Jane Austen's Genius Guide to Life: On Love, Friendship, and Becoming the Person God Created You to Be

By Haley Stewart

Popular Catholic podcaster Haley Stewart insists that there’s no better life coach than nineteenth-century British novelist Jane Austen.

In this uniquely Catholic take, Stewart reveals Austen’s thoughtful, deeply personal exploration of human relationships—including with God—through her six novels. Stewart’s insights take you on a journey that is both literary and spiritual, revealing how Austen’s characters and themes can lead to you to discover and become the person God has called you to be.

Stewart draws fascinating connections between Austen’s novels and real life and introduces Austen as a capable life coach by how she guides her readers to understand virtue and vice through friendship, love, community, and God’s grace. Austen’s characters reveal how virtuous habits transform us and help us become who we were meant to be. Each chapter focuses on characters and virtues from a single novel:

• Do you find yourself swayed by superficial charm and yearn to see others more clearly? Let Elizabeth Bennet teach you how to recognize substance in others and address the pride in your own heart through the cultivation of humility (Pride and Prejudice).
• Are you stuck in selfishness that wounds others (and yourself)? Let Emma Woodhouse and George Knightley help you develop the compassion to see the world more clearly with the eyes of Christ (Emma).
• Do you get swept away into poor choices due to a lack of self-control? Let the Dashwood sisters show you the virtue of temperance and guide you to embrace your God-given personality and temperament (Sense and Sensibility.
• Do you have treasured ideals but struggle to live them out? Follow along with Edmund Bertram’s journey toward constancy through the example of Fanny Price (Mansfield Park).
• Have the disappointments of life grown resentment or bitterness in your heart? Be inspired by Anne Elliot’s vulnerable fortitude in the storms of life (Persuasion).
• Do you struggle to know what to do or who to believe in tricky situations? Join Catherine Morland in learning prudence to know and act on the truth (Northanger Abbey).

Whether you are already an Austen fan or are discovering her works for the first time, Stewart’s infectious enthusiasm and captivating spiritual insights will have you digging in to experience firsthand the characters and stories that have captured imaginations in book and film for more than two centuries.

Discussion questions and recommended film adaptations make this book suitable for individual or group use or as a high school classroom or homeschool resource. A free, downloadable leader’s guide is available at avemariapress.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ave Maria Press
• Release date: Mar 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781646801404

Haley Stewart

Haley Stewart is a Catholic author and the editor of Word on Fire Spark. Stewart was the cohost of the popular Fountains of Carrots podcast from 2014-2022. She is the author of Jane Austen's Genius Guide to Life, The Grace of Enough, and The Sister Seraphina Mysteries, a series for young readers. She has contributed to Evangelization & Culture, Plough, the University of Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal, Public Discourse, and America. She has four children and is married to a beekeeper/whisky distiller.

Book preview

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Haley Stewart takes ideas seriously and herself lightly. That makes her a perfect fit to discuss how Jane Austen used wit and humor to write primers in morality.

Leah Libresco Sargeant

Author of Arriving at Amen

Jane Austen has the uncanny knack of making timeless truths about human nature winsome for our twenty-first-century life, and Haley Stewart has the talent of making these truths accessible and applicable. As a fan of Austen’s beloved stories and characters, I’m so grateful to have a guide for turning these pleasurable reads into a compass for finding my way with virtue through our modern culture. I’m glad Stewart’s penned all of us this guidebook.

Tsh Oxenreider

Author of At Home in the World

Haley Stewart has written a fabulous confection of a book that long-time Janeites will devour with pleasure and that demonstrates to those new to Austen what all the fuss is about! Stewart combines scholarship, wit, and relatability with Austen’s immortal characters, creating a delightful study of virtue, vice, and encouragement to become the person God created you to be. I think Austen herself would’ve been pleased with this wonderful book.

Emily M. DeArdo

Author of Living Memento Mori

With her own unique verve and energy, Haley Stewart reveals the genuine genius of Jane Austen and her most memorable characters—from the iconic Dashwood sisters and Elizabeth Bennet to Fanny Price and Catherine Morland, as well as the men who alternately irritated and beguiled them. Stewart shows us how Austen’s keen insights on human vulnerabilities, her humor, her intellectual vigor, and her securely anchored faith can inspire us to live in a more balanced, and ultimately constructive, compassionate and clear-eyed way. If you love Austen, you will love this book. If you merely like Austen, you will learn to love her here and return to this book again and again for its deep voice of intelligent friendship and lively, joy-filled faith.

Elizabeth Scalia

Editor-at-large

Word on Fire Catholic Ministries

Jane Austen is one of my favorite authors, and it’s a pleasure to explore her books with Haley Stewart as a guide. With a light but sure touch, Stewart shows how we can learn to be more virtuous people through emulating Austen’s heroines, and in the process, we come to appreciate Austen’s writings all the more.

Holly Ordway

Cardinal Francis George Fellow of Faith and Culture

Word on Fire Institute

Though I went into this book with love for Jane Austen, Haley Stewart made me appreciate her so much more. And I own a shirt that says, ‘What Would Lizzy Do?’! I have been leaning on Austen’s works to get me through tough times and to celebrate the great ones for more than twenty-five years, and ‘life coach’ is the best way to describe her. Stewart also has a lot to say about virtue and putting it into practice. It is a superbly featured work!

Marcia Lane-McGee

Cohost of the Plaid Skirts and Basic Black podcast

Jane Austen as life coach? Haley Stewart’s delightful handbook just might convince you that the answers you’ve been looking for have been in the pages of your favorite novels all along.

Anne Bogel

Creator of Modern Mrs. Darcy

Unless noted otherwise, scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, DC, and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All Rights Reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

______________________________

© 2022 by Haley Stewart

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews, without written permission from Ave Maria Press®, Inc., P.O. Box 428, Notre Dame, IN 46556, 1-800-282-1865.

Founded in 1865, Ave Maria Press is a ministry of the United States Province of Holy Cross.

www.avemariapress.com

Paperback: ISBN-13 978-1-64680-139-8

E-book: ISBN-13 978-1-64680-140-4

Cover images © duncan1890 / Getty Images / DigitalVision Vectors.

Cover and text design by Katherine Robinson.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

For my mother,

Margot Payne,

who introduced me to my lifelong friend,

Jane Austen.

Contents

Introduction: Jane Austen, Life Coach

1. The Life and World of an Underestimated Genius

2. Mr. Darcy Learns to Laugh (Pride and Prejudice)

3. Knightley Speaks Frankly (Emma)

4. Fanny Price and the Stronghold of the Self (Mansfield Park)

5. Marianne Follows Elinor (Sense and Sensibility)

6. Catherine Learns to Read the World (Northanger Abbey)

7. The (Went)worth of a Soul (Persuasion)

8. A Wedding Feast and a World Renewed

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Appendix 1: Group Study Questions

Appendix 2: Plot and Character Summaries for Each Novel

Appendix 3: Explore Austen’s Novels in Film

Appendix 4: Suggested Reading

Notes

Introduction

Jane Austen, Life Coach

Philosophers tend to be obsessed with the theory of flames, but Jane Austen is the fire.

—Cornel West,

Power and Freedom in Jane Austen’s Novels

I know a guy who discovered Jane Austen the week of his thesis defense, my friend Dan, an English professor, told me.

What happened to him?

Oh, he bombed his defense. He read all six of her novels that week. He just couldn’t stop. He needed to prepare, but instead he stayed up for several days straight reading Austen.

Sounds about right. Discovering Jane Austen can be dangerous. You think it’s going to be all bonnets and ballgowns, and then she swoops in to change your life. Consider yourself warned. (It’s not too late. There’s still time to close this book and run!)

Jane Austen is a lot of things. She’s one of the finest novelists to write in the English language, a moral philosopher of the highest order, and a sharp social commentator. She’s also my life coach.

You may think I’m joking, but the fact that she died more than two hundred years ago has not been a problem for our relationship. I consider her to be a very close personal friend. And a friend of Jane’s is a friend of mine. You love Jane Austen? Great. I’m adding you to my Christmas list. And I know I’d hit it off with Dan’s friend who failed his thesis defense due to excessive Austen reading. (I haven’t tracked him down to confirm, but I imagine he has no regrets.)

I discovered Austen as a child. Her novels were on my parents’ bookshelves, and the film adaptations were on frequent replay. My understanding of friendship, family, and romantic love was shaped by her stories. But not only did they form my view of relationships; they also helped me decide what kind of person I wanted to be. Was I going to be driven by selfishness like Frank Churchill? Would I be as firm in my convictions as Fanny Price? Could I develop the discernment to tell the difference between a John Thorpe and a Henry Tilney? While I’ve looked to Austen for advice on love over the years (she is, after all, the queen of good romance), what I’ve come to appreciate above all else are her examinations of the human soul. What does a good person look like? How do I become one?

Austen doesn’t write goofy, one-dimensional people. Her characters are true to life—full of personality with natural tendencies, characteristics contributed to by their families or education, and a realistic mix of virtue and vice. There are (almost) no villains and (almost) no angels in the pages of her books. While I love Dickens, I have never encountered anyone in real life quite as nasty as Ebenezer Scrooge or as saccharine sweet as Tiny Tim. Austen’s characters, on the other hand, remind me of real and complicated people I could encounter at any moment. I have met women as likable (and slightly flawed) as Elizabeth Bennet and men as charming (and weak) as John Willoughby. All of Austen’s characters might remind you of someone you know—or even yourself! They may be on the path to self-knowledge and growth, or they might be blinded and thwarted by vice. But these characters are so alive that it is often hard for me to remember that they cannot leap off the pages of Austen’s books.

Jane Austen’s novels remain wildly popular after two hundred years in print. They’ve inspired a whole genre of books and films set in ballrooms and garden walks (on estates with extensive grounds, as Emma’s Mrs. Elton might note). But often these Austen-inspired stories leave something to be desired. The dresses are lovely—but it’s not Austen, you might hear a friend remark about a new costume drama. While we might enjoy a romp through a beautiful historical setting, it’s not the trappings that make Austen’s works popular centuries after publication. We are drawn in by characters who ring so true that we cannot help thinking of them as friends. And we are fascinated by an exploration of what it means to be a good person in Regency England—because despite the distance of a couple of centuries (and perhaps a few thousand pounds a year), we are fighting the same internal struggles today as Elizabeth Bennet, Marianne Dashwood, and Edmund Bertram were in Austen’s novels.

How can we learn humility and conquer pride like Elizabeth Bennet? Can we escape selfishness and develop compassion like Emma Woodhouse? How can we see past mere appearances to the heart of reality like Edmund Bertram? Can we control our passions like Elinor Dashwood, or will we be swept away by our emotions like Marianne? How do we gain the maturity to know how to act wisely as Catherine Morland needs to do? And when our lives don’t turn out as we want them to, can we face our trials with fortitude and grace, or will we get stuck in bitterness like Captain Wentworth?

The goal of any good life coach is to help you flourish—to envision what you want out of life and become the person who can overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of that reality. The lessons you learn from a good life coach will apply to the challenges you’ll face not only today but a decade (or five) from now. The best life coach would teach you to live well, and that’s exactly what Jane Austen does. She prompts us to ask, What makes someone a good person? Is it possible for me?

These questions are at the heart of everything! Philosophy and religion seek to address them, and art and literature attempt to explore them. As human beings, we pay attention to these questions, whether we realize it or not. We want friends who make us better people. We’re disturbed by inequality and injustice. We care about the right way to behave toward others, the best way to structure our lives, the best way to be governed. We might disagree about moral issues, but we’d be hard-pressed to find someone who lives as if being a good person doesn’t matter. We want to be good people. The question is, How?

Jane Austen helps us consider, What does it look like to be someone who does what is right even when it doesn’t reward them with wealth, power, or esteem? Are small vices a big deal? If we are enslaved to vice, how can we become virtuous people living in authentic freedom? Is that even possible? How does our virtue, or lack thereof, affect our families, friends, and communities?

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

One of my favorite professors in college, a brilliant and dynamic Irish medievalist, gave a lecture I’ll never forget. When trying to communicate why reading great texts of literature and philosophy of the past is important, she explained the concept of standing on the shoulders of giants. On our own, we cannot see very far. If the big questions of life are illuminated on the mountaintops, we can only see the foothills if we stand on our own two feet. But what if we turned to the wisdom of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents? What if we reached back even farther? When we do, we have a foundation to stand on that lifts us up to the heights of human wisdom. We stand on the shoulders of giants. One of these giants is Jane Austen.

But Austen was standing on other shoulders—all those that came before her. To answer the question of how to live the good life, Austen’s vision for human flourishing is indebted to the moral philosophy of ancient classical philosopher Aristotle (as Alasdair MacIntyre and others have pointed out).1 Did Jane Austen actually read his works? While I like the image of a young Jane sitting in the garden with her nose in a copy of the Nichomachean Ethics, we simply don’t know if she read Aristotle.2 What we do know is that she grew up in a scholarly household. Her parents even ran a school for boys in their home. The education her parents received and passed down to their children would have been influenced by the canon of Western literature and the ethics of Christian scholars such as St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante Alighieri. Austen’s novels are written in this grand tradition.

As a Catholic Christian, I