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A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter
William Deresiewicz
#UE4572
Hardcover, 272 pages; 2011
$25.95
 Members' Price: $22.06
I was twenty-six, and about as dumb, in all human things, as any twenty-six-year-old has a right to be, when I met the woman who would change my life. That she'd been dead for a couple of hundred years made not the slightest difference whatsoever. Her name was Jane Austen, and she would teach me everything I know about everything that matters.
From here on out, whenever I meet a man who scoffs at Jane Austen, I will refer him to this delightful memoir. As a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, William Deresiewicz was a devotee of modernist literature who abhorred the romantic sentiment of nineteenth-century British novels. But when his professor assigned Austen's Emma, Deresiewicz's true education began. From the value of the ordinary and the importance of humility to the dangers of perpetual amusement and the power of friendship, the young man discovered astute object lessons woven into Austen's half-dozen novels of love, family, and social convention. As time passed and he applied her keen insight to his own life, he found himself finally evolving into the man he had always hoped to be. What a heartening tale, especially for the Austen detractor in your life!
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