Sheamo

In Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller writes that “reading Jane Austen is the key to a woman’s heart,” and I do think young men would benefit from a careful study of her novels. They possess wisdom of a sort that men in their teens and twenties are typically lacking: a keen perceptiveness about others, a knowledge of what kinds of people are best avoided, advice for avoiding embarrassing yourself in public (see: Mr Collins and others). In showing the sort of man that is worth marrying, they provide an aspirational model for men in their pursuit of virtue. Her portrayal of the rakish Henry Crawford is instructive in this regard: while he comes very close to winning the heart of Fanny Price, he is undone by his love of performance, his callous flirtations and fickleness, his disregard for the feelings of those he seduces. The book is a remarkably nuanced character study of a man who *almost* gets the girl, but who is ultimately defeated by a fundamental weakness of character. There’s a reason Alisdair MacIntyre called her one of our greatest philosophers. If you’re serious about becoming a person of social intelligence and plain good sense, you could do much worse than reading Jane Austen.