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A Jane Austen Education How Six Novels Taught Me About Love Friendship and the Things That Really Matter William Deresiewicz Books

Download As PDF : A Jane Austen Education How Six Novels Taught Me About Love Friendship and the Things That Really Matter William Deresiewicz Books

A Jane Austen Education How Six Novels Taught Me About Love Friendship and the Things That Really Matter William Deresiewicz Books

Aside from the cover artwork for this book, featuring the clothing of a paper doll man (entirely inappropriate to the seriousness of the subject matter), I consider this one of the most important books I've ever read.

Besides explaning the phenomenon of Jane Austen in fresh, new ways, the book also lets the reader, as the author bares his soul, live with Deresiewicz a short period in the first several decades of his life. He had been stuck in the immaturity from which many 21st century young people suffer, and from which many older folks never do manage to make their exit.

For a real graduate school course and its real and gifted professor, the author begins--against all previous instincts--to read Jane Austen. He notices that Austen broke all the conventional author rules. Her hidden way of teaching what she wanted her readers to learn by means of her characters and her subtle commentary on them was what brought Deresiewicz finally to know himself and understand why his relations with real people in his life weren't working very well.

To learn from this book, the reader needs a prior acquaintance with at least a few of the Jane Austen novels. The reader is taken back and forth between the author's excellent analysis of Austen's work to the life of Deresiewicz himself and how, as he reads Jane Austen, he begins to change his attitudes toward people, toward matrimony, and a host of other things that plague people in any century. Deresiewicz comes to see that he can stay in his safe, bungled, depressed life or grow by listening and more objectively studying the everyday folks around him, even as Austen did. He begins to do this once he has absorbed certain key values that the reading of Austen novels has taught him.

Anyone who loves Jane Austen in her printed works (and not just in the movies and stories that are spin-offs from them) should profit from this unusual book. It began reminding me somewhat of Tuesdays with Morrie and that author's professor, but it is definitely a unique life journey aided by the tutelege of a classic author from the late 1700's/early 1800s in England.

Jane Austen changed Deresiewicz; in turn, Deresiewicz is changing me.


Tags : Amazon.com: A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter (9781594202889): William Deresiewicz: Books,William Deresiewicz,A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter,Penguin Press,1594202885,GOOD-EARTH-13474,Books & Reading,1775-1817,AUSTEN, JANE, 1775-1817,Appreciation,Austen, Jane,,BOOKS AND READING,Biography & Autobiography Personal Memoirs,Biography Autobiography,English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh,GENERAL,General Adult,LITERARY CRITICISM Books & Reading,LITERARY CRITICISM European English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh,Literary Criticism,Literature - Criticism,Non-Fiction,Personal Memoirs,United States

A Jane Austen Education How Six Novels Taught Me About Love Friendship and the Things That Really Matter William Deresiewicz Books Reviews

This book shoed up in my 'recommendations'. The title drew me in. I read the blub and some sample paragraphs in the preview function, bought the book and am so glad I did. For some reason, I'd never read Jane Austen. Now that I've started to, I'm glad I didn't before reading this book by Deresiewicz. Showing his readers what he discovered in Austen, he taught me how to settle into her stories. I'm reading Emma now an plan to read the rest. So intrigued by what is in this book, I even bought a biography of Austen which I'm looking forward to reading soon.
Immersing myself--first in all the novels of Jane Austen--then plunging into many of the spin-offs of modern authors, I naturally turned to Deresiewicz's book as yet another source. As in all my reading, I like to underline, and since other reviewers have had their say, I'll just mention a few of those underlined passages. He calls Austen "the godmother of chick lit," something I hadn't thought of. Parts of two pages describe his father--a task I need to do--so I made a note to revisit this section.
Another subject--feelings/emotions/passions--the author says that Austen valued those, but didn't think we should worship them; didn't think we had to be controlled by them. Good idea given today's worldview.
One more new idea for me Nearly all of Austen's heroines have teachers of one kind or another; helpers to direct their reading and form their tastes. Which prompted me to ask, "Who directed our reading and how, and who/what formed our tastes?"
Using Austen's novels to "learn" something is, in my estimation, a sensible way of applying "old" lessons to one's life. Recommended.
I came to this book with excitement and skepticism--excitement because I already admired the author's writing, and skepticism because I am wary of books that tell about "what such-and-such means to me in my personal life." A book about what someone learned about life from the novels of Jane Austen? Could I trust in such a thing?

Well, I am actually glad for the mild initial skepticism, because it put me in the author's shoes. I could see myself in the author as he describes himself at the outset--sarcastic, rebellious, and (in his view) too intelligent for everything around him. And so, as I read the book, I was able to enter its lessons, one by one.

Each thing Deresiewicz learned from Austen's work came not from a first reading, not from a quick reaction, but from a slow sinking into the work. As he takes the reader into each novel, as he leaves behind his own misconceptions of it, something remarkable starts to happen. The whole book is about close listening and the slow process of growing up. And it is about coming to love the work of an author--not adoring it immediately, not getting it right away, but discovering, over time, what it is really about. In the first chapter. Deresiewicz writes, on pages 12-13

"I returned to the novel in a completely different frame of mind. Mr. Woodhouse's banalities, Miss Bates's monologues, all that gossip and small talk--Austen put them in as a sign that she respected her characters, not because she wanted us to look down on them. She was willing to listen to what they had to say, and she wanted me to listen, too. As long as I had treated such passages as filler and hurried through them, they had seemed impossibly dull. But once I started to slow down enough to take them on their own terms, I found that they possessed their own gravity, their own dignity, their own sweetness."

Likewise, the way he tells his story, it possesses its own gravity, dignity, and sweetness (and candor and roughness and wit). He doesn't mince words, about his family, his acquaintances, or himself. But the stories are not gratuitous or indulgent; again and again they lift into an understanding and come back to Austen and her work.

The book's lessons can be found in any life. The way the author tells them, it seems to me that I am learning them now, whether in fact I learned them long ago, am in the midst of learning them, or haven't learned them yet. By the end, I was actually beaming. I won't say more.
Aside from the cover artwork for this book, featuring the clothing of a paper doll man (entirely inappropriate to the seriousness of the subject matter), I consider this one of the most important books I've ever read.

Besides explaning the phenomenon of Jane Austen in fresh, new ways, the book also lets the reader, as the author bares his soul, live with Deresiewicz a short period in the first several decades of his life. He had been stuck in the immaturity from which many 21st century young people suffer, and from which many older folks never do manage to make their exit.

For a real graduate school course and its real and gifted professor, the author begins--against all previous instincts--to read Jane Austen. He notices that Austen broke all the conventional author rules. Her hidden way of teaching what she wanted her readers to learn by means of her characters and her subtle commentary on them was what brought Deresiewicz finally to know himself and understand why his relations with real people in his life weren't working very well.

To learn from this book, the reader needs a prior acquaintance with at least a few of the Jane Austen novels. The reader is taken back and forth between the author's excellent analysis of Austen's work to the life of Deresiewicz himself and how, as he reads Jane Austen, he begins to change his attitudes toward people, toward matrimony, and a host of other things that plague people in any century. Deresiewicz comes to see that he can stay in his safe, bungled, depressed life or grow by listening and more objectively studying the everyday folks around him, even as Austen did. He begins to do this once he has absorbed certain key values that the reading of Austen novels has taught him.

Anyone who loves Jane Austen in her printed works (and not just in the movies and stories that are spin-offs from them) should profit from this unusual book. It began reminding me somewhat of Tuesdays with Morrie and that author's professor, but it is definitely a unique life journey aided by the tutelege of a classic author from the late 1700's/early 1800s in England.

Jane Austen changed Deresiewicz; in turn, Deresiewicz is changing me.