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

That winter, I took her down to Mexico for a kind of relationship honeymoon. She’d told me how she’d loved the beach vacations that she’d taken as a girl, so I decided to surprise her with something extravagant. We went down to a little cabana place on an island near Cancún, where we spent the week lying on the beach like a pair of lizards, wandering the village streets, and racing mopeds along the back roads.

As winter turned into spring, our phone calls began to take on the structure of dates. We’d start by pouring ourselves drinks and catching each other up on the previous couple of days’ worth of news. I’d sit out on the fire escape as the weather got warmer, the smell of lilac wafting up from the yards below. Then we’d each make dinner, sharing jokes and stories all the while, then keep talking far into the night, until we were literally falling asleep in midsentence.

When summer came, I went to stay with her in Cleveland. Some of my New York acquaintances were a little appalled that I was involved with someone who lived in the Midwest. One, that glamorous woman who had broken up with the guy from Ohio because he didn’t dress well enough, ran into me one night. “Are you still going out with that girl from St. Louis ?” she demanded. When I introduced my girlfriend to another one of those people, the son of a fairly well-known modern artist, he said, “Oh, I’ve been to Cincinnati. I thought it was just going to be a bunch of strip malls. But you know, it wasn’t really that bad.”

No, Cleveland (at least I knew the difference) wasn’t bad at all. There’s life, I discovered, outside New York. In fact, with the way my girlfriend made it come alive for me, I came to sort of love the place. As we drove and walked the neighborhoods and streets, she peeled back the layers of memory for me—showed me her old houses and old haunts, gave me the backstories, introduced me to the people she’d been telling me about. She was retracing her life, and weaving me into it.

I set up my computer in her living room and started hammering out the introduction to my dissertation, the last piece left. I turned her on to Leonard Cohen, with whom I’d been obsessed since the darkest days of my depression, and she taught me how to drink martinis. I hid about a half dozen presents all over the apartment on her birthday that July, and she baked me fortune cookies with naughty messages inside. Of course, my little gray cat had come with me for the summer—she would curl up on the pillow between us—and when I went back to Brooklyn at the end of August, I left her in my girlfriend’s care, to keep a little piece of me with her.

It wasn’t long before they both were back. By the end of the year, my girlfriend had packed up and moved in with me. Now my city became hers, too. We ate black bean cakes in Chinatown, blini in Brighton Beach, and bowls of flaczki at Christine’s. We watched the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset from the railing of the Promenade. The owner of a shop in Little Italy helped us toast our relationship with tiny cups of fifty-year-old balsamic vinegar that he pulled out from the back of the store, as thick and sweet as maple syrup.

It was all falling together. She was by my side when I finally finished my dissertation that spring, and she was there when, miracle of miracles, I actually landed a job. It was even in Connecticut. We were going to be joining the circle of friends, the substitute family, through whom we had found each other.

And all the while, she had been meeting the important people in my life. She met my parents—the first time I had ever brought anyone home—who seemed to have trouble believing that their baby boy (I was thirty-three by that point) was finally growing up. She met my professor, who had us over for dinner and treated us like equals. She met the couple who had introduced me to the high-society crowd, who didn’t get her at all. And she became acquainted with my best friend, who really did know me better than I knew myself, because she welcomed her as the partner I had always been searching for.

That first weekend she came to Brooklyn, the visit that sealed our fate, she brought along a book, just in case there was some downtime. She knew I was a graduate student by that point, but she had no idea what I studied or whom I was writing my dissertation about. It was just the thing she happened to be reading at the time.

The book was Pride and Prejudice.

Reader, I married her.

My first thanks go to my agent, Elyse Cheney, who encouraged me to undertake this project and provided invaluable, unstinting guidance in shaping it. Gratitude also to my editor, Ann Godoff, for giving me the freedom to find my voice, and to the staffs at Cheney Literary and Penguin Press, for all their creativity and care. Thanks as well to the friends who believed in the book along the way and who helped me believe in it, too. Two volumes were indispensable: Claire Tomalin’s biography and Deirdre Le Faye’s edition of the letters. My highest thanks go to Karl Kroeber, who started it all, and to Aleeza Jill Nussbaum, who gave me the perfect ending.