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The headline is not a typo, but I did mistakenly write “Austin” recently. In a previous piece in Discourse [ [link removed] ], I made a quip about “a Jane Austen dinner party.” In the draft, however, I had spelled it “Austin,” like the Texas capital. A terrible speller, I had only just started thinking about her and hadn’t even noticed the different vowel. At that point I had only read one of her books—“Pride and Prejudice”—and had just completed it some weeks before. As of this writing a few months later, though, I’ve read all six of her completed novels.
If you had asked me a year ago whether I wanted to read all of Austen’s finished novels in the course of a year, I would have told you to take the next post to town. I had given P&P a stab in my younger years and found it soppy and tedious, not bothering to finish it. Yet here I am now, a converted Austenian. What changed? Primarily, 20 years of aging has led me to appreciate the subtleties of small talk and the benefits of dinner parties. With 2025 being the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, I wanted to share my “conversion” story and suggest maybe all of us, especially those who are a bit older, could use a bit of Austen in our lives.
Charles > Jane?
Jane Austen’s novels present an extremely different world from our own, but with characters that are somehow immensely modern and relatable. The daughter of a Church of England rector who was educated by her several older brothers, Austen grew up in an age of social stratification pummeled by political turmoil. Nearly the entirety of her adult life witnessed war between the industrializing British Empire and Revolutionary-cum-Napoleonic France.
Never marrying, Austen—who lived from 1775 to 1817—buckled down to a relatively short life of observing and eventually chronicling the mores of the landed gentry from her perch on the lowest rung of what was then considered good society. It was a world of large estates, (generally large) fixed incomes, country-house balls, country-walking ladies, first-son spendthrifts, second-son vicars and an endless parade of subtle social cues. As depicted by Austen, it all seems unshakably stable compared with the realities of an often-mad king, the shadow of a French invasion and the back-and-forth of vituperative Whig and Tory governments. Yet, within the seams of Austen’s pages can be glimpsed some worry about all this—the young men in regiments, the naval rotations and the shaky finances of formerly great families.
I knew some of this when, at the age of 28, I began listening to an audio version of P&P as I trained for a marathon (back when I did that kind of thing). I didn’t have much time for the gossip of who looked at whom at the ball or the mother-led matrimonial engineering. After slogging through about two-thirds of Mrs. Bennet’s intrusive matchmaking and complete lack of self-awareness, I couldn’t continue, and I switched to another book on tape available at the local library, Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations.” Now there was a story: banished convicts, shady lawyers and unspeakable family secrets. Sure, there’s a bit of social small talk with Miss Havisham, but it only adds to the mystery. As for Miss Austen, I said adieu to all that nonsense.
Almost 20 years and a growing family later, I had been laboring on a project that overlaps with British life in the early 19th century. A friend was organizing a reading group that included P&P. I thought this could give me some insights into the social life of the time while I once again grinned and bore Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy’s argumentative flirting.
To my surprise, there was no grinning or bearing. This time I found Austen delightful, both in P&P and in a couple other works we read: “Catharine or the Bower [ [link removed] ]”—a juvenile work recently “completed” by a modern Austenian—and her last work, the also unfinished “Sanditon [ [link removed] ],” which her hotly [ [link removed] ] contested [ [link removed] ] mysterious [ [link removed] ] illness cut short. Overall, I found the small talk insightful, the marriage machinations compelling and the serial dinner parties and balls enlightening.
Just before the last reading group session, my wife bought me a set of all six published novels, which seemed to mean fate’s hand had intervened and I must now travel down the rest of Austen Road. My group members (overwhelmingly women, unsurprisingly) excitedly advised on the best reading order (“‘Mansfield Park’ is complicated, so leave that to later, and then ‘Persuasion’ is the cherry on top!”). In the end, after P&P it was “Sense and Sensibility,” “Emma,” “Northanger Abbey,” “Mansfield Park” and finally the cherry.
Maybe my strange new appreciation for the small talk was largely due to my lovely reading group. But I think being older and raising children helped. As for appreciating dinner parties, that’s connected to what’s happened to our world in the past 20-plus years, something all of us are just coming to grips with.
Novels About Nothing
During my teens I was a massive fan of “Seinfeld.” I’m not alone there, of course, although I will say I was a fan from the beginning, before it was a hit. As Larry David and his friend repeatedly put it, “Seinfeld” was “a show about nothing.” The four main characters—Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer—seem to spend most of their time on Manhattan’s Upper West Side discussing and fighting through aspects of life that everyone experiences but nobody talks about. Much of this conversation has to do with serial failures in their love lives, but the show also explores the inner dialogs of our minds, from chip double-dipping to remembering where you parked.
What I missed in my first brush with P&P was that the conversations between the likes of sweet Jane Bennet and the conniving Bingley sisters, Mrs. Bennet and the self-important Mr. Collins or manipulative Lady Catherine de Bourgh and the independent heroine Elizabeth were of the same substance. When reading P&P a second time, I thought, “That’s exactly what I would have thought,” or, simply, “Nailed it.” That was true even though the subject matter can be so ordinary. The banalities of a life full of drawing, carriage riding and waiting for an invitation are, on their own, the same “nothing” as George and Jerry ruminating on why people like to say “salsa.” [ [link removed] ] Yet the novel is actually about so much more: class, gender, power, money, virtue, obsession and on and on.
The “nothings” of Austen are more of a seasoned kind than Seinfeld’s, which is why I had to wait several decades to appreciate one while I understood the other in my teens. Flirtatious dialogue or subtle threats of disinheritance don’t do much for us when we’re younger—at least for overconfident young men like me. After the ups and downs of life, career, marriage and children, however, those social cues hit me just like a double-dip of a tortilla chip did when I was 15. Humility—which eventually comes for us all—allows us to appreciate Austen better.
Learning how complicated the world and its inhabitants can be is another lesson of growing older. I’m not an Austen scholar and have read almost nothing of the biographical or other secondary literature. But when Freudians target Austen’s work, I’m betting they spend much of their time on what I was (correctly) told was her most “complicated” novel, “Mansfield Park,” the tale of Fanny Price and her adopted home.
Almost every character in “Mansfield Park” is messed up. Fanny herself, the “poor relation” forgotten by her own parents and constantly put down by her rich relatives, desperately needs therapy. Lady Bertram, Fanny’s aunt, means well but sleepwalks through life and neglects everyone close to her. Fanny’s other aunt, Mrs. Norris, is a sociopath who is particularly cruel to the defenseless Fanny. Maria and Julia, Lady Bertram’s daughters, could also use a few years with a shrink and are wildly immature for their age, leading to some truly catastrophic marital decisions. Henry Crawford, a new acquaintance of the Bertrams, is a well-disguised predator while his sister stands by as a calibrated enabler. Sir Thomas Bertram, the patriarch, at times gets it but is absent (both geographically and emotionally) for a large part of the novel, and he fails to investigate problems or make a serious attempt to set things right.
And in “Mansfield Park” I recognized another, more twisted, comedy of recent times: “Arrested Development.” The cult classic that barely limped through [ [link removed] ] three initial seasons on FOX depicts a formerly rich and proud family full of psychodrama with one (kind of) normal helmsman, Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman), at its center just barely keeping everything from imploding. Journeying through Fanny’s life, I couldn’t help but think of Michael and his gang. Likely no amount of therapy or legal advice (certainly not from their incompetent attorney, played by Henry Winkler) could have saved them from their travails—other than a suggestion not to torch their family business, the banana stand [ [link removed] ]. And the same likely was true of Fanny and her troupe.
The characters in other Austen novels certainly had their issues—snobbish Emma (who you may know better as Cher in the wonderful adaptation “Clueless”) needed several thumps on the head to take her down a few notches, while the lying and manipulative John Thorpe of “Northanger Abbey” was simply what we in high school would call a scumbag—but the confluence of all of them in one great house makes “Mansfield Park” a Jason Bateman adaptation that very much needs to happen.
The psychological complexity and the richness of ordinary life depicted in Austen’s novels all add up to so much more than “nothing.” But unlike Pip’s adventures in “Great Expectations,” those of the Bertrams (or the Dashwoods from “Sense and Sensibility” or Woodhouses from “Emma”) are largely between one’s walls, or even one’s ears. Perhaps appreciating all this is one thing that’s worth getting older for.
Dinner Party Alienation
The “nothing” with which Austen’s novels are concerned is largely about social relationships. It is unusual to be alone in an Austen novel. The churn of teas and balls, trips to Bath or London and visits to aunts in unnamed counties (“She left for ________”) is relentless. Someone has to be deliberately kept “in” and hidden from view (such as Fanny) to feel alienation from human contact. More likely the temptation is to find the torrent of company stifling and yearn for an escape, as the naive Catherine Morland does in “Northanger Abbey” by reading “horrid” novels and interpreting real life through their lens.
Today things are quite different. Setting aside Facebook friends and other phantom online contacts, people are ever more isolated. I think some of the evidence for this can be overstated, but it is hard to deny that people spend less quality time with other people than they used to and that this is a cause for serious concern. Just one small example: In 1990, 33% of Americans said they have 10 or more “good friends,” [ [link removed] ] but only 13% said the same in 2021. Meanwhile, the number who said they have no good friends grew from 3% to 12% over the same period. People have others over to dinner less and visit others less. There’s an “epidemic of loneliness” [ [link removed] ] at all age levels.
This phenomenon has various proposed causes, many of them simply technological. In the early 1800s there was no radio, TV or internet to entertain the family, so it made sense for the Dashwood women of “Sense and Sensibility” to have their neighbors, the Middletons and the Palmers, over to eat and play cards yet again because it was more entertaining than rereading a Gothic novel. But there’s a long list of other suspected causes of loneliness, including declining church attendance [ [link removed] ], smaller household size [ [link removed] ] and the prevalence of single-family zoning [ [link removed] ]. All of these plausibly make it less likely you’d invite people over.
I wrote about this phenomenon [ [link removed] ] a few years ago while reviewing some [ [link removed] ] good [ [link removed] ] books [ [link removed] ] on it and related subjects. I didn’t have great answers on how to fix this problem then, and I don’t have much better ones today. I did come away with a wonderful insight from Tim Carney’s “Alienated America [ [link removed] ],” though. As I restated it: “Dependable social bonds and networks that promote individual flourishing and the flourishing of communities are the result of people joining civic groups even though that often isn’t the reason they join those civic groups.”
In other words, people join associations because they want to get in shape, meet potential clients or save their souls, not necessarily because they’re looking for community. But the community and friends come anyway. To put it in the terminology of Adam Ferguson [ [link removed] ] and Adam Smith [ [link removed] ], entrepreneurs don’t sell food and clothing in order to feed and dress people, but that is the result of their behavior—a product of human action but not of human design.
It’s easy to expand this insight to dinner parties. In Austen’s day you might have planned a picnic [ [link removed] ] or thrown a ball [ [link removed] ] or organized a group to attend a concert [ [link removed] ] for the immediate reason that it was a lot more fun than the quiet of staying home in pre-electronic life. But the lasting social bonds you gained from that interaction made for a healthy society. In an age with fewer dinner parties because people have many more distractions, you’re going to get fewer friendships, less robust networks and more loneliness. Just as employment without physical labor, plus abundant cheap and tasty food, has created a world where we have to consciously struggle to not get fat, we also have to specifically work to make many of the friendships and social connections that in Austen’s day simply came with breathing English air.
Even though we lack the numerous servants of Austen’s main characters, in an age of takeout it’s actually not that hard to entertain. Asking people to gather at one’s home for dinner, croquet on the lawn or any one of a thousand other excuses for human interaction is easier today than it’s ever been, given technological advances ranging from cars to dishwashers and vacuum cleaners. Hospitality is a universal value across different times and cultures. Yet in our age of marvels it’s done less—or, increasingly, not at all. Austen’s supposedly unrealistic, idealistic and “snooty” stories remind us that it can—and should—be done much more.
Austen is the ultimate antidote to any lingering squeamishness against social gatherings left over from our COVID-induced social vacation. Perhaps some of her characters see too many people too much of the time and are rife with anxiety because of it. And many of her characters are terrible people. But there are terrible people in every age. Her display of so many people of all temperaments spending their time together reminds us that we must remember the social aspect of the human animal. That is one among the many lessons of Austen that I’m now hopefully old enough to learn and appreciate. If you practice your small talk, accept invitations, visit your aunts, hone your virtues (including thrift), mind your manners and search for a partner you truly love, all will be well. Just don’t be afraid to try therapy in the meantime.

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