Once, many years ago, I was listening to somebody I knew describe why a potential romantic partner was an utterly hopeless prospect. He’d signed his email to her with “best,” she kept repeating. Best!—said with deepest disgust. For her, that fact was enough to communicate his unsuitability for human companionship to any sane person. Obviously, it wasn’t really about “best.” She just had no interest in him, and the email signature represented whatever it was that made them incompatible from the jump. But it also was about “best,” a little; it wasn’t just that he’d signed his email that way but that he was precisely the sort of person who would.

The process of getting to know another person, whether romantically or for some other reason, consists of small tests. These tests are not deliberate trials—ideally, at least. They’re just little moments in which you think to yourself “Speed up” or “Slow down.” Such tests can be arbitrary (as with email signatures) or imbued with wisdom (tipping well being, among Americans, the universally recognized sign of a good heart). Under the guidance of folk wisdom and our own instincts, we try our best to make judgments about who people are before we know who they are, because once we know, it’s too late for that knowledge to do we any good.

And there’s also the other side to this dynamic, which is that we believe that, as we ourselves are complicated individuals of great importance to ourselves, we may not always be accurately represented by such minute interactions. Maybe we miscalculated the tip that one time, or maybe we never sign our emails with “best” but did as a flirty joke, or maybe we were in a bad mood. Even if we jokingly type ourselves, it’s another thing to be typed by others.

Toward the end of Jane Austen’s first completed novel, Northanger Abbey, its heroine, Catherine Morland, is faced with just such a puzzle. Her love interest, Henry Tilney, is to host her; his father, General Tilney; and his sister, Eleanor at his home in the nearby village of Woodston. General Tilney has stressed to his son that he is not to take any great pains with the dinner he will serve them; Henry is therefore leaving ahead of the rest of the family to make sure all is in readiness. To Catherine, who doesn’t understand why the mismatch between what the general has requested and what Henry is doing, he explains that his father’s repeated statements that any old meal will do are simply not true. In his absence, Catherine is left to puzzle over “the inexplicability of the General’s conduct … That he was very particular in his eating, she had, by her own unassisted observation, already discovered; but why he should say one thing so positively, and mean another all the while, was most unaccountable! How were people, at that rate, to be understood?”

How are people, at any rate, to be understood? And how are we to read the shifting sands of our relationships with others? One reading of Northanger Abbey is that it is a satire about a silly girl who reads so many Gothic novels she begins to think she’s in one. (She believes General Tilney murdered his wife. He didn’t.) But after a good laugh is had at Catherine’s expense, all is well. Instead of being offended by Catherine’s beliefs about his father, Henry teases her. Such things, he tells her, don’t happen in England—not “in a country like this … where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies.” (True to form, Catherine fails to catch the joke and retreats to reflect very seriously that such things must simply happen only in Italy.) Such a reading is not wrong, but it’s not complete either. Catherine’s Gothic-novel habit has nothing to do with the book’s final crisis, in which she is abruptly evicted from Northanger Abbey for reasons she doesn’t understand. It turns out that General Tilney has thought all along that she was a wealthy heiress; when he realizes she isn’t, he tries to end the match he has so assiduously encouraged between herself and Henry. Catherine is not the only person to have misread the situation.

In an essay on Northanger Abbey, Elizabeth Hardwick notes that reading Austen is generally much more fun than reading about Austen—where Austen is assured and humorous, her partisans tend to be defensive and ponderous. It’s not my intention to turn Northanger Abbey from a gleeful romp into a treatise on human judgment. It is a light novel—Austen’s lightest—and that lightness should be burdened as little as possible through overthinking it. Nevertheless, at risk of weightiness, it’s worth exploring how Northanger Abbey is more than a satire of other novels. Managing disastrous first impressions, discerning the sincerity of another’s intentions, seeing into somebody’s character: these are all here, explored in just as nuanced a way as they will be in Emma or Pride and Prejudice. Northanger Abbey is not Austen’s best novel, or even her second best. But it is, far and away, my favorite.

So, to reiterate our problem: Given that people often say and do different things, and say and want different things, how are we to read them? It is crucial, particularly for Austen’s young women when evaluating marriage prospects, to know how to tell if somebody deserves your trust before you actually need to trust them. Yet you’ll only ever know if you made the right decision when it matters. Everything else is a judgment by proxy. But given that life is not a novel, Gothic or otherwise, what do we do with all these signifiers of character that we steadily collect as we go? You cannot read people like a book. But what if, sometimes, you need to?

***

When Catherine bonds with a newfound friend, Isabella Thorpe, over their shared tastes in literature, she exclaims that “while I have Udolpho to read, I feel as if nobody could make me miserable.” I will confess up front that, once I opened up Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho to see what had Catherine in such ecstasy, I did not share her experience. Even to a person like myself, who has a great appetite for long and boring novels nobody actually reads, Udolpho is a slog. It may be the classic Gothic novel par excellence, but for a book in which a girl is whisked away to an ancient Italian castle, surprisingly little ever really happens in it.

Despite its spooky atmosphere, where nothing is what it seems, the actual “mysteries” of Udolpho lie first in introducing things that appear to be supernatural (but are not), and then in introducing people who appear to be sinister and untrustworthy (and they are). That is, people in Udolpho are mostly what they appear to be. One of the few mistakes its heroine, Emily, makes is believing the villain of the book, Montoni, to have murdered the previous owner of the castle of Udolpho. Though Montoni is grasping and cruel and unafraid to kill, he is innocent of that particular crime. Thus when Catherine thinks of the general that he has “the air and attitude of a Montoni,” she is more on-target than she thinks. First, because General Tilney, like Montoni, is wrongly suspected of murder. But secondly, because, much like Montoni, he is a greedy and calculating man whose love of money ultimately causes him to act brutally toward a young woman who is a guest in his home. For Austen, there are no huge mysteries lurking in country houses, ghostly or otherwise, but people are unknowable.

Austen plays this same game more subtly with Catherine’s two love interests, Henry Tilney and John Thorpe. We like Henry from the start because, when he meets Catherine in Bath, he joins her and Mrs. Allen, the older woman she’s with, in a conversation about women’s clothing. “Men commonly take so little notice of those things,” Mrs. Allen (whose main interest is clothing) says. Henry goes on to display not only interest in but genuine affection for the novels that Catherine is reading, saying that he has read “hundreds and hundreds. Do not imagine that you can cope with me in a knowledge of Julias and Louisas.” John Thorpe, on the other hand, is pretentiously and defensively masculine, declaring to Catherine that “I never read novels; I have something else to do.” Catherine does not like John, but she continually lies to herself that she does; she ignores what she can plainly tell to be true about her own feelings because he’s her friend’s brother and thus must be a nice person.

In other words, we like Henry because the novel lets us know, through novel code, that he is a sympathetic and intelligent individual, one who is interested in women and the things that interest women without being scornful of them. And we don’t like John because his dismissiveness of Catherine’s interests is one clue that he’s a boor who doesn’t care about her. And we don’t like his sister, Isabella, either, because she seems a lot like her brother. In all of these judgments, we are correct.

But in real life, such broad-minded tastes mean nothing about a person’s character. Even professed beliefs don’t tell us anything about how somebody treats the other people in their life; that’s why practically every week we see a story of some idealist or another who is revealed to be brutal to the actual people around them. At this point it’s more surprising to us when somebody professes a high ideal and then sticks to it. A man who says on his Bumble profile that he shares some feminine tastes (Taylor Swift, Gilmore Girls, Emily Henry) could still be cruel, manipulative, violent, dismissive, bad with money, unfaithful, or dishonest. In other Austen novels, in fact, men who present themselves as sympathetic through their more refined tastes, like Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, are not trustworthy at all. (Her most feted hero, Mr. Darcy, is socially graceless.) That Henry’s signaled character and his actual character coincide is an accident. Like Catherine, we are just filling in the gaps.

Catherine herself makes a series of terrible impressions on Henry Tilney, including not only leaping to the conclusion that his father is a killer but accidentally standing him and his sister up early in their acquaintance, apparently for another man. Where somebody hunting through Catherine’s actions for tells to her character might write her off quickly, Henry is always willing to hear her out. When Catherine frantically apologizes and explains why she stood him up, Austen comments: “Is there a Henry in the world who could be insensible to such a declaration? Henry Tilney at least was not.” Henry is given ample evidence that Catherine is unreliable and flighty, but he disregards it—because he already likes her. It works out.

Where another writer might pretend that such a mismatch between proxy and reality does not exist, or moralize her readers by admonishing them not to judge, in Northanger Abbey, Austen does neither. She examines a flaw in human perception and judgment but offers no solutions. We do judge others through proxies that are often useless and wrong, but we also have to judge by something. The alternative would be to remain naively open to everybody, incapable of drawing conclusions, which is neither possible nor really desirable. This position is, in fact, the one Catherine occupies at the beginning of the book—she doesn’t have enough experience to judge good friends from bad and assumes good intentions from others even on the thinnest of evidence. When she does try to listen to her gut, as with General Tilney, she doesn’t have enough life experience to know that what would be the answer in a Radcliffe novel is unlikely to be the answer anywhere else. And yet, perhaps there is another kind of novel—a novel like Northanger Abbey—that can provide insight into human choices. Austen’s narrator boldly declares that a novel is “only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”

Austen’s spirited defense of the novel—as something that is worthwhile not only for entertainment but for its study of humanity—serves as a manifesto for the books she would go on to write after Northanger Abbey. All six of her novels are not only entirely devoted to the subject of character but take place in a world in which the whole possibility of happiness revolves around the task of judging another person correctly. The women in particular cannot afford to marry the wrong person, and they don’t have very much to go on in making their decisions, but nevertheless some tools are better than others. Taste in literature, as it turns out, is a pretty bad test. How somebody treats their social inferiors, or administers their affairs, or keeps promises they wish they hadn’t made—these are all good tests of character, albeit not ones always on display.

Still, people do choose badly in Austen’s novels all the time. They judge by the wrong things. Sometimes they are rescued by an outside circumstance; often they are not. The curdled marriage of the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice looms over every romance in that book like a memento mori. At some point, inconceivable as it might be, these were happy people who liked each other. Now look at them.

***

If I were to list things that people have done to set me off, most of them would sound as trivial as signing an email “Best.” A particular pet peeve of mine is people saying “You should try X” without any acknowledgement that I might have tried whatever they’re advising already, but, really, unsolicited advice of any kind will find me hitting the ceiling.

At one time I did construct elaborate theories as to why trespassing on my own annoyances demonstrated something bad about others: if this person meant well, they would have done this and not that, or they would have done the same thing but in a slightly different manner. In some cases, it even might have meant something bad, but who can say? It’s much more likely that they just irked me. But I don’t regret my decisions to avoid people who annoyed me, only the need I once felt to assume that annoying people must, secretly, be sinister. Somebody can be a bad host without having killed his wife.

Of course, when things do go wrong, we often go back into the past to find the signs. Perhaps if I did overlook an email signature, years later I’d be sitting in a bar muttering to myself: I should have known. I should have known the first time he wrote “Best.” In such a case, I like to think that Jane Austen would have found that funny, though in a sympathetic spirit: You’re right, she would say, leaning on the bar. You should have known. But then, how could you? Austen knew better than I did—but only, really, in the sense that she knew that none of us will ever know any better.