Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a live talk and has been lightly edited. It retains the cadence and idiosyncrasies of an oral presentation.
Imagine that you have a crush on somebody and you have reason to believe that this person likes you back. Then you’re at a bar or a dance and you see him or her dancing with somebody else. What would you do? Or if you’ve been in this situation, what did you do?
Believe it or not, this is a situation that Jane Austen wrote about. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg; we all have to deal with many kinds of complex situations within relationships. At different times in our lives, we all have to make decisions about romantic relationships: Do we start a romantic relationship? Do we end one? We’ve all found ourselves in tricky conflicts with friends and had to resolve arguments. At times, we’ve had to negotiate better ways to communicate with our parents and siblings, and so on.
In order to equip ourselves for these inevitable and often painful situations, there are a few key things we can do. We can look to philosophy, which explores the fundamental nature of human beings, how we know what we know, and how we should act. We can look to psychology and learn about patterns of behavior, thought, and emotions and how we can influence them. But what people don’t often think about is that we can also look to great fiction—which dramatizes both. Or as Austen put it, novels can contain “the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties.”1
All good fiction includes conflict, which is fundamentally a clash of values. Two or more parties want things they’re willing to strive for—and they cannot both have them. (Occasionally, one character has an internal clash, or one “party” is actually a challenge posed by nature, but two or more parties is more common.) Great fiction also contains vivid characters, and many of these are archetypes: a particular kind of person who serves a certain plot function but whom you’ve probably also encountered in real life. Austen was especially good at showing archetypes in a subtle way, depicting how they fared and what they did in different situations and different kinds of relationships. But she also went deeper than that, and that’s why we’re going to talk about her work today.
Before we go any further, I want to say that fiction is something that is enjoyable in and of itself. We read a great novel and love it because it’s fun. Additionally, the digging a little deeper we’re going to do here is part of the enjoyment of fiction. The learning that we can do by thinking about characters, understanding them, and evaluating them adds to the enjoyment. This is because fiction can help us grasp essential truths on a fundamental level by connecting them to our emotions—by giving us a reason to care.
To contextualize Austen’s work, it helps to have a bit of background. She was born in 1775 and died mysteriously in 1817. She was the daughter of a preacher and part of a large family. She began writing from an early age, about twelve, beginning with humorous short stories and vignettes. When she initially began to publish novels, she did so anonymously. They were published as “by a lady.” That being said, there’s a lot we don’t know about her life. She didn’t keep a diary, or if she did, we don’t have it. There were no biographies of her written during her life. And the first biography wasn’t written for over half a century after her death by a nephew who didn’t know her that well.2 Nor do all of her letters survive; we have some, but her sister burned some. So, there’s a lot we don’t know. What we do know is what’s in her published works, particularly her main six novels. These are the four that she published during her lifetime (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma) and the two that her family published shortly after her death (Persuasion and Northanger Abbey).
Within these novels we see some pretty consistent characteristics. Austen is often noted for her wit; she liked to look at what’s absurd in the archetypes she employed, in their relationships, and in the social norms of her time and poke a bit of fun at them. For example, she absolutely detested people with authority who neglected the responsibilities that came with that authority, or even worse, abused it. We can see this is in the clergymen in her novels. The less important clergymen are lazy or hypocritical, but the important ones are always absurd. And they’re absurd in the same way: They’re pompous, self-important, and arrogant. They’re written for laughs, so we get to giggle at the fact that the person is this way, rather than being infuriated with them.
But Austen’s appeal goes deeper than that. In all of her novels, there are moral lessons. There is the development of timeless virtues, and this is why it’s still worth talking about them two hundred years after they were written, when a lot of the social norms she was criticizing are gone or significantly faded. We’ll get into these lessons in more depth, but a lot of them are around things such as justice and honesty. In order for her heroines to learn these lessons, they need to gain some kind of knowledge. Usually this is both internal knowledge about themselves and external knowledge about other people and the world around them. One of the fun things about Austen is that she actually gives us most of this information if we are attentive enough to pick up on it before the heroines do. It’s subtle.
However, possibly my favorite thing about Austen is that she creates a benevolent universe. All of her heroines get happy endings, but it’s not automatic, and it’s not guaranteed; they don’t know they will get them. They have to earn them. They have to develop their characters. These earned happy endings provide us with motivation along with an exploration of what the relevant virtues and principles look like when applied. We’re going to look at this from a few different angles.
Ideas Shape Choices
First, we must recognize that ideas shape choices. By ideas, I mean your core beliefs about human nature, what constitutes a good life, and what you expect from other people. It was common in Austen’s time for writers to think about their moral ideas and how they could explicitly promote those principles in their novels, or even to write novels in order to propagandize. Marilyn Butler, a preeminent Austen scholar, argues that what makes Austen stand out from her contemporaries, and one of the reasons that she is more influential than they, is that she showed us her characters’ ideas rather than telling us. Many of her contemporaries had their characters declare their philosophies in speeches or in letters. Occasionally in Austen we get a conversation, a snippet, or a sentence or two of this, but mostly we see who they are. They show us in their actions, their words, their topics of conversation, and how they speak about those topics. Austen was praised for her development of a variety of idiolects; each of her characters sounds different for a reason.3
She shows her characters’ ideas in a lot of ways, but I want to take one example. For this, we need to start with her intellectual context. As I mentioned, Austen was born in the late 18th century and started writing in the early 19th century. At this time, rationalism was giving way to romanticism in philosophy. The entirety of these philosophies goes beyond the scope of this discussion, but here are some relevant points. Rationalism emphasizes the use of reason over and detached from experience and emotion. It is often associated with sciences and things that are constructed by human beings. Romanticism is the opposite; it emphasizes the importance of emotion over reason, and it’s associated with nature and with the arts.
Austen examined these two schools in Sense and Sensibility. This title may sound a bit odd to a modern ear, but “sensibility” in her time meant something more like sentimentality or emotionalism. This is the only novel in which Austen had two heroines, sisters, one of whom represents sense and rationalism and the other sensibility and romanticism. Throughout this novel, she puts them in similar situations so we can see how they respond differently and what the results of those behaviors are. Along the way, they both go through different arcs.
Recall the imagined scenario in which your crush is talking to somebody else with evident interest. Austen puts both of the sisters in this situation, and we’ll see how they respond differently—according to their ideas about what is important and what constitutes a good life.
Marianne is our romantic; she’s not merely somebody who feels things strongly, but somebody who indulges her emotions as a matter of principle. She believes that to be a good person is to be emotional. She judges people by how passionate they are. When she goes to a ball and sees the gentleman she’s interested in, and who she thought was interested in her, with another lady, Austen tells us, “Her face was crimsoned over, and she exclaimed, in a voice of the greatest emotion, ‘Good God! Willoughby, what is the meaning of this? Have you not received my letters? Will you not shake hands with me?’”4 For Marianne, wearing her heart on her sleeve is a badge of honor. It would never occur to her to not say what she’s thinking or feeling, no matter how public the context or serious the consequences.
By contrast, we have her sister Elinor. Elinor wants to be rational, she wants to do the practical thing, she wants to do what she thinks is right—at the cost of ignoring her own emotions entirely. She shoves them down, suppresses them, trying to never make them somebody else’s problem but also not dealing with them herself. She finds herself in a similar situation to Marianne’s. She’s at home when the gentleman in whom she is interested comes to visit, as does another lady who is attached to him. Elinor thinks she ought to leave them alone;
she soon afterwards felt herself so heroically disposed as to determine, under pretence of fetching Marianne, to leave the others by themselves; and she really did it, and that in the handsomest manner, for she loitered away several minutes on the landing-place, with the most high-minded fortitude, before she went to her sister.5
Elinor is martyring herself because she refuses to acknowledge the reality and validity of her emotions.
Consider yourself in this scenario. What would you do in their places? Would you be more like Marianne and express your emotions clearly and vocally, regardless of who’s around? Would you be more like Elinor and shove them down and try to pretend they’re not there? Or something else? And why? What is it about your view of life and human nature that pushes you in that direction?
The “why” question is important because this kind of self-knowledge is essential to how we grow, which Marianne learns. She finds herself in a dire situation, and she realizes through reflection that it’s not only her actions that led her there but the beliefs that drove her actions. The most relevant idea is that being passionate and expressing her emotions is always right, without questioning them or thinking about the context of the situation and whether it was appropriate to express her emotions in that way.
She realizes that she’s able to correct her ideas and then her behavior. It’s an interesting kind of climax, a realization, but it’s one we see over and over again in Austen. As Butler put it, “her plots are a movement from ignorance to knowledge, culminating in a moment of intelligent discernment.”6 But the obstacles to that intelligent discernment, that knowledge, vary dramatically from novel to novel.
Self-Deception
Pride and Prejudice centers around self-deception, particularly in a heroine who believes herself a very good judge of character. In fact, the working title for the novel was First Impressions. The protagonist is Lizzy Bennet, who misjudges two key characters in the novel.
First, we have Mr. Wickham—a walking red flag. From the very beginning, he flirts with Lizzy, charms her, talks to her family kindly, and opens up. He talks to her about his past and how he’s been wronged by the other character. He’s open and amiable, so she overlooks the facts that he’s shared far more than is appropriate given their relationship and that he doesn’t do the things he said he was going to do. She also overlooks the fact that she doesn’t have the evidence to judge the claim that the other character had, in fact, wronged him.
The other character, Mr. Darcy, is quite offensive on their first meeting. He says something negative about Lizzy’s looks within her hearing. He’s generally standoffish and arrogant to everyone. Later, he starts to be more polite and behave like a gentleman, even correcting others’ rudeness toward her. But he’s still distant and reserved. He waves away any potential inadequacy on his part by saying he’s not good at making conversation with people.
There comes a situation in which Lizzy makes clear to him her disapproval—that she thinks that Mr. Darcy is a bad person because of what he supposedly did to Mr. Wickham as well as another reason. Mr. Darcy initially is angry, but he decides to explain himself, unintentionally creating a test for her. Mr. Darcy writes Lizzy a letter in which he sets forth his side of the story.
At first, she doesn’t want to believe it. She had thought herself a good judge of character; how could she be so wrong about two people? But she’s honest. She stops and thinks. She goes through the letter a couple of times. She asks herself whether what she’s reading makes sense with what she knows of each of the two men. She asks whether Darcy would have given her the kind of information that he gave her if it were not true. Over a couple of pages, Austen spells out the process of introspection and the realizations Lizzy has. Here is one sentence of it: “Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned.”7
Through Lizzy’s realization, she’s identifying her emotions, past and present, and how she deceived herself through them. Note how active this language is: “courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away.” This isn’t something that simply happened. Lizzy actively chose to ignore evidence, to ignore her sister’s warning, to ignore the red flags in Mr. Wickham and the positive things she was seeing about Mr. Darcy. She “drove reason away”—it was an active thing that she chose. The good news is that she can now choose differently. She can choose to look for more evidence, to act more civilly toward Mr. Darcy, and to reassess herself.
She thinks, “Till this moment I never knew myself.”8 She had not realized that her emotions could lead her astray in that way, but now she does. We already know that when we face tough decisions, we are shaping ourselves through what we decide. But we can also learn about ourselves if we choose to turn the spotlight inward and ask, How did we come to these conclusions? Why are we thinking what we’re thinking? Why do we want this? Why do we feel this way? If we ask those questions, we start to understand ourselves on a much deeper level.
We also are able to understand others better because we can see where our own emotions, misconceptions, hasty judgments, and insufficiently evidenced evaluations could be leading us astray. This is a pattern we see throughout Austen’s work: All her novels involve the characters gaining some kind of knowledge about themselves and about each other, and through this they come to better understand one another.
Better Understanding Others
We can learn from the processes, challenges, and triumphs of her characters and apply these lessons to our own lives to better understand the people around us. How? The following strategies are all things that we see Austen’s characters doing, that we can do as we read fiction, and that we can do with people in our own lives.
The first strategy is to think of yourself like a detective. In recent years, publishers have released several novels based on Austen’s works in which the author turns the heroine into a detective solving a murder or other mystery. The reason this works so well is because Austen depicted her female characters as detectives, trying to figure out the moral stature of the people around them so they can make the most important decision in the life of a woman in Regency England, which is whom to marry. A heroine has to put together different clues, and she can go wrong if, like Lizzy, she ignores some things that she really ought not to ignore.
In detective stories, very often the detective comes to a wrong conclusion initially. He has some evidence, but he puts it together wrongly. He thinks that he knows more than he does and creates a narrative that sounds compelling but is, in fact, incorrect. We see this throughout Austen’s novels, such as with Lizzy in regard to Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham.
If we’re actively reading fiction, we’re doing the same thing all the time. We want to figure out who the villain is, what’s behind the secret plot, or who the murderer is before the detective or hero does. We can also do this with people in our own lives. When we’re getting to know somebody or considering a relationship, we can look at the clues we have. We can ask ourselves what we know about his character, what we’ve seen from him, what makes sense as an explanation for his behavior, and whether we even know enough to come to a conclusion yet.
The next strategy is projection. I’m sure your parents have told you at some point to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. This is something that we do very naturally when we read fiction. In fact, the parts of our brains that we use when we’re imagining ourselves in the future are active when we’re reading fiction.9 But we can do this more deliberately. We can imagine we’re Marianne in Sense and Sensibility and ask ourselves what we would do in her situation, how we would feel. Austen’s characters encourage each other to do this, too. Lizzy’s friend encourages her to put herself in the shoes of her sister’s suitor to understand how he must be feeling at this moment so she can better advise her sister.
But sometimes it’s really hard to relate to people. Sometimes we cannot understand their thinking, and we cannot feel as they would feel. They’re simply too different from us; we wouldn’t behave in that way. Or maybe it’s even worse—maybe we’ve judged that this person is immoral, so we don’t want to feel like they would feel. We don’t want to imagine ourselves as a bad person.
In that case, we can employ “strategic empathy.” This is a strategy used by military analysts, because when you’re trying to figure out what to do in a war, it’s dangerous to feel as the enemy feels. But you still have to know how to handle them; you’ve got to figure out how to adapt your strategies for the situation. This is a whole field, but there are two important questions to consider: How does this person or group see themselves? And how do they see the situation? You don’t need to feel as they feel—only to understand where they’re coming from.
We see this, too, in Austen’s fiction. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor, the rationalist, is confronted with a malicious character. She could never feel as this lady feels. She would never treat somebody the way this woman is treating other people. But by understanding how the other woman sees herself and how she sees the situation, Elinor knows how to handle her. She knows what to tell her and what not to tell her, how to frame things, and therefore how to get through the situation better.
The last point is not so much a strategy as a pitfall to avoid: assumed similarity, also known as excessive self-reference. We all have the most experience with ourselves; we spend more time with ourselves than we do with any other human being. The result is that we tend to assume that other people are like us. But other people are not like us in many ways. We can go wrong if we assume that their motivations, thinking, and emotions are like our own when we don’t have evidence for that.
In Emma, a mentor warns Emma against this. She says, “do not pretend, with your sweet temper, to understand a bad one, or to lay down rules for it: you must let it go its own way.”10 There are many characters in Austen’s fiction, mostly minor characters who are written for laughs, who do this frequently, such as Mr. Woodhouse in Emma and Lady Catherine De Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice. These people assume that others will think as they do, but in such a dramatic way that it’s funny.
But we also see it from the main characters. Part of the reason Marianne from Sense and Sensibility is so shocked and hurt at the ball is because she would never do what Willoughby has done. She values authenticity and the genuineness of emotion so much that to profess a feeling she didn’t fully feel and couldn’t fully commit to is unthinkable to her.
The above are merely a few examples that give us a step on the right path to figuring out how to apply the lessons Austen is offering us. But why should we?
First, Austen argues for moral growth. All of her characters develop some aspect of virtue throughout their respective stories; they all go through a character arc, and more specifically, a growth arc. A growth arc is when a character faces challenges and has to transform herself—to undergo realizations and change in some fundamental way—in order to meet a challenge. By thinking about these challenges and how the characters transform and meet them in fiction, we can more profitably ask ourselves: Where could I have, or have I had, a growth arc in my life?
If you look back at your own achievements and understand what you’ve overcome, that can add to your self-confidence—and it’s also a way of continually improving in the future. Maybe you’re facing challenges right now; maybe you will in the next year. How can you become a better person in order to meet that challenge or through meeting that challenge? Lizzy, for instance, becomes more honest and more just through better understanding herself and how she’s misjudged Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham. She develops those specific virtues. Austen, like Aristotle, does not conceive of virtue as a thing you achieve once and then you’re done. It’s not a finish line. Virtue is an active condition. It’s something we have to continually maintain; it’s the working state of the soul. Accordingly, in Austen’s fiction, we often see that, after her realization, the heroine has to put it to work multiple times. Lizzy has to encounter and talk to Mr. Darcy multiple times before the end of the story.
The reason it’s believable that her characters have these growth arcs and come to these conclusions and develop these virtues is because they are fundamentally truth seekers. This is an aspect of honesty. If it really, deeply matters to you what is true about a situation, what is true about a person’s character, or what was said or done in a given situation, the act of searching for the truth already puts you in a better place. What we see in Austen’s stories is that the characters who go through these growth arcs and develop these virtues are looking for the truth, and they end up with better relationships. They end up with good romantic relationships, and many of them also end up with better friendships and better family relationships, both in the sense of getting rid of some that are not good for them and in the sense of improving the ones they have. This is the happy ending I referred to earlier.
This makes sense. If we’re constantly working to better understand ourselves, better understand other people, be more honest, be more just, and grasp the truth, we’re going to have better relationships.
Flatterers versus Challengers
We see this clearly in Emma. Its protagonist, Emma Woodhouse, is spoiled, high status, privileged, and accountable to no one. Emma is often considered Austen’s most tightly plotted novel, and there’s a lot going on in it, so I will narrow down this discussion to two basic choices: choice of romantic partner and choice of friend.
Early on, Emma is drawn to people I call flatterers. These are the people who tell Emma only what she wants to hear—things that superficially feel good in the moment and puff up her ego. One flatterer, Frank Churchill, flirts with her. Another is Harriet Smith, who is lower status than Emma, poorer than Emma, younger than Emma, and less independent and strong-minded than Emma. She looks up to Emma for advice on virtually everything from buying ribbons to whom she should marry. Emma doesn’t think badly of these people; she wants the best for them. She takes on Harriet as a pet project to try to help her along in life. She doesn’t question why Frank would be flirting with her; she merely enjoys the attention and flirts back. But this leads her to disastrously misjudge the people around her because she’s not questioning her thinking. Both characters encourage her in whatever whim, fantasy, or misunderstanding she comes up with.
By contrast, there are the challengers—people who tell you what you need to hear, not always what you want to hear. The gentleman she ends up married to is described early in the novel as being “one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them.”11
Not all challengers are confrontational or blunt, however. You can also challenge the people around you simply through how you act, which is what we see with Jane Fairfax, the woman Emma ends up becoming friends with. Jane is on a similar social level to Emma, but she’s significantly more accomplished in the kinds of skills that ladies were expected to have in that era—things such as drawing and playing the piano. Emma is smart, but she has no patience and she is the opposite of diligent, so she never really develops these skills. From early in the novel, Emma has a vague dislike for Jane and doesn’t understand why, and she doesn’t stop to ask why either. One character comments that it’s because Emma “saw in [Jane] the really accomplished young woman, which she wanted to be thought herself.”12 By the time Emma starts to better understand her own emotions and realize what evidence she’s overlooked, which includes how she feels about all of these characters, she realizes that Jane is somebody who’s going to inspire her to be her best.
These are the kinds of friends and partners who are valuable and whom we should cherish—even though sometimes it’s more difficult in the moment because they may tell us that they think we’re wrong. As Butler puts it, “Emma makes mistakes in the first instance because, like all other human beings, she is fallible. She also makes more than she need, because for much of the novel she underrates the need for objective self-criticism.”13
Austen reportedly wrote in a letter that Emma is a heroine who nobody but herself would much like.14 But many of us do like Emma because we relate to the kinds of errors that she makes and how she learns to correct them. What do we learn from Emma? Similar to Lizzy Bennet, we learn the importance of understanding your emotions and how they’re influencing your judgment, including emotions you didn’t know you had or you didn’t know the reason for. For example, it’s not nice to dislike somebody who has done nothing wrong to you, as Emma dislikes Jane. So, most of us wouldn’t want to spend too much time thinking about that, and Emma doesn’t. But when she does, she can be much more just to Jane, and she gets a good friend out of the bargain.
Emma, like Lizzy Bennet, also misunderstands her own strengths. Lizzy thinks she’s a much better judge of character than she is. Emma thinks that she would be a great matchmaker. (Spoiler alert: She is not.) Understanding your own strengths and weaknesses enables you to better address many things in your life. Studies have been done on self-esteem showing that people who have high self-esteem are pretty accurate in their assessment of their abilities; they don’t think themselves better than they are.15 They know where their strengths and weaknesses are, which Emma eventually learns.
Emma also learns to avoid the assumed similarity problem; other people’s motivations may not be what yours would be. Part of why she misguides Harriet, despite genuinely wanting the best for her, is because she doesn’t understand what Harriet wants or respect her agency. Emma doesn’t understand why Frank would flirt with her if he wasn’t actually interested in her. She doesn’t understand why other people act as they do because she assumes that their motivations would be the same as hers.
She also doesn’t think about the fact that good intentions aren’t always enough. She genuinely wants what’s best for Harriet. But without taking into account what Harriet wants, Harriet’s context, and the fact that Harriet needs to make her own decisions, she’s going to make Harriet’s life worse—as, initially, she does.
The Pattern
We see a clear pattern across Austen’s novels. We start with a setup; we learn the financial and family situation of the heroine and a bit about her personality. Then something changes; usually the heroine moves or other people move to where she lives. In this new context, she has to judge people, usually at least two people. She judges wrongly, usually in at least two cases. She makes some kind of mistake that leads her to behave unjustly and in a way that’s not good for her in the long run or the people around her.
Then she has that moment of intelligent discernment, the realization. In each case, she has to make the choice to take that seriously, as we saw with Lizzy’s letter. And she does. She has a moment of reflection and realizes what’s gone wrong and then adjusts her behavior. This often takes a couple of tries. In most of Austen’s novels, the heroine is put in a situation in which she has to put her new knowledge to work at least two or three times. Austen did not believe (with Socrates) that knowing what is right is enough. You still have to put it into action.
It’s helpful to look at our own lives through this lens. We all know our own situations; we know who we are and what our lives are like. We all have faced changes and complexity in our lives. We all have made errors of judgment. What have been the triggers through which you realized that you were wrong? What kind of reflections did you go through in those moments? Or perhaps you’re now facing complexity or the prospect of change in your life. You can be on the lookout for these kinds of errors. You can start to understand what kind of reflection is going to turn them into a moment of growth for you rather than letting it only be pain or challenge or complexity. Hopefully, that will lead you to a happier ending.
Key Takeaways
Ideas shape choices—what we believe about ourselves, other people, and what a good life is will affect how we behave. The more explicitly we understand that, the easier it’s going to be to correct errors and to correct our course if we’ve gone wrong, as we saw with Marianne in Sense and Sensibility.
To do this, introspection is essential. Without it, we risk leading ourselves astray, misunderstanding our emotions, and losing sight of how they are affecting our thinking. If we want to be more just and honest, like Lizzy and Emma, we have to understand why we don’t want to pay attention to some kinds of evidence—why we don’t want to look at that feeling or think about that person. We have to ask ourselves those difficult questions. If we do, then we continue to develop the active condition of virtue. We keep moving in the right direction. And if we do that, we’ll see improvements in our relationships. Sometimes that means that some relationships end, but others can shift and develop a new dynamic that is healthier and better for both people.
We see with Marianne and Elinor in Sense and Sensibility that, as both of them learn from each other, they end up treating each other better. Austen’s fiction, in general, offers us this benevolence—this world in which hard work, serious introspection, and challenging oneself always lead to a good outcome. And that’s the reassurance we sometimes need when we’re in moments of difficulty. Her novels offer an exploration of different aspects of virtue that we may not have considered. We know that we should treat people as they deserve to be treated. But what does that look like? In real life, it’s complicated and messy, so examining it from different perspectives can be valuable.
Austen was a keen observer of how people think, interact, and talk. By reading her novels, we get clear explorations and examinations of both a person’s internal world and the external world, as well as how those things mesh. Art is an end in itself. We can simply enjoy reading Austen’s fiction because it’s funny, because her characters are vivid, or because we love the happy endings. But the more thoughtfully we engage with it, even only the aspects I’ve elaborated, the more it enriches us.
I hope I’ve convinced you to go read or reread Austen. But if I haven’t, or if you’ve tried and really didn’t enjoy it, here are some books, different in genre, era, and scope, that I would recommend if your goal is to better understand yourself and human nature and thereby improve your relationships. All of these books, to different extents, involve characters who learn to deal with and understand people who have different motives, different backgrounds, and different goals from themselves.
In Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, that is the main character’s whole arc. He wants to understand the principle behind a certain kind of person who thinks differently from him. In doing so, he’s able to improve his career and his relationships.
A related lesson is that of learning to work with those who are deeply different from yourself—not just understand them, but form alliances and build something together. We see this in Pierce Brown’s Red Rising, a dystopian sci-fi trilogy in which the character has to bring together people from entirely different planets in order to effectively rebel against tyranny.
The costs of misunderstanding others can be deep. It can cause not only a lot of guilt and shame for ourselves, but also serious consequences for others if we misunderstand them and don’t realize that we didn’t have enough evidence for the evaluations we drew. We see that in books such as Atonement by Ian McEwan and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.
Thoughtful authors, such as Jane Austen, draw on observation and project principles that can help us thrive. Equipped with this knowledge, go forth, read more, and learn about yourself and other people.
This article appears in the Fall 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.
This comes in a defense of novels in which Austen describes a young woman reading a book that she bashfully describes as “only a novel,” after which the narrator adds “or, in short only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.” See Jane Austen, Jane Austen: The Complete Novels (Prague: e-artnow, 2022), Kindle edition, 2177.
This biography was A Memoir of Jane Austen by James Edward Austen-Leigh, published in 1870.
An idiolect is an individual’s unique way of speaking, including his verbal crutches, favorite expressions, and preferred slang.
Austen, Jane Austen: The Complete Novels, 274.
Austen, Jane Austen: The Complete Novels, 341.
Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 292.
Austen, Jane Austen: The Complete Novels, 702.
Austen, Jane Austen: The Complete Novels, 702.
Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt, “Emotional Responses to Fiction: An Evolutionary Perspective,” in Richard Joyce, The Routledge Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2018), 387–98.
Austen, Jane Austen: The Complete Novels, 1507.
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