Deresiewicz, William "A Jane Austen Education"

Deresiewicz, William "A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter" - 2011

I have read quite a few books about Jane Austen as part of the #Reading Austen project this year. And this one will be quite on top of my favourites of the year and of the books I read for the project - besides all of Jane Austen's books, of course.

What I really liked was the author linking his life to all of Jane Austen's books. It starts when he is 26 and reads his first one: Emma and ends with Sense & Sensibility when he finally meets his wife, after having told himself all the time that he would never marry.

He also didn't want to read Jane Austen, thought it would just be something like a chick lit with no content whatsoever. But he had to read the first one for a class and then found that Jane Austen has a lot to tell and to teach us.

How he develops from a conceited, big-headed young student into a decent human being, that is the background to this book. Something we can all learn from.

From the back cover:

"Before Jane Austen, William Deresiewicz was a very different young man. A sullen and arrogant graduate student, he never thought Austen would have anything to offer him. Then he read Emma — and everything changed.

In this unique and lyrical book, Deresiewicz weaves the misadventures of Austen’s characters with his own youthful follies, demonstrating the power of the great novelist’s teachings — and how, for Austen, growing up and making mistakes are one and the same. Honest, erudite, and deeply moving, A Jane Austen Education is the story of one man’s discovery of the world outside himself."