A graduate student at the time, I was as arrogant as they come and didn’t think there was much anyone could teach me about life—especially not Jane Austen, the godmother of chick-lit. Imagine my surprise when she taught me not just how to grow up, but how to be a man.
Like so many guys, I thought a good conversation meant holding forth about all the supposedly important things I knew: books, history, politics. But I wasn’t just aggressively sure of myself. I was also oblivious to the feelings of the people around me, a bulldozer stuck in overdrive.
In fact, I was a lot like Emma, the heroine of that first Austen novel I read—was forced to read, actually, because I thought her fiction sounded trivial and boring.
Via Joe Carter at First Things, whose Carter’s Theorem states “that all complex behavior of advanced mammals can be explained by reference to the novels of Jane Austen.”