The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After

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WHY DO WOMEN LOVE JANE AUSTEN SO MUCH?

There’s no doubt we do. Women made Jane Austen a bestselling novelist in the nineteenth century and a blockbuster screenwriter in the twentieth. And today there’s a whole industry of Jane Austen knockoffs—
Bridget Jones’s Diary
,
The Jane Austen Book Club
,
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
. They’re great fun. But do they get at what really fascinates us about Jane Austen?

Jane Austen is a great novelist, of course. She’s a genius on the subject of female psychology—and male psychology, for that matter. But those aren’t the only reasons women love her. We go to Jane Austen for a good read, but there’s more to it than that. Jane Austen shows modern women a world that we’re aching to be part of. And it’s not just about the clothes (though they
are
gorgeous). Let’s be honest: we wish we could be Jane Austen heroines in our own lives, dealing with everything—especially men—with the sophistication and competence we admire in characters like Elizabeth Bennet. Women see something in Jane Austen that’s missing
from modern relationships, and we can’t help wondering if there might be some way to have what we see there—without going back to Empire waistlines, horse-drawn carriages, and the bad old days before the Married Women’s Property Act.

Can we learn from Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Elliot about men, sex, marriage, and living happily ever after? Can Jane Austen teach modern women to make our way through the minefields of love and courtship—to find the “permanent happiness” that Jane Austen heroines aim for? Is it possible to unlock the insights, habits of mind, intelligence about men, and choices that make Jane Austen heroines so different from us? That’s what
The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After
aims to do.

The original inspiration for this book was an article that appeared in the
Washington Post
“Style” section at an earlier high-water mark for Jane Austen’s popularity—after the movies and the “chick lit,” but before the zombies and sea monsters. In “Jane Austen: A Love Story,” Jennifer Frey asked, “Where did all this come from? What suddenly, unexpectedly, made Jane Austen so unbearably hip?”
¹

Frey quoted Bridget Jones in swoony appreciation of Colin Firth’s torso in the 1995 British TV version of
Pride and Prejudice
, “emerging from the lake dripping wet, in the see-through white shirt. Mmm. Mmmm.” But she also interviewed an impressive stable of experts. Besides the wet shirt angle, Austen enthusiasts were supposed to be fascinated by “her sharp rendering of class and class distinctions” for the same reasons they read
The Devil Wears Prada
and
The Nanny Diaries
, “two novels that expose the excesses and obnoxiousness of America’s reigning class through the gaze of what is, essentially, a servant.” Or, perhaps, Frey considered, twenty-first-century women look back two hundred years to find models for our liberated selves: “Austen, it’s been suggested, is the great-great-grandmother of “chick lit”—that exploding genre about upwardly mobile young women and their wayward travails through the world of modern courtship.” A Yahoo! movie
critic told the
Post
that Jane Austen “has a stunningly modern sensibility. And it took the world a couple centuries to catch up with her.” A chick lit author chimed in with the cliché that Jane Austen is “such a subversive writer.”

Really?
I thought, reviewing all this expert opinion.
Aren’t they getting the Jane Austen phenomenon exactly, perfectly, 180 degrees wrong?
If women in the twenty-first century want to gawk at men’s chests, get vicarious thrills from the adventures of the upwardly mobile (or, in the alternative, from the indignities suffered by the employees of the rich and famous), or cheer on the oppressed sisterhood, we don’t need to resort to Jane Austen. Opportunities to drool over some hot guy’s torso are not exactly in short supply at this moment in world history. Neither are tell-all memoirs or “Go for it, girl!” pep talks. And anyway, aren’t people’s desires and aspirations generally about what we
don’t
have, not what we’re suffocating in already? Jane Austen, I found myself thinking, fascinates us
not
because we recognize our lives in her books. It’s just the opposite. Sure, Elizabeth Bennet and Elinor Dashwood are women whose desires and problems we can identify with. But they’re not exactly like us. What we see in
Pride and Prejudice
and
Sense and Sensibility
isn’t just our same old lives, only dressed up in scrumptious Regency costumes and witty dialogue.