The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (23 page)

YOU CAN PRACTICE “JUSTICE,” SELF-CONTROL, “delicacy towards the feelings of other people,” and “forbearance” toward their faults in any personal relationship you have—by trying to get along better with your parents or your siblings, for instance, or with your co-workers. Every extra bit of Jane Austen heroine-style effort you put into those relationships is so much exercise that will get you into better shape to manage your relationship with your hero when you meet him.

But there’s one particular kind of relationship that prepares you for romantic love in a unique way. Sure, getting along with your family will help you know how to get along with the man you love one day. But you can’t learn how to
pick
the right guy from your relationships with your family members—or with anyone else who’s a “given” in your life. Your family, you don’t get to choose. Your friends, you pick for yourself. And picking the right guy is obviously crucial to happiness in love. It’s only in your friendships that you get any practice at this vital skill. True, we’re almost always closest to people we were thrown together with at some point
by circumstances beyond our control. But of everybody we meet on that first day in high school or in the dorm freshman year, there are one or two we pick out—and they pick us—because we seem to belong together.

There are interesting lessons about friendship in Jane Austen’s novels. The most obvious one is simply that better human beings make better friends. The whole Isabella Thorpe subplot in
Northanger Abbey
is a hilarious send-up of the friendship from hell. Isabella makes professions of undying friendship.
¹
She continually tells Catherine that she would do anything for her friends.
²
But in fact she won’t inconvenience herself in the smallest way for Catherine.
³
Isabella takes no interest in Catherine’s concerns; she doesn’t mind hurting or embarrassing Catherine in any scheme in her own interest that she happens to have in hand at the moment.
⁴
Isabella’s “shallow artifice” eventually becomes so obvious that even Catherine, naïve as she is, sees through it. And Catherine finds a much better friend in Eleanor Tilney. Eleanor never gushes about undying friendship, but she does really love Catherine.
⁵
While Eleanor is much smarter and more sophisticated than Catherine is, they’re alike in the fair and honest way they treat other people, in contrast to a scheming manipulator like Isabella.

Something similar but more subtle happens in
Pride and Prejudice.
When Charlotte Lucas accepts Mr. Collins’s proposal, Elizabeth realizes that she has a lot less in common with her best friend than she thought: “She had always felt that Charlotte’s opinion of matrimony was not exactly like her own, but she could not have supposed it possible that when called into action, she would have sacrificed every better feeling to worldly advantage.” From now on it’s going to be impossible for Elizabeth and Charlotte to share the same “unreserve” they’ve always enjoyed in the past.
⁶

Elizabeth stays friends, of a sort, with Charlotte. Though “persuaded that no real confidence could ever subsist between them again,” she still loves Charlotte and cares that Charlotte will be miserable with Mr. Collins—even though that misery is of her own choosing. So though Elizabeth feels “all the comfort of intimacy” is “over,” she keeps up a correspondence “as regular and frequent as it had ever been” with Charlotte, and agrees to visit her (and her awful husband) in their new home. Elizabeth’s letters and visit are bright spots in Charlotte’s bleak existence, and Elizabeth is willing to make that kind of contribution to cheer her friend up “for the sake of what had been” between them, though she expects “little pleasure” from it.

But because her relationship with Charlotte is no longer an intimate, “unreserved” friendship, Elizabeth comes to appreciate and rely on her sister Jane more than ever before: “Her disappointment in Charlotte made her turn with fonder regard to her sister, of whose rectitude and delicacy she was sure her opinion could never be shaken.” Elizabeth can respect and trust Jane, and share her secrets with her. She can go to her for advice—when she learns the truth about Wickham’s character and needs to decide whether to let other people know, and when she realizes how unfair she has been to Darcy and needs a sympathetic friend to talk the whole thing through with. Jane is a better friend to Elizabeth because she’s a better person.

But in Jane Austen novels the wrong kind of friend isn’t always somebody with defective principles, like Charlotte Lucas.
⁷
Sometimes the wrong friend for you is a perfectly nice person, but you’ve picked her for the wrong reasons. Not every man who’s a decent human being would necessarily be a good match for you, and not every woman who’s a person of character is the right friend for you, either. Sometimes the problem isn’t either one of the friends—it’s the kind of friendship they have.

The
case of the wrong kind of friendship in Jane Austen is the relationship between Emma and Harriet Smith. What Mr. Knightley guesses at the
very beginning of it turns out to be true: “They will neither of them do the other any good.” The problem with their friendship isn’t so much one or the other of the young women, as why they become friends in the first place, and how the friendship affects each of them.

Emma picks Harriet because she’s “a pretty girl, and her beauty happened to be of a sort which Emma particularly admired. She was short, plump, and fair, with a fine bloom, blue eyes, and a look of great sweetness.” Note the “short” and the “sweetness.” Emma likes Harriet’s manners, too: “so pleasantly grateful for being admitted to Hartfield, and so artlessly impressed by the appearance of everything in so superior a style to what she had been used to, that she must have good sense and deserve encouragement.”

Emma has plans for Harriet: “
She
would notice her; she would improve her; she would detach her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into good society; she would form her opinions and her manners.” Harriet’s “not clever” like Emma, or like the equal companion Emma has just lost—Mrs. Weston, her former governess who’s just gotten married.
⁸

We’ve all seen friendships like this, where the personality of one of the friends is much stronger than the other’s. It’s a staple of young adult fiction.
⁹
And like a lot of those relationships, the friendship between Emma and Harriet ends badly. It’s embarrassing to watch Emma put her plan for Harriet’s improvement into effect—especially the part of the plan where she “detach[es] her from her bad acquaintance.”

Harriet has been staying with the family of a Miss Martin, a school friend. When Emma realizes that the girl’s brother, a young farmer, likes Harriet, and Harriet seems to like him, too, Emma immediately decides
that if Harriet “were not taken care of, she might be required to sink herself for ever”—to sink, that is, below the higher social position that Emma has decided to get Harriet into by arranging a better match for her, one with some gentleman of independent means. So Emma starts advising Harriet about her friendship with the Martins. She insinuates that Harriet is out of their class: “I wish you may not get into a scrape, Harriet, whenever he does marry;—I mean, as to being acquainted with his wife—for though his sisters, from a superior education, are not to be altogether objected to, it does not follow that he might marry anybody at all fit for you to notice.... I want to see you permanently well connected—and to that end it will be advisable to have as few odd acquaintance as may be.”

When Robert Martin sends Harriet a letter declaring his love, she naturally shows it to her great friend Miss Woodhouse, hoping for help making up her mind how to answer his proposal. Emma makes a parade of refusing to advise Harriet one way or the other, all the while pulling out every stop to make sure that Harriet refuses Mr. Martin. First Emma reads the letter, and when it’s better than she expected—“as a composition it would not have disgraced a gentleman; the language, though plain, was strong and unaffected, and the sentiments it conveyed very much to the credit of the writer”—she tries to think that Mr. Martin’s sister must have helped him write it. Next she pretends that Harriet wants advice only on
how
to write her letter of refusal, not on
whether
she should refuse or accept—because she wants Harriet to think accepting Mr. Martin is out of the question.

Then, when Emma begins to be afraid Harriet will give in to “the bewitching flattery of that letter,” she begins to give her
general
advice on how to evaluate a proposal of marriage: “I lay it down as a general rule, Harriet, that if a woman
doubts
as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him.” The whole time, Emma pretends she’s not really putting her finger on the scale: “‘Not for the world,’ said Emma, smiling graciously, ‘would I advise you either way. You must be the best judge of your own happiness.”