quite want to hit him over the head (I did say quite), and the flow is very well handled between episodes of Austenia and episodes of the ongoing Will learns to be a decent person show. 

If you're short on time, or have little patience for obsessive devotion, the back jacket will tide you over quite nicely with short paragraphs of the "point" of each of the novels according to our now totally humanized guide.