Waiting for Mr. Darcy

Austenitis can be as insidious as any disease, but whereas a disease merely takes over your body, "Austen's ideas overtake your mind and your expectations."

Or perhaps the real problem is that you've been reading Austen all wrong.

In her examination of Austen's endings-the first such dedicated studyMs. Brodey zooms in on the misunderstandings that surround this iconic novelist. Why, she asks, do we still think of Jane Austen as the queen of romance, despite the many antiromantic maneuvers in her works? The fault is partly one of distance: In the modern Anglophone world, we have been conditioned by our own obsession with relationship goals and the primacy we give to romantic love as a means to self-realization. We assume that Austen must be suffering from the same delusions. Recent film and fictional adaptations of her novels haven't helped: "the ghosts of Elizabeth and Darcy," Ms.

Brodey points out, meaning the combative couple at the center of "Pride and Prejudice" (1813), "haunt contemporary courtship and dating." As proof she supplies a handy appendix to further viewing and reading, from "Steamy Adaptations" ("Bridget Jones's Diary") through "LGBTQ Adaptations" ("Threadbare Morality: The Queer Musings of Miss Mary Bennet") to "Christian-Themed" ("Dating Mr.

Darcy: A Smart Girl's Guide to Sensible Romance," anyone?) Austen's endings aren't as simple as these adaptations might lead us to believe. In fact, they do their best to undercut what Ms. Brodey calls "the inevitability of the marriage plot's happy ending." Ms. Brodey argues that Austen is deeply suspicious of such literary conventions, consciously rejecting the sentimental and gothic modes of her predecessors, Samuel Richardson and Ann Radcliffe, in favor of celebrating "the sufficiency of common, everyday occurrences." Far from delivering reliable romance, Austen acknowledges the high likelihood that in courtship things might not turn out as expected.

Take "Northanger Abbey" (published 1817), Austen's first completed novel, a frisky satire on the pitfalls of letting books be your guide to life.

Catherine Morland, 17, is addicted to a diet of sensational novels that has led her to expect terror and excitement around every corner-"in training for a heroine," as Austen puts it. This leaves her oblivious to what is really happening around her. While staying at the romantically named abbey of the book's title, the Gloucestershire family home of her suitor, Henry Tilney, she embarrasses herself by wondering aloud whether his forbidding father may have murdered his mother. Deeply shocked, Henry rebukes her for her lack of common sense. "Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe's works," the narrator remarks dryly, "it was not in them, perhaps, that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for." The hyper-emotive Marianne Dashwood in "Sense and Sensibility" (1811) is even more of a danger to her own chances of happiness. Marianne swoons over sentimental poetry and dead leaves. She is ready for a grand passion and when she meets John Willoughby-a bit of a player who, thrillingly, carries her home in a rainstorm after she has twisted her ankle-she throws what little caution she has to the winds. Our emotional investment in Marianne's love story is constantly being checked by chill glimpses of the economic and social realities of her world, which she prefers to ignore: She is penniless, and when Willoughby is suddenly disinherited, he unromantically settles for a wealthy heiress. This never happens in Samuel Richardson's work, where the girl always gets the reformed rake.

Like Catherine, Marianne has to accept that literature gives us an unreliable picture of the world. The actual triumph in each of these two novels is a young woman's painful growth to self-knowledge, not her arrival at the altar. In book after book, Austen wields the quotidian like a weapon against our desire to replace fact with fantasy. Her heroines are all required to overcome a battery of psychological, social and economic difficulties: Emma Woodhouse (in "Emma," 1815) must stop indulging in childish fantasies of omnipotence. The timid Fanny Price (in "Mansfield Park," 1814) must show her teeth and resist being pressured to accept a man she doesn't trust. Anne Elliot (in "Persuasion," 1817) must defy her family's sterile snobbery. Even Elizabeth Bennet, the spirited heroine of "Pride and Prejudice," which Austen called the most "light & bright & sparkling" of her novels, has to admit that she's misrepresented her inconveniently rude but staggeringly eligible suitor. Her happy ending with Fitzwilliam Darcy comes at the cost of extensive and uncomfortable selfexamination.

Austen's antiromantic darts are perhaps most keen in the confusions of "Emma." Emma herself is engaged for much of the book in plotting a supposedly happy ending for her protégée, Harriet Smith, by getting her to refuse the unflashy farmer who has made her a heartfelt offer of marriage and to set her sights on Mr. Elton, a vain, upwardly mobile clergyman. Her scheme fails miserably, but not before Mr. Elton has mistaken Emma's patronage for romantic interest and Emma has convinced herself that the man she belatedly realizes she loves, her mentor, Mr. Knightley-who has been quietly trying to correct her crazier notions-is about to propose to Harriet instead. As Ms. Brodey observes, the novel is really about the "temptations of authorship." Emma's baroque plotting, ridiculous as it is, seems no more absurd than Richardson's or Radcliffe's in the novels they wrote. Mr. Knightley's proposal to her, when it finally comes, is unlike her fantasies: It is "plain, unaffected, gentleman-like"-a lot like his advice. In "Emma," language, narrative perspective and a philosophy of life are indistinguishable.

What Austen really prizes, Ms. Brodey concludes, is "the heroism of common things," not least the courage to speak and feel clearly and to learn from your mistakes. Tellingly, her Emmas and Mariannes and Elizabeths are all resigned to disappointment in love, and to getting on with life regardless, before the last-minute reversal that delivers what they desire. That Austen might be pushing her readers to separate the ideas of happiness and marriage in favor of introspection and self-actualization is a bold idea, but Ms. Brodey defends it with aplomb in this beautifully argued and original book. Jane Austen as the novelist of hard-nosed relationship realism? Look no further for the cure to Austenitis.