B.D. McClay points out that Anne Elliot is 27 in Persuasion, that Lily Bart is 29 in The House of Mirth. Fanny Price is 18 when most of the action unfolds in Mansfield Park, which I just finished reading. We don’t know Anna Karenina’s exact age, but she’s in her late 20s. Emma Bovary kills herself when she is only 27 years old (insert joke about the 27 club). It’s funny to me that I spent my 20s in agony at the passage of time, and now when I’m on the cusp of turning 30 I’m calm, excited. What I was anxious about was not time; it was plot. I was interested in how a particular story would play out. It was the story of my writing—the story of a book—and then the story of my love life. I treated my life as a novel, because all I’ve ever known is how to read things like I read novels. Sometimes that’s made things better, and sometimes I think it’s made things worse.
Lately I’ve been circling back to Jane Austen. I read Mansfield Park recently because of this review, the only Austen novel I’ve never read; the thing I find interesting about it is the idea that you can determine someone’s character simply by waiting. In fact, the optimal thing to do is simply to wait instead of act. Fanny Price’s strategy, you could say, was to go slow. (Of course, the whole point of Fanny is that she doesn’t have a strategy. She is the most passive girl in the world, which is sort of the point.)
In most novels, our character’s fates are determined their errors of judgment, often a result of going too fast: Marianne commits to the charming, aesthetically and intellectually sophisticated Willoughby too fast, only to realize later that he is an untrustworthy cad; Emma leaps into affair after affair with unsuitable men, after marrying someone she barely knows. Isabel Archer says no to Warburton and Caspar Goodwood, only to say yes to Gilbert Osmond, who is a very bad man indeed. Dorothea marries Casaubon because she wants someone to worship intellectually, only to realize he is a poor partner, and does not live up to her lofty expectations.
So it’s bad to go too fast. But also going slow does not mean things will work out for you: just look at Lily Bart. Reader, you see now that all my life I have been tortured by the oldest problem, just like everyone else: you have limited discernment, and limited time. But love is important, and we must get it right. Many model it as game theory, but the interesting thing about Jane Austen is that she understands that marrying well is also about virtue ethics.