Love and Friendship: A Textbook on Relations Between the Sexes

Love and Friendship: A Textbook on Relations Between the Sexes

Even now, Lady Susan remains an extraordinarily vivid figure. Such an accurate grasp of relations between men and women comes, on the one hand, from keen observation and practice, and on the other, from sheer talent. Behind the text, one can faintly detect the sly, clever, and slightly malicious smile of the author, Jane Austen. I imagine that in an era when the balance between men and women was so severely unequal, a novel like this must have caused a tremendous stir among female readers, perhaps even becoming a kind of textbook for dealing with relations between the sexes. Of course, in the eyes of morally upright critics, Lady Susan’s conduct is disgraceful. But what she does is simply to fight for a chance at survival for herself—and for her daughter—in a world ruled by the law of the jungle. As a young widow, her beauty, intelligence, and deep understanding of men may well have been her only truly effective weapons. And all Lady Susan does is wield those weapons to their utmost.

The story’s style is quintessential Austen: the plot rises and falls almost casually, with twists unfolding where one least expects them. But unlike Pride and Prejudice, every crisis here is resolved by Lady Susan’s own eloquence. Her complete confidence in the face of danger, along with her quick wit and ability to improvise according to circumstance, leaves men hopelessly enthralled without their even realizing it. It is impossible not to find her both astonishing and deeply frightening. Love already tends to make people blind, and before a master of emotion like Lady Susan, that blindness becomes truly dangerous. In the story, Lady Susan does not deliberately set out to harm others—though those around her are indeed hurt by her actions—but if she wished to, she clearly has the ability. And if someone were to become entirely her emotional captive, one careless step could leave them utterly heartbroken. Yet when confronted with someone as charming as Lady Susan, falling under her spell is hard to avoid, so long as she wills it. In Love and Friendship, men’s obstinacy, pedantry, naivete, and foolishness are displayed in full. Perhaps this does not represent all of Jane Austen’s views on men, but it is at least a loud protest against the absurdity of a male-dominated world. Women are in no way intellectually inferior to men, yet the world is ruled by these men who seem at once foolish and stubborn, while women can obtain property—or even the right to survive—only through men. That is profoundly tragic.

In The Jane Austen Book Club, each person draws some kind of insight or influence from Austen’s stories. When I finished Pride and Prejudice, I felt that this was indeed true; after Love and Friendship, I became even more convinced of it. Whether ten years pass, or a hundred, or two hundred, people keep growing up and growing old, and the problems each generation faces at certain stages of life—love, friendship, family affection, and the entanglements, jealousy, and passion that come with them—remain fundamentally the same. Human nature has not changed all that much with the times, and our society, in its essence, has not undergone any radical transformation either. When it comes to relations between men and women, Jane Austen is a master, and Love and Friendship is one of the textbooks she wrote.