A certain kind of story (2)

If I am right, and, obviously, I think I am, then the people who say "What Would Jane Do?" are missing the point. For the real lesson Austen wants to teach us is not how to make particular moral decisions but how to live a certain kind of story. (I'd even say that one of the most satisfying things about reading Austen is that she shows us how we can expect to make bad moral decisions while still living the right sort of life.)

Elsewhere I have talked about being a certain kind of person but, I hope it is now clear, being a certain kind of person is the same thing as being the heroine of a certain kind of story.

And let me take you back:

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.

This is getting way ahead of the story but ...

A fairly obvious objection here is to say, "Well of course Catherine Morland and the other Austen heroines live a certain kind of life but that is because they have Jane Austen behind the curtain pulling the levers for them."

And Jane Austen would say, "Well yes but I do believe that Anne Eliot would have been the same heroine even if she'd not been able to marry in the end. That particular lever I pulled wouldn't change the person I tell this story about if I had left the lever unpulled." And Miss Austen is too modest to point it out but she herself is proof of this. Better to not marry at all, as she advised others, than to settle for any marriage but the right kind.

That, as long as I am going on about it, is why some of us think the last three books are so far superior to the first three. All of them allow for the vicissitudes of life. Jane Austen writes them out to their comedic finish but she lets us see enough that we can imagine a different ending; imagine an ending that is not so dramatically satisfying, and perhaps not as satisfying for the heroine either, but an ending that meets the moral requirements of a happy and well-lived life.