FT: What Jane Austen can teach us about taking feedback

Key topics:Feedback overload doesn’t always improve performanceJane Austen’s notes show value in balanced critiqueBest advice: take feedback seriously, but not too seriouslySign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Sarah O’Connor.The word “feedback” can describe either an unpleasant screech or hum produced by an amplifier, or an opinion about whether something is any good. In the modern world, the sheer amount of the latter means it is beginning to feel a bit like the former. We live in a cacophony of feedback. We are expected to provide it after every holiday, meal, or delivery to our door. We are expected to receive it from bosses, from colleagues, and — for anyone who puts a product, service or creative endeavour into the world — from strangers who publish their views of it online.Whether all this feedback actually makes anyone perform better is far from clear. The answer from the academic literature can be summed up as: it depends. One meta-analysis of hundreds of experiments found that in 38 per cent of cases, feedback not only failed to improve performance, it actively made it worse. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development — the UK professional body for HR — has distilled the research on what works in a workplace context: in order to be useful, feedback should be “specific, relevant to the job, constructive, credible and unbiased”. But not every boss or colleague acts on this, and good luck expecting anything like it from the general public. Pity the novelist who receives a one-star review on Amazon from a member of the public because the delivery courier was late.To be able to move through this world of noisy feedback without losing your mind or your motivation is an important life skill. But how? As someone whose work has been exposed to public and anonymous comments for almost two decades, I think I am qualified to offer some advice (most of which I have learnt the hard way, and plenty of which I still don’t always manage to follow). I have also drawn some wisdom from an unlikely source: Jane Austen, who took feedback seriously enough to collect and transcribe the opinions of people who read her novels.Why did she do this? For the same reason I think it is worth paying attention to feedback today, especially about something you have put out into the world: curiosity about people’s response. After all, if you didn’t want to reach people, what was the point? According to Austen’s biographer Claire Tomalin, the novelist was “detached enough to write down rude remarks as well as praise, and without adding any defensive replies of her own”. It is almost as if she created her own version of the online reader comments section. And while the family members and acquaintances who gave her feedback weren’t anonymous, they didn’t shy away from criticism. Austen recorded that her mother found the protagonist of Mansfield Park “insipid”, for example, while another relative “could not bear” her..Read more:.Urgent: A copy of Pride and Prejudice for Venezuela.Sometimes, criticism can teach you something useful, especially if it comes from someone you respect, or if a lot of people respond the same way. If a large number of people have misunderstood your point, for example, the chances are you didn’t explain it well enough. If a lot of people were offended, the chances are you were offensive. I once inadvertently upset a number of people from Iceland with a flippant remark. As my boss told me the next day: “It’s OK to offend people, but only if you do it on purpose.”That said, bad-faith or lazy criticism should be ignored. It may be some consolation to know that even Austen had to put up with some of this. One acquaintance “read only the first & last chapters” of Emma, according to her notes, “because he had heard it was not interesting”. I hope she was laughing when she wrote that one down.That brings me to my final piece of advice, which is to extract what is useful from feedback without mistaking it for an accurate appraisal of how good your work is (and certainly not of how good you are). For one thing, any feedback that reaches your ears is only going to be a small and unrepresentative sample of how people felt about your work. For another, it’s simply not possible to please everyone. You can only please yourself. As Austen’s eponymous heroine says in Emma: “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”Emma, of course, is now generally hailed as Austen’s “most perfect book”, according to her biographer, “flawlessly carried out from conception to finish”. Yet the feedback Austen received on the novel at the time was somewhat different. Of the 43 opinions of the novel she noted down, 12 were hostile, six gave unreserved praise and 17 said they preferred Pride and Prejudice. We can only hope that Austen took the feedback in a manner to which we can all aspire: seriously — but not too seriously..© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd.

FT: What Jane Austen can teach us about taking feedback

Key topics:

Related Stories