You Can’t Always Get What You Want; or, Jane Austen and the Dangers of the Imagination

My favourite moment in any book ever written is chapter 43 of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. As I’m about to publish my first book, Women and Property Ownership in Jane Austen, with Peter Lang at the end of July, chapter 4, in which I write about it, also continues to be the section I’m the most proud of. In chapter 43, Austen describes Elizabeth visiting the imponent estate of the man who, without her knowing yet, will soon become her husband. As Elizabeth walks around Pemberley and admires the extent of its fertile woods, the winding of its river, and the tastefully chosen furniture in its many rooms, she decides that this is very much the place for her. More than this, she begins to imagine herself living there, imaginatively taking possession of the estate. Regretting her decision to turn down Darcy’s offer, she pictures an imagined future that could have been and can still be her own: “‘And of this place,’ thought she, ‘I might have been mistress! With these rooms I might now have been familiarly acquainted! Instead of viewing them as a stranger, I might have rejoiced in them as my own.’” Elizabeth may not know for sure that she will ever become part of Pemberley, but us readers know better. The minute Darcy walks into her and warmly welcomes her into the estate it becomes clear that she can absolutely start packing her bags (or ask a servant to do it).

When I heard that I had an interview in a city and in a country I had never visited before, but of which I knew a fair bit about, I had the sneaking suspicion that I would feel as if I had found myself in the middle of an Austen novel when I got there. I was right. “You would thrive there,” some friends of mine from that city had told me beforehand. I only had 48 hours there, but it was enough for it to become my favourite city and my favourite country in the world. I had tried very hard not to feel this way, but in the end it was inevitable. To paraphrase Austen, around every corner there were beauties to be seen. Turning into a new street as I walked around the city, I chuckled like Keira Knightley in a “Oh, come on!” fashion as she sees Pemberley for the first time in the 2005 adaptation of the novel. Of course the next street was even more idyllic than the one before. Of course everyone was incredibly nice to me, offering me suggestions for places to see and then asking excitedly whether I had visited them yet when they next saw me. Of course after visiting the local vegan restaurant a couple of times everyone there welcomed me as if I were a close friend. Of course all the students in the teaching demonstration were engaged, intelligent and perceptive, making me excited about the prospect of teaching them. Of course my prospective colleagues were kind and encouraging, the interview feeling like the conversation everyone has always told me a good interview should feel like. Of course everyone from the housekeeper at the hotel to the officer at border control (who wished me luck when I told him I had come for an interview) were some of the nicest people I had ever met. Of course the view from its most famous landmark was so incredibly beautiful that even while being showered with rain I still stood on top of it and, like Elizabeth, imagined what life would be like if I suddenly became a part of this place. The city was welcoming me with open arms. It was exactly like being an Austen heroine.

Except that I was in the wrong Austen novel. In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne Dashwood has an experience that is both similar and incredibly different from that of Elizabeth’s. In this novel Marianne too visits the estate of a prospective husband, only to become completely entranced by it. Though we don’t witness it ourselves, we find out that Willoughby has shown Marianne around the estate he expects to inherit, and Marianne, unaware at this point of the dangers of this, begins to imagine herself as its mistress. In this tour around the estate, Marianne walks around the rooms she would be occupying. I was shown the building where my office would be. Marianne is shown the grounds around which she would be walking every day. I was shown a great path for a morning run. Marianne gets shown the horse that she would be riding. I was told how much money I would receive towards a bicycle every couple of years. By the end of it, Marianne has forgotten all about her current home and is imagining herself living nowhere but in this fantastic new place. So was I.

Of course, we know that this will never come to pass. Austen makes sure to offer us plenty of clues: Willoughby has £600 a year and is already in debt, even though he has no one to support other than himself at this point. The estate is not his yet, and the sorry state of its current furniture seems to indicate that money to manage it is already scarce. But Marianne, of course, is oblivious to this, and when she finds out that Willoughby has chosen to marry someone else — a rice heiress, no less — she is devastated. Through Marianne, Austen shows us how cruel it can be to invite someone to imagine a future for themselves that will never materialise.

Well-meaning friends will say that nothing has changed; I have started out with nothing and I have neither gained nor lost anything. But, of course, as Marianne shows us, and as Austen absolutely understood, this isn’t true. If I walked into the plane teary-eyed because I didn’t want to leave, then clearly something had changed. The mourning Marianne experiences in itself implies a feeling of loss. Perhaps not a literal loss, as she never signed a contract giving her full legal possession of Willoughby’s estate, but a loss nonetheless. Marianne had begun to imagine herself as belonging in Allenham and having it belong to her, and this feeling of affective ownership is so powerful that the fact that it was all based on her imagination doesn’t make the loss any less painful for her.

Unlike Marianne, I might have known better. I, of course, knew that the odds were only 25%, that me having travelled all that way, put so much work into it and given what I believed was the best interview I had ever given, guaranteed absolutely nothing, as three out of four of us would inevitably come out of this experience disappointed. And yet, 48 hours after arriving in the city I was completely in love with it, and when 48 hours after leaving it I was watching Mick Jagger sing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and singing along out of the top of my lungs, I knew this was my very own process of mourning. The radio silence could only mean that no news was bad news, and, sure enough, another twenty four hours would confirm it.

I realised that, much as I had tried to stop myself from doing so, I had begun to imagine myself living in this place. This shop would be the first I would show my dad when he came to visit. This train station is where on weekends I would catch a train to visit my best friend, who conveniently only lives an hour and a half away. This is the house where I would have lived, and this is where I would have parked my bicycle. This is the path where I would have done my morning run, if I could ever be bothered to take up running again. This is the vegan restaurant where I would have lunch every other day, and won’t it feel amazing when, a couple of months from now, I walk through these doors again, and everyone here who already knows me will cheer because they’ll know I got the job in the end. This is the bookshop where I would buy my books. These are the students whose final-year dissertations I would supervise. This is the spot where I would sit and read before my next class. This is where my office would be, and where my copies of Austen’s novels would sleep.

It’s up for debate whether Marianne truly learns anything from this experience or allows it to change her in any way, and I’m not sure myself of what I have learnt from my own. I have a new idea for a trade book on Austen I want to write, but this is no solution to my problem, which is that my current contract runs out in 11 weeks and that my university can’t keep me because it can’t afford me (a statement that makes fellow academics nod knowingly and non-academics chuckle). I now have a new favourite city, a new favourite country, and a new life goal. I will never stop until I find myself doing a job exactly like that in that country, with the ultimate goal of moving to that city, but this seems like a pointless lesson to have learnt, since there is nothing I can do about it right now. The usual consolations of academic job rejections are denied to me: this was literally the perfect job in the perfect university in the perfect city in the perfect country. I can’t console myself with the thought that the job wasn’t that great, that the contract was temporary and precarious, that the city wasn’t really somewhere I would want to live. The only consolation I can think of is that no disappointment will ever be as painful as this. Of course, Marianne thought very much the same. And yet, in a matter of months, she was married to Colonel Brandon, who has four times more money than Willoughby, having completely changed her mind. I’m looking forward to it.