Robert Mai, a local member of the Metropolitan St. Louis Region of the Jane Austen Society of America, has written an article that is published on Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal On-Line.
Robert Mai is a principal in Stakeholder Insights, an opinion research firm in St. Louis. He teaches courses in managing people at the Brown School at Washington University, and is the author of The Leader as Communicator (AMACOM). He has earned degrees in English from Columbia and the University of Rochester.
ARTICLE SUMMARY
Bob has recently published an article in Persuasions On-Line (Winter 2014) titled “To Forgive is Divine – and Practical, Too.” It’s about a special skill exhibited by Jane Austen’s heroines (mostly), and can be summarized by this quote from the article:
The real accomplishment of Austen heroines is not just securing a husband but also strengthening the goodwill embodied in those communities where they will live as married couples. The strategy that accomplishes these positive ends is forgiveness, which is also the subject of some compelling new research emanating from the fields of evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics.
Bob has been reading Jane Austen with pleasure since undergraduate days at Columbia. He is currently musing over other examples of how Austen heroines exhibit highly regarded contemporary character traits like resilience, action-orientation, empathy, and speaking truth to power. He is thinking about how to write a Jane Austen management book that might be read by more than his immediate family.
