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A review by becca_g_powell
A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz
1.0
Wow. This book is made up of almost nothing but platitudes and cliches, although the author explicitly points out that Jane Austen would never have used such things. We are constantly reminded about the author's life as a Graduate Student at an Elite University as if all of the readers should be desperately impressed by his "educational success." The writing is painfully formulaic. I started highlighting each time he used the sentence structure "blah blah blah, I now saw/I now realized/Austen is telling us, is blah blah blah" but it started getting too cumbersome, with several instances per page. As an English Professor at an Elite University he should know better.
About a third of the book is a cliff notes summary of each novel, the next third is long explanations about the non-remarkable life events of the author at the time he read it ("my rich friends were jerks," "my dad just doesn't GET me"), and the final third was the worst - trivializing each book into a neat package of a Life Lesson that single handedly tells the author something obvious about his life (after reading Emma, he seems to have realized for the first time that maybe he shouldn't be a jerk to people.) I love Austen novels, but this book may have made me like them LESS.
About a third of the book is a cliff notes summary of each novel, the next third is long explanations about the non-remarkable life events of the author at the time he read it ("my rich friends were jerks," "my dad just doesn't GET me"), and the final third was the worst - trivializing each book into a neat package of a Life Lesson that single handedly tells the author something obvious about his life (after reading Emma, he seems to have realized for the first time that maybe he shouldn't be a jerk to people.) I love Austen novels, but this book may have made me like them LESS.