I’m currently taking a class called Jane Austen’s Afterlives. I’ve always considered myself an Austen fan, despite the fact that until recently, I’d only read “Pride and Prejudice.” But Austen feels like one of those authors you can claim even with minimal exposure. Her characters and stories seep into the cultural consciousness through so many retellings and adaptations that you almost feel like you know them before opening the book. Between “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “Clueless” and the endless stream of TikToks about Mr. Darcy, it felt safe to say I was a fan.
Then we read “Emma.” I was surprised by how much I liked it — how much I liked her, even though, by all accounts, Emma Woodhouse is not supposed to be particularly likable. She’s vain and oblivious and a little too sure of herself. She fancies herself a matchmaker, yet every match she makes goes horribly wrong. She meddles in everyone’s lives and remains blithely confident even as things fall apart around her. But I couldn’t help but feel a certain affection for her, maybe even admiration. There’s something liberating about a character who is so utterly convinced of her own insight, who moves through the world with unshakeable self-assurance, even if it’s completely unfounded.
Emma thinks she can read people. She believes she understands the inner logic of her small world, that she can orchestrate happiness for everyone if only they’d follow her lead. She believes she knows what’s best, not just for herself but for everyone around her. She’s wrong, of course. Painfully, repeatedly wrong. But she doesn’t know that until the novel forces her to confront it, until her carefully built sense of order collapses under the weight of her own blind spots.
I like “Emma” best because I see myself in her. I know what it feels like to mistake confidence for control, to believe I understand the pieces of my life well enough to arrange them into something that makes sense. I know the satisfaction of thinking I’m one step ahead, only to realize later that I’ve missed something obvious, something vital. There’s comfort in thinking you have a handle on your world, that you know what you’re doing and where you’re going. There’s also an inevitable crash when you realize how flimsy that certainty really is.
Lately, I’ve been living in that space between confidence and collapse. At this point in my Dartmouth career, I’m making off-term plans, summer plans and future plans. I’m trying to decide what kind of person I am, what kind of life I want and how all the different versions of myself might fit together into a single, coherent story. I keep trying to map out my life like it’s a novel, like I can control the pacing and the plot twists, like I’ll be able to recognize the climax when I get there. But life doesn’t unfold with Austen’s symmetry. It’s not structured around witty misunderstandings and sudden moments of clarity. I keep waiting for my “I love Josh!” moment, the big reveal in “Clueless” when Cher, Emma’s modern-day twin, realizes what she’s been missing all along. I want that kind of epiphany: sudden, funny, perfectly scored to a ’90s pop song. The kind that makes everything make sense. But real life rarely offers that kind of neat revelation.
When I think about my own life, I wonder if I’m doing the same thing Emma did. Mistaking motion for progress. Mistaking planning for understanding. It’s easy to feel like adulthood is a puzzle to be solved, that if I make the right choices now, everything after will fall into place. But Emma reminds me that knowing yourself isn’t about control. It’s about curiosity, about allowing yourself to be surprised by who you are and who you might become.
This week in Mirror, we exercise curiosity. We explore long distance relationships and 21st birthdays. One writer investigates the Dartmouth Libraries sticker collection. Another investigates the role student teaching assistants. Our relationship columnists brainstorm what to do when you just don’t like your friend’s boyfriend.
I keep planning and unplanning, building and rebuilding, trying to make sense of things. I’ll probably never arrive at some final understanding. All I can do is stay open to the possibility that I’m wrong, and that being wrong can sometimes be the most honest thing of all. Life might just be a series of small, humbling, lovely mistakes that slowly add up to something like wisdom.
Aditi Gupta ’27 is a Mirror editor from Ridgefield, Conn. She is majoring in Biology with minors in Global Health and English. On campus, she spends most of her time working in a cell biology lab. She hopes to pursue a career that integrates her love for scientific research with her broader academic interests in health and literature.
