The Austen Math cumulative report
a grande finale chart extravaganza
Greetings Austenites—
This is it, ladies and gentlemen! The last hurrah.
Dare I say Austen Math has more than delivered? It kept me sane while Medium Rare was on submission, and apparently many of you entertained.
featured the first installment; invited me to talk shop; I co-hosted an salon on Austen’s economics that we all enjoyed so much we’re doing a follow-up on the economics of Middlemarch in July. The comments on the posts themselves were wonderful; I loved responding to them in each successive edition: Sense & Sensibility, Pride & Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion.It is time for a victory lap before I put the model to bed and move on. But before we dive into the combined status charts, etc. (too long for email; you’ll want to read in browser/app!), I submit a new framework for thinking about Austen more generally:
I still think Emma is unequivocally Austen’s best novel; it has the most accomplished balance between the outsized triumphs of her others. In Emma, the witty dialogue and expository pyrotechnics of Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey meet the Girardian insight and maturity of Mansfield Park and Persuasion.
Maybe this is why, as easy as I find it to anoint Austen’s best novel, I find it basically impossible to name her “worst” one. There are not only no bad Austen novels—there are no mediocre ones. There are none that are merely good! Some are crowns, and some are jewels, but all are precious. Emma reigns precisely by combining the others’ dearest qualities.
Sense and Sensibility achieves a similar balance to Emma, just without quite as much sophistication, which is why I think it’s my second-favorite despite both Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park technically being “better” books.
The lighter and darker novels, meanwhile, are differentiated by tone, mood, and individual preference rather than quality.—If only we could say the same of Austen’s single men!
Austen Math 101
Jane Austen, arguably the greatest novelist of all time, was the author of six marriage-plot comedies of manners published between 1811 and 1817: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. There is rampant dispute as to how to read them. “The people who read Austen for the romance and the people who read Austen for the sociology are both reading her correctly,” Louis Menand argues, “because Austen understands courtship as an attempt to achieve the maximum point of intersection between love and money.”
Menand’s vaguely mathematical binary is directionally accurate but insufficiently sophisticated. Austen is absolutely a marital maximizationist, but her calculations have far greater dimensional depth. As such, neither the die-hard romantics nor sociologists are reading her correctly; they are equally mistaken. Over- or under-weighting any single dimension of Austenian courtship maximization amounts to a fundamental misunderstanding of what she most cunningly gets:
Austen understood status—ahem, station; that its shoring up is hardly superficial. The intrigue of the marriage plot springs not just from uncertain affection—“will they fuck”—but the balance of such possibilities with a complex and often competing set of considerations. Status questions, basically, though to the standard socioeconomic strains I would add, particularly in Austen’s case, that of moral status. Alas, fuckability is a kind of status, too.
The Austen Math model more or less directly follows my original offhand vision, ranking all of Austen’s single men across four weighted dimensions—fortune, morals, manners, and fuckability—to develop secondary insights, calculate their individual total status, and analyze their relative marital desirability. The heroines, in turn, are judged by their dimensional weighting (and to what extent it shifts over time) versus the Austenian baseline. In other words: they are judged on the soundness of their judgment. The better a heroine is at Austen Math herself, the more virtuous she is deemed.
And what of love per se? Even the most sophisticated mathematical models are simplified phenomenological representations. Indeed, this is the purpose of models. I’d argue love is largely represented indirectly by a proprietary mix of the various dimensions—but I do not claim to capture all of Austen’s complexity, let alone any universal truths.
Methodology*
I. Dimensional raw scoring of single men
Each single man is evaluated on each of the four primary status dimensions of FORTUNE, MORALS, MANNERS, and FUCKABILITY using a whole-number score of 1 to 6, one being low and six high, based on textual analysis by yours truly.
My definitions are as follows, with help from Merriam-Webster (MW):
By FORTUNE (n), I mean “riches; wealth,” in line with MW 1.2, “a man of fortune.”
By MORALS (n), I mean both “ethics” and “modes of conduct,” per MW 2.2a-b, in the context of Christian Regency norms without blind deference to them.
By MANNERS (n), I mean personal bearing, air, deportment, style, etc., running the gamut of MW 1a-e, again filtered through a critical Regency lens.
By FUCKABILITY (n), admittedly not in MW, I mean sexual desirability, predominantly but not exclusively based on physical attractiveness, also including demonstrable charm, wit, and je ne sais quoi.
The six-point scale both allows for sufficient differentiation across Austen’s six novels and forces non-neutrality.
II. Austenian primary status weighting (baseline)
The four primary dimensions predict total status via uneven weight distribution, in alignment with the hierarchy of Austen’s values as I have long understood them:
MORALS - 40%
FORTUNE - 30%
MANNERS - 20%
FUCKABILITY - 10%
for a total of 100%.
The formula to calculate total estimated Austenian status is a basic SUMPRODUCT: D1*W1 + D2*W2 + D3*W3 + D4*W4, where D=dimensional raw score and W=Austenian weight.
III. Secondary dimension calculations
Each pair of congruous primary dimensions yields insights into a secondary dimension. At the intersection
of FORTUNE and MORALS is WORTH,
of MORALS and MANNERS is CHARACTER,
of MANNERS and FUCKABILITY is AFFECT,
and of FUCKABILITY and FORTUNE is ELIGIBILITY.
Secondary dimension calculations may be performed either via weighted or unweighted averages of their raw inputs to harness insights inclusive or exclusive of Austenian status bias, respectively.
Note the secondary dimensions get closer to viscerally lovable personal attributes—character, affect—but would be harder to directly quantify themselves (e.g.: worth is more subjective than fortune).
IV. Heroine dimensional weight variance
Each heroine is evaluated on the difference between her hierarchy of the four primary status dimensions (again per my textual analysis) and Austen’s. Like in the Austenian baseline, the heroine’s top-priority dimension is weighted 0.4, with -0.1 for each subsequent priority.
The formula for dimensional weight variance is: |W1-H1|+|W2-H2|+|W3-H3|+|W4-H4|, where W=Austenian baseline weight and H=heroine weight. I use this absolute-value “spread” calc over true squared variance for its simplicity, clarity, and sufficiency given the small size of the data set. The score will fall between 0 and 0.8 in increments of 0.2, and can be roughly interpreted as follows with regards to the heroine’s judgment:
0 - Unimpeachable
0.2 - Sound
0.4 - So-so
0.6 - Precarious
0.8 - Misguided
I.e., the lower the score, the better her judgment. In some cases, heroines’ dimensional values change over the course of the novel, in which cases I calculate both starting and ending hierarchy for comparison to estimate their development.
*Feel free—nay, encouraged—to quibble with any of this. We are here first and foremost to have fun, and banter is damn close to my definition of it.
Credentials
While admittedly an amateur Austen scholar, I am the daughter of a doting professional one—and a professional novelist and management consultant myself (see: Portrait, patents). My undergraduate degree is in English and my graduate an MBA: a thoroughly Austenian compromise. Her voice has been inseparable from that of my own conscience since I was ten years old.
Part 7: cumulative report
The single men
I won’t bury the lede:—here is the master weighted status ranking of the single men in all six of Austen’s completed novels:
Excluding Eleanor Tilney’s perfect, mysterious Lord——, Austen’s single men fall almost exactly into three neat groups: “heroes,” “okay guys,” and “villains & insufferable clergymen.” I say “almost” because Mr. Elliot is an exception; an extremely high status villain, but a villain nonetheless, at least tying if not outperforming all of the okay guys.
These are the three groups I will use to segment my analysis and pressure test the model across novels.
But first! I cannot resist one little connection between the cumulative total status model and my crown/jewel framework above. Leggerezza seems to correlate to larger spreads in single mens’ status; gravitas to smaller spreads. Indeed, if we look at the number of men between each novel’s highest and lowest status man, it follows what would be my exact tonal ranking, from light and humorous to dark and serious:
Northanger Abbey (24 - encompassing the full spectrum w/ both the highest and lowest-status man)
Pride and Prejudice (21)
Emma (19)
Sense and Sensibility (16)
Persuasion (13)
Mansfield Park (11)
It makes sense—and yet I have to admit I’m a little surprised it’s so on the nose, that the leggerezza-gravitas spectrum seems to be an even closer correlative than complexity, as I posited in the Northanger Abbey edition:
There is a fair argument to be made that the degree of differentiation inversely correlates to overall novel complexity, and if Mansfield Park is Austen’s trickiest novel, Northanger Abbey is her simplest. Note this is not a value distinction—though I suspect its misleading flavor of one a contributing factor to Northanger Abbey’s under-appreciation.
This is still broadly true as well, but Emma is a more complex novel than both Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion. If anyone has thoughts on this I’m eager to hear them.
Heroes
Summary
The heroes weighted status scores range from Mr. Knightley’s towering 5.7 down to 4.2 for Edward Ferrars, for a point spread of 1.5. The average hero score is 5.05, with five men above and three below the average.
Secondary dimensions & insights
That said: I think the best way to think about the heroes is in two groups of four.
The “first tier” heroes—Knightley, Darcy, Wentworth, and Henry Tilney—loom larger than life over their respective novels; all but the last have a flaw in only a single dimension, and the only one who doesn’t (Henry Tilney) might just be the most lovable of them all. I can see legitimate partisan quibbles over Kightley vs. Darcy, Wentworth vs. Tilney—but the top four seem pretty clearly, correctly, the top four.
The “second tier” heroes have more, and more varied problems. Bingley suffers in comparison and over-deference to Darcy; Colonel Brandon in fuckability; Edward Ferrars in funds, and Edmund Bertram a little all around.
I expect Edmund Bertram over Edward Ferrars to be an unpopular judgment to modern eyes, but I stand by it in Austen’s. Is Edward more lovable? Unquestionably. But in terms of total status, Edmund, with his greater fortune, polish, and hotness, has the edge.
Okay guys
Summary
Every okay guy falls between 3.6 and 3.9—a point spread of only 0.3, a fifth the range of the heroes. With three men tied at both 3.8 and 3.9, their average score comes in at 3.81.
Secondary dimensions & insights
These scores are all so close, and yet again I feel the pull of further segmentation.
Four of the okay guys are just (a bit above) average all around—Tom Bertram, Charles Hayter, James Morland, and Captain Benwick. The other three achieve their similar scores through some sort of a teardrop shape, a disproportionate high point: Rushworth from his fortune, Churchill for his fuckability, and Martin for his morals.
Note that in the “high point” group, teardrop extremity aligns to dimensional importance—e.g., Mr. Martin’s high vs. low dimensions are the most disproportionate, but his moral strength is also Austen’s weightiest dimension. This is contributing to the total weighted status clumping across the group.
Villains & insufferable clergymen
Summary
The villains & insufferable clergymen’s scores range from John Thorpe’s meager 1.7 to William Elliot’s outlying 3.9—a point spread of 2.2. The average score is 2.95, with four men above and four below.
Secondary dimensions & insights
Here things get really interesting, because the group you’d most expect to cleave neatly into two subgroups doesn’t:
On the higher-status side, you have three villains who fit in the okay guys’ tiny range of 3.6-3.9, with Henry Crawford and Captain Tilney joining Mr. Elliot. These are the “kidney bean” villains, with high eligibility and affect masking low morals.
The other two seducers—Willoughby and Wickham—are also of a type. They’re like the kidney beans except without money.
But the last three are each in a class of their own. Mr. Elton still resembles nothing so much as “the poor man’s Frank Churchill.” John Thorpe is Austen’s only total loser.
And then there is Mr. Collins.
Mr. Collins’s “modest ring” persists in failing “to capture his absurdity”—and yet, across all six novels, it does nonetheless manage to stand out. I can only stand by my prior assessment:
“Mr. Collins is the Hope Diamond of literary characterization; I will die in this mine.”
The unweighted model, for comparison
It’s worth noting how much things shift, total-status wise, without Austenian weighting:
All three groups see spread increases—the heroes from 1.5 to 1.7, the okay guys from 0.3 to 1.4, and the villains & insufferable clergymen from 2.2 all the way to a full 3 points.
I dare say this unweighted ranking aligns better to our contemporary perception of status than the weighted one. But the higher spreads serve to show how much closer the weighted model reflects Austen’s own moral sentiments and Regency values. It’s the latter by which her novels, and the single men within them, are ultimately far better judged.
The heroines
Similarly, as much as Austen is touted for heroine modernization vs. the perfect eighteenth century Emily St. Aubert-types, the model shows quite a bit of overlap between them. For all its admitted shortcomings, this is something I think the heroine model overcomes popular bias to get right.
Here is the combined chart of every heroine I rated in the novel-specific installments:
But look what happens when we remove the precarious and misguided ladies of Mansfield Park—all of whom Fanny ultimately usurps qua heroines:
A very different picture! Unimpeachable and sound judgment all around. Yes, Marianne, Elizabeth, and Emma all improve themselves to get there—and some of the others are imperfect and/or humanized in other ways (Fanny’s early plainness, Catherine’s averageness in general). Still, the data doesn’t reflect the level of character innovation with which Austen is generally credited.
My hypothesis as to why? Emma and especially Elizabeth’s outsized impact on our contemporary collective psyche. The cheeky, vivacious, and nonchalant heroines of Austen’s best and most beloved novels respectively are disproportionately modern and relatable to us, and thus disproportionately featured and reflected back.
Meanwhile, every one of Austen’s four other novels features a heroine as unimpeachable as the author herself!
I am glad to have tacked on the heroine model to its superior status counterpart if only for this: mathematical evidence that Austen was as much a product of her era as transcendent of it, temporal and timeless at once.
Too good, too excellent creatures! Thank you for reading Austen Math. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe.
You do me justice indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy—and humor—among Austenites. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating in
ANJ
Brilliant. Should be compiled into a short book. I would purchase and recommend!
This was so fun, thank you! It must have been A LOT of work.