We are rapidly approaching the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death this July 24th. When I read and reread Austen, which I believe I do at least once a year, I am reminded of the power of reading a great book. Austen was a keen observer of human character, as are many of her protagonists. Each novel improves upon being reread and I learn more from her observations each time. Even those of her novels which I initially disliked have become increasingly dear to me, and even those which I loved from the first reveal more. Emma repulsed me at first, because I would be aghast if anyone tried to manipulate my life the way Emma tries to manipulate her friend Harriet Smith. While I still shy away from that behavior, I admire Emma’s humility in reforming herself in response to Mr. Knightly’s unflinching critique of her behavior and character. On the other hand, I have always loved reading Mansfield Park; but when I first read it, I did not realize how much Austen was saying about how our characters are formed and how we make our biggest decisions.

I'm struck and sometimes haunted by the line, “but habit, habit carried it” (Mansfield, 477). This line comes from a climactic scene that parts Mary Crawford and Edmund Bertram forever. Until this moment, Edmund, the second son of a country gentleman preparing for ordination, and Mary, a young woman raised on the city morals of London where liveliness and excitement are preferred over concerns for morality and family life, have been attracted to one another despite their differences. What is interesting about Mary is that she almost “converts” to Edward’s way of thinking. She starts to break away from the values she has grown up with by gradually considering Edmund as a potential husband, even though he is a younger brother who will not inherit a country house, and by beginning to prefer her life and acquaintances at Mansfield Park to those she had in London. In comparing her sets of friends at either place, Mary declares that the society of Mansfield “has so much more heart among [them] than one finds in the world at large. You all give me a feeling of being able to trust and confide in you; which, in common intercourse, one knows nothing of” (371-2). However, she ultimately chooses the values of London over the attraction she has to Edmund and life at Mansfield Park.

The idea expressed in this line, “habit carried it,” is that in moments of decisive action, people often do not spend or have the luxury of spending much time reflecting on the big decisions that change the course of their lives, but are carried in the direction of their habits. ‘Habit’ here does not refer to rote, unthinking actions but the character or pattern formed by continually choosing to follow certain values in one’s daily living. We can look to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for a similar idea of how characters are formed: “… the virtues we get by first exercising them… For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them… by doing the acts that we do in our transactions with other men we become just or unjust… Thus, in one word, states of character arise out of like activities” (Nicomachean, 1103a:32-3,34-5; 1103b: 14-5,20-1). In other words, what we choose in the most climactic moments our lives, are often the same things we are choosing every day in thousands of smaller ways. This bears immediate implications not only for our own lives, but for raising and educating children. In most cases, the small choices in life are the ones that shape us. Things like finishing homework or respecting our parents or showing a small kindness to a classmate are some of the small decisions our students face every day that determine whether we will choose responsibility, respect, or loving our neighbor or the stranger around us when it will cost us dearly.