It makes for a nice circle: Deresiewicz sums up “Emma” with dash, adds a smart critical element and brings it back home to his own life. Emma’s dawning awareness parallels Deresiewicz’s growing self-knowledge, and he comes to see Austen’s textual cleverness - she effects a full and surprise reversal on the reader - as having the same literary ambitions he’d looked for in the works of authors like James Joyce. What turns him around is Austen’s novel “Emma.” The main character charmed Deresiewicz with her certainty and clarity of purpose - which, late in the book, is revealed to be not at all on target. I was also oblivious to the feelings of people around me.” But I wasn’t just aggressively certain of myself…. Like so many guys, I thought that a good conversation meant holding forth about all the supposedly important things I knew: books, history, politics, whatever. In fact, I wonder that my friends put up with me at all. “I was not the easiest person to get along with. He is candid when describing himself as an intellectually ambitious grad student. “Wasn’t she the one who wrote those silly romantic fairy tales? Just thinking about her made me sleepy,” Deresiewicz writes. It begins with the young scholar - hot on literary theory, the Clash and Dostoevsky - coming at Austen with skepticism. William Deresiewicz, a fortysomething literary critic and former Yale professor, devoted part of his doctoral dissertation to Austen and has published a scholarly book about her, “Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets.” In this new book, he clambers down from the ivory tower and combines deft descriptions of her novels with something more, a memoir of growing up, with insights provided by Austen’s writings. That’s what “A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter” is ready to reveal.

But with adoring Austen a largely female pursuit, something nags: Can dudes love her too?

Jane Austen’s keen social observations and delightfully witty, sometimes foolish and occasionally loathsome characters have made her one of our most lasting writers - this year marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of her first novel, “Sense and Sensibility” - and earned her an avid fan base. How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter

Love and friendship summary jane austen