The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (20 page)

After all, Jane Austen expected
other human beings
—not money, not accomplishments, not “independence,” as much as she valued those things—to be the most reliable source of happiness in this life. Caring about people as she did (and understanding romantic love in all its glory), she must have been devastated never to marry and have children.
⁹
But she still treated relationships as the most important thing in her life. She was the kind of aunt her nephews adored, the one her niece turned to for advice on whether to marry a man she was dubious about. Jane Austen wasn’t impatient with them if they interrupted her work, or prickly about her reputation as a novelist. She was not just kind about but deeply interested in their (vastly inferior) literary creations. She arranged to do her own writing under conditions that allowed her to put it away quickly to attend to visitors.
¹⁰

And yet, all the time that she was living the life of a traditional woman—a typical English spinster, in fact—putting relationships first, Jane Austen managed to make herself the most accomplished female writer in the history of the English language. How did she do it? Not by shunting family aside for her art. And not by trying to “have it all,” either. At least not all at once. She did it, first, by picking an artistic project that played to her deepest interest—other human beings. And then she exercised almost superhuman patience. She wrote and revised and wrote some more. For decades. Her first novel wasn’t published until she was thirty-five years old—about twenty-five years after she began writing fiction, and more than fifteen years after she began writing
that particular novel
.

A lot of us could have a lot more of what we want if we were willing to go about it the same way: Don’t be ashamed to admit to ourselves that the people in our lives matter more to us than any accomplishment of our own.
¹¹
Don’t be embarrassed to choose a career that’s compatible with taking a big
chunk of time off to tend to family, or feel like we’re selling ourselves short if we pick a profession that’s associated with traditionally feminine interests. And then keep at our ambitions, when we can and as steadily as we can, in the interstices of paying attention to the people we love, until we’ve achieved something great.

If we want to bridge the chasm between Jane Austen heroines’ consummate relationship expertise and our own sad deficit in these matters, we can treat the rough spots in our friendships and relations with family members as opportunities for developing skills we may have to call on at any time, to get love right. And we can take an interest in the rights and wrongs of our behavior, and that of other people. Instead of idly or even maliciously gossiping about our co-workers, friends, and neighbors,
¹²
we can seriously discuss what kind of behavior is substandard, what kind we admire, and why. The point isn’t to build yourself up by cutting other people down, the way Bingley’s awful sisters do whenever they talk about Elizabeth. It’s to think yourself into a state of mind where you’re used to asking what kind of “conduct” will make you an admirable human being—a person of “character.” It’s a sophisticated way of evaluating behavior that we’re not really used to. Emma and Mr. Knightley demonstrate; turn to the next chapter, and you’ll see how it’s done.