Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 18

Coincidence in Persuasion

“Coincidence can be an important element in the novelist’s armoury, providing it is handled with discretion,” writes Maggie Lane in today’s guest post for my blog series celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Maggie is the author of many books, including Jane Austen’s World, Jane Austen and Food, and Jane Austen and Names. Her most recent books are Growing Older with Jane Austen (Hale, 2014), which is about the concept of ageing and older characters in Jane Austen’s work and times, and On the Sofa with Jane Austen (Hale, 2016), a selection of essays first published in Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine on topics as diverse as hairstyles and heroes, nature and needlework. Maggie is Editor of the Jane Austen Society (UK) Newsletters and Annual Reports. It’s my pleasure to introduce her guest post on coincidence in Persuasion.

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Coincidence can be an important element in the novelist’s armoury, providing it is handled with discretion. “Mrs. Smith had been able to tell her what no one else could have done” (Volume 2, Chapter 10). The episode towards the end of Persuasion, when Anne Elliot calls on an old schoolfellow with whom she has lost touch, only to find that she is the widow of Anne’s cousin’s intimate friend, and can give information about Mr. Elliot’s shady past and dubious morals that Anne could not have obtained from any other source, has been found unsatisfactory by many readers. Objections can be made on two counts. The fact of the relationship itself may seem too far-fetched. To counter this, it could be argued that within a much smaller national population, of whom the gentry formed only a tiny part, it was inevitable that such chains of acquaintance and coincidence should emerge quite often. This is what we might call the “small world” phenomenon. Known even to ourselves, Jane Austen’s contemporaries may not have found it at all unlikely.

The second more specific objection, the plausibility of Mrs. Smith’s being able to produce corroborating evidence in the form of a letter, is less easy to defend. Here, surely, Jane Austen is stretching credulity, and hoping to get away with it at a point in her story where a dramatic denouement is the convention, the pace of reading quickens, and critical faculties may be laid aside in the excitement of nearing the end. Mrs. Smith gives the best explanation she can, though it is a rather feeble one: the letter from Mr. Elliot to Mr Smith “happened to be saved; why, one can hardly imagine” (Volume 2, Chapter 9).

We know that Jane Austen was suffering debilitating illness as she wrote Persuasion, and though she completed it and moved on to begin a new novel, she strangely did not submit it to her publisher—nor did she plan to do so for “a twelvemonth” as she told her niece Fanny Knight (13 March 1817). The best explanation for this delay is that she was dissatisfied with her own work. If so, she is more likely to have been dissatisfied with later than earlier passages, as her weakness took hold. What is certain is that Persuasion begins at a measured pace, taking its time to introduce us to a new imaginative world, with situations and characters promising a novel quite as long as Emma or Mansfield Park, but that it seems to come to a conclusion in a rush of quickly tied loose ends. This theory is well supported by comparing the coincidence of the Mrs. Smith narrative with the way Austen handles an even greater coincidence at the beginning of the novel, without arousing the least uneasiness in her readers.

Consider how we would react if Austen had written an opening chapter focussing on the heroine’s emotional history (as many a novelist might indeed have begun such a story) in which we learnt about the broken engagement to Captain Wentworth; and if this had been followed, a chapter or two later, by his sister turning up as the new tenant of Anne’s home. Too much of a coincidence, we would feel, spoiling the story from the start. But Austen has cleverly avoided that trap. While she gives us the outline of Elizabeth’s disappointment in Mr. Elliot early on, along with much other family history, she withholds the equivalent back story of Anne. We are introduced to Anne, we see through her eyes the tragicomedy of her father’s retrenchments and reluctant agreement to let Kellynch, we warm to her delicate personality. But it is only after the Crofts have presented themselves as likely tenants that we learn the most important thing about the heroine, the regrets and enduring love for one man which have clouded her youth.

This “little history of sorrowful interest” (Volume 1, Chapter 4) is so deeply involving that we are carried beyond the fact of the Kellynch tenancy and give it no great critical thought as we anxiously anticipate what this will mean for Anne. It helps, too, that Anne herself does not regard the Crofts’ coming as an unlikely coincidence, only as an event of painful emotion. The complex opening chapters of Persuasion have not always been credited with the high level of control, the fine artistic judgement, which Austen here displays. In August 1815, when she began this novel, she was surely writing at the height of her powers.

Her masterly touch is in evidence again halfway through the novel on the first appearance of Mr. Elliot in person. Undeniably, it is a coincidence that he should be on the shore at Lyme at exactly the same time as Anne. But what the circumstance loses in implausibility, it gains in dramatic power. A mysterious stranger, an openly admiring glance, the rekindling of Captain Wentworth’s feelings for Anne as a result of another man’s admiration: all this is achieved by the clever stroke of bringing Mr. Elliot to Lyme. True, Austen could have invented a passing stranger, never heard of again, if Captain Wentworth’s reaction were all that mattered; but the passage has an afterlife. What Anne later thinks of as “a cousinly little interview” (Volume 1, Chapter 12) before they are aware of their relationship gives them a warmer interest in one another when their real acquaintance develops in Bath. This extends to the reader: Mr. Elliot interests us more, seems a more serious suitor for Anne, than if he appeared first as the protégé and intimate of Sir Walter and Elizabeth. By virtue of this prior meeting he seems to belong to Anne, and it is she who must assess his worth and withstand his pursuit. And when Captain Wentworth follows her to Bath, the jealousy he quickly conceives of Mr. Elliot has its foundation in the scene on the beach. By linking Anne’s Lyme experiences with those she will encounter in Bath, Austen weaves the parts of her story together. For all these reasons, this use of coincidence is artistically justified.

This passage serves to prove that without some degree of coincidence, a fictional world would not draw together so satisfyingly. A novel is art, not life, and we expect from it the unity and closure which often elude in real life, without the author seeming to manipulate the puppet strings too much. So we should not be surprised to find coincidence in some form or other in most of Austen’s novels. Only in the circumstance of Mrs. Smith’s box of old papers, brought with her to Bath, does it jar. And, I suggest, Jane Austen knew it.

Quotations are from the Cambridge University Press edition of Persuasion, edited by Janet Todd and Antje Blank (2006), and the Oxford Edition of Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye (4th Edition, 2011).

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Twenty-fifth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Next week, we’ll turn back to Northanger Abbey, with guest posts by Diana Birchall and Kim Wilson, and then we’ll have two more weeks on Persuasion before the series ends with a guest post by Deborah Yaffe on Captain Wentworth’s letter.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

L.M. Montgomery’s Halifax: A Literary Soirée, June 18th

L.M. Montgomery lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, when she was a student at Dalhousie University in 1895-96 and then when she worked as a journalist at the Halifax Daily Echo in 1901-1902. I’m helping organize an event in Halifax on June 18, 2018:

L.M. Montgomery’s Halifax: A Literary Soirée, in support of Project Bookmark Canada

Women’s Council House, 989 Young Avenue, Halifax, NS, 7pm

If you happen to be in Halifax then, I hope you’ll consider joining us![image error]

Download an invitation here.

All are welcome, and the suggested donation is $20. Our Halifax Reading Circle for Project Bookmark is celebrating the first three Bookmarks in the Maritimes, for No Great Mischief, by Alistair MacLeod (2015), Barometer Rising, by Hugh MacLennan (2017), and “The Gable Window,” by L.M. Montgomery. The Montgomery Bookmark plaque will be unveiled in Cavendish, PEI on June 24th. We’re also keen to see more Bookmarks in the Maritimes, and we’ve been reading works by Rita Joe, Budge Wilson, George Elliott Clarke, and others, to find passages to recommend to Project Bookmark for consideration.

At our celebration on June 18th, Alexander MacLeod, Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary’s University, is going to talk about connections among the first three Bookmarks in the Maritimes. Kate Scarth, Chair of L.M. Montgomery Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island, will talk about Montgomery’s time as a student at Dalhousie University and as a journalist at the Daily Echo. Budge Wilson, author of Before Green Gables, and Mike Hamm of Bookmark II Halifax will read from L.M. Montgomery’s work, and I’ll read from her journals and talk about her love of Point Pleasant Park. Laurie Murphy, Executive Director of Project Bookmark, will describe the literary trail of Bookmark plaques across Canada. The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia is co-sponsoring the event with our Halifax Reading Circle, and Marilyn Smulders, Executive Director of the WFNS, will be our emcee. There will be live music, tea and squares, and raffles for Elly MacKay “Anne” prints, Tundra editions of the Anne novels, tickets to Anne of Green Gables, The Musical, and more.

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Women’s Council House, Halifax

Please join us on June 18th to celebrate L.M. Montgomery and writing set in the Maritimes! We’d love to know if you’re able to attend—here’s the link to the Facebook event, so you can let us know you’re coming.

If you’re not able to be there in person, but you’d like to donate to help build more Bookmarks in the Maritimes, you can make a donation on the Project Bookmark Canada website.

I’m excited about the event, and about future Bookmarks in our region and throughout Canada. Regular readers of my blog will know about my interest in travelling across Canada (I wrote about my road trip “From Halifax to Vancouver and Home Again” a couple of years ago, and about my pilgrimage to see the Carol Shields Bookmark in Winnipeg). I love the idea of a “literary Trans-Canada highway,” to borrow Kristen den Hartog’s phrase, and it’s been a pleasure to volunteer for Project Bookmark over the past few years.

For more information:

A Bookmark for Prince Edward Island: Lucy Maud Montgomery’s “The Gable Window,” at Project Bookmark

An article by Hughena Matheson about the Halifax Reading Circle

An article about the No Great Mischief Bookmark, which I wrote for the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia newsletter Eastword

My “L.M. Montgomery in Nova Scotia” page

Here are a few of the photos I took last week at the Old Burying Ground in Halifax, which Montgomery fictionalized as “Old St. John’s Cemetery” in Anne of the Island:

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Kingsport (aka Halifax) “has other historic spots also, which may be hunted out by the curious, and none is more quaint and delightful than Old St. John’s Cemetery at the very core of the town…. ‘I’m going across to Old St. John’s after lunch,’ said Anne. ‘I don’t know that a graveyard is a very good place to go to get cheered up, but it seems the only get-at-able place where there are trees, and trees I must have. I’ll sit on one of those old slabs and shut my eyes and imagine I’m in the Avonlea woods.’ Anne did not do that, however, for she found enough of interest in Old St. John’s to keep her eyes wide open. They went in by the entrance gates, past the simple, massive, stone arch surmounted by the great lion of England.”

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I find it fascinating to read about places in Halifax Montgomery disliked (there are many) and places she liked (a few, including the Public Gardens and Point Pleasant Park). For example: “Halifax is the grimiest city in Canada—I know it is!!” (March 16, 1902). We thought about using that line on the invitation for the literary soirée, but we settled on “Even Halifax is pretty now. The trees are respectably leafy and every grass plot is gay with dandelions” (June 2, 1902).

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Anne Elliot’s Journeys of Body and Mind

Hazel Jones says she is “a confirmed Austen addict, having fallen in love with Henry Tilney at the age of 11,” although she tells me she has “since been unfaithful to him with Mr. Darcy, Captain Wentworth and Mr. Knightley.” Hazel tutors adult residential courses and she has lectured at various venues across the UK as well as speaking at Austen events in Australia, the USA and the Netherlands. Her first book, Jane Austen & Marriage, was published in 2009 and it was reissued in paperback in 2017. Jane Austen’s Journeys was published in 2014 and her new book, The Other Knight Boys: Jane Austen’s Dispossessed Nephews, is due out later this year. I’m very happy to introduce her contribution to “Youth and Experience.”[image error]

“One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it,” Anne Elliot claims near the end of Persuasion, and by then where has she not suffered? Yet Jane Austen delineates subtle alterations in the intensity of her heroine’s suffering in each location and the gradual widening of physical and mental horizons on her journey from passive acceptance to active engagement. For Anne to progress beyond regret for what might have been, she must re-learn cheerfulness and confidence, to trust in her own powers of self-determination and self-expression. It proves a slow and painful process, but on the journey from the deadening insularity of Kellynch to the busy streets of Bath, the inextricably linked miseries of Anne’s past and present assume an increasingly hopeful, thrillingly romantic potential.

Compared to Jane Austen’s other heroines, with the exception of Emma Woodhouse, Anne can justifiably describe herself as “at home, quiet, confined” (Volume 2, Chapter 11), a confinement as much psychological as physical. The association of place and character is always significant in Austen’s fiction and change of location a test of integrity, calling for adaptation while keeping faith with self-esteem and principles. Wherever Austen’s heroines happen to be, they are essentially what they always were; they none of them “perform to strangers.” Through their journeys they learn something of the world and discover where, and with whom, they do and do not belong. This is true for Anne Elliot too, but with a distinct difference. She is at least six years sadder and wiser than previous heroines and in her case it is a matter of giving up where she thinks she belongs and regaining the man with whom she already knows she belongs. For Anne, geographical change, though largely within one county, breaks the cycle of isolation and stasis in which she is trapped. Her journeys between Kellynch Hall, Uppercross, Winthrop, Lyme, Kellynch Lodge and Bath ease her away from a present damaged by past events towards hope.

Wherever Anne Elliot travels within the physical boundaries of Somerset, her “little history of sorrowful interest” accompanies her, colouring inner and outer landscapes in shades of autumn and winter. The vocabulary of suffering and loss dominates the first four and a half chapters based at Kellynch, where Anne”s existence is expressed in negative terms: of  “inferior value” to her father, she is “haggard … faded and thin” a “nobody” whose word carries “no weight.” Disappointments and oppositions, miseries and regrets, proliferate. The positives – love, happiness, “exquisite felicity”—are limited to two short paragraphs in Chapter Four, emphasising their transience and obliteration eight years previously. Small wonder Anne Elliot never smiles. Kellynch Hall, valuable to Sir Walter and his eldest daughter as a possession conferring privilege and status, is precious as a “beloved home” to Anne alone, the only place she has ever experienced happiness, albeit in the past. In fact, Kellynch is closely identified with looking back: Sir Walter’s copy of the Baronetage records the Elliots’ rise to honour and property in the seventeenth century, when a baronet might live like a baronet without incurring huge bills. While Sir Walter finds a temporary refuge from his financial predicament in his book of books, Anne finds some consolation in hers, the Navy List.

The novel’s insistence on time passing serves to mark the characters’ moral preoccupations—Sir Walter’s pride in his perennial handsomeness “amidst the wreck of the good looks of every body else,” his ruinous self-indulgence and gradual descent into debt; Elizabeth’s thirteen years of “laying down the domestic law at home,” taking precedence at balls, unsuccessfully advertising her eligibility during the London season and inwardly seething over her rejection by the heir to the Kellynch estate (Volume 1, Chapter 1). Seasons at Kellynch come and go with monotonous regularity, effecting little change. Anne’s suffering dates from the same period, but apart from thirteen years of missing a mother, almost eight of mourning a lost lover have exacted a greater toll, in “an early loss of bloom and spirits.”

It was no creed of Jane Austen’s that “such sort of Disappointments kill anybody” (Letter 109, 18-20 November 1814), a no-nonsense attitude evident throughout her novels, but in Persuasion, Anne’s relinquishing of Wentworth is a kind of death, a “sacrifice” of future happiness, occasioned by being “forced into prudence” at the age of nineteen. Anne is the victim of that “youth-killing dependence” predicted by Lady Russell as the certain consequence of an engagement to Wentworth; with one form of dependence, on a naval officer who had yet to make his fortune, exchanged for another, on a father thoughtlessly squandering his. Eight years in one location, with “no aid … given in change of place” (Volume 1, Chapter 4), have failed to accomplish a “sufficient cure” for Anne’s heartache. The significance of that one word “sufficient” becomes apparent in a single, precious shred of hope—“in favour of his constancy, she had no reason to believe him married.”

Anne’s painful existence has become habitual, but at the same time sustaining. Suffering reminds her that she is alive, that love was once possible, a state of mind preferable to Elizabeth’s cold insouciance and sense of ill-usage. Kellynch, redolent with a lover’s passion and the misery of parting, and freighted with past pleasure and present sorrow, is the only place Anne can connect with Wentworth. She visualises him there when the Crofts take over the lease, “and many a stroll and many a sigh were necessary to dispel the agitation” (Volume 1, Chapter 4). The idea of a Captain Wentworth in the flesh rather than as a “softened down” memory, revives all of Anne’s former pain in full force.

The first journey Anne makes away from familiar physical and psychological territory, is undertaken reluctantly, but her spirits are “improved by change of place and subject, by being removed three miles from Kellynch” (Volume 1, Chapter 6). At Uppercross a mental readjustment is necessary within the “cheerful character” of the little commonwealth of both houses at Uppercross, where Kellynch preoccupations are no concern of the Musgroves. They live very much in their own all-encompassing present; the past that paralyses Kellynch exercises no authority here, except, at first, over Anne. She feels her own “nothingness” within this self-absorbed family circle, yet this is not what her experiences at Uppercross should be teaching her. Her worth to the Musgroves is clear to them, if not to Anne. She is adaptable and sympathetic, a ready, if reluctant ear for everyone’s complaints and counter-complaints.

Thankfully, this state of anaesthetised tranquillity cannot last. She is “electrified” out of her comfort zone by Wentworth’s arrival at Uppercross. From this point on, she is shocked into recognising an insistent, trembling life force tingling through every nerve. The passive suffering of her Kellynch existence is jolted into “agitation,” “shudderings,” “confusion” and blushing as her body reacts in ways contrary to the mind’s directives. To begin with, she persuades herself that she will learn to be “insensible” to Wentworth’s close proximity, but her acute agitation, echoed in Austen’s agitated vocabulary and syntax, is betrayed by her mental and bodily responses on their first meeting:

a thousand feelings rushed on Anne, of which this was the most consoling, that it would soon be over … she heard his voice—he talked to Mary; said all that was right; said something to the Miss Musgroves, enough to mark an easy footing: the room seemed full—full of persons and voices—but a few minutes ended it …

“It is over! it is over!” she repeated to herself again, and again, in nervous gratitude. “The worst is over!” (Volume 1, Chapter 7)

Far from being over, painful encounters with Wentworth are only just beginning. They repeat the same cycle, moving from despair to hope, to repression, but physical responses prove barely controllable and hope sneaks in under the radar. Anne’s vain attempt to impose rational thought on her emotional and bodily reactions, extends to a kind of painful satisfaction in his dismissive words on her appearance:

“So altered that he should not have known her again!” These were words … of sobering tendency; they allayed agitation; they composed, and consequently must make her happier. (Volume 1, Chapter 7)

When Wentworth makes electric physical contact in removing little Walter’s sturdy arms from around her neck, “a confusion of varying, but very painful agitation” succeeds, which only “a long application of solitude and reflection” quietens (Volume 1, Chapter 9). This is hardly a sober allaying of emotional or physical turbulence. She might be silent, but her body language speaks volumes.

The “pleasures” on the walk to Winthrop reflect Anne’s frame of mind— “the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges” and the recalling of various poetic lines redolent of autumnal change and decay. As a distraction technique, it fails. She cannot escape the conversation going on between Wentworth and Louisa, in particular on the subject of love:

The sweet scenes of autumn were for a while put by—unless some tender sonnet, fraught with the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness, and the images of youth and hope, and spring, all gone together, blessed her memory. (Volume 1, Chapter 10)

Not the kind of blessing most heroines would welcome, and the narrative voice hints that indulging in such comforts might be counter-productive. Brighter prospects, possible after a little active intervention, are evidenced in the image of the farmer preparing the fallow ground, “counteracting the sweets of poetical despondence, and meaning to have spring again.” If the pains of the present are rooted in Anne’s past mistake, so are the hopes for the future and autumn proves more promising at Uppercross than Anne could possibly have imagined. In the case of the Winthrop walk, she hears enough to detect a “degree of feeling and curiosity about her” in Wentworth’s questioning of Louisa and on the way back to Uppercross, he assists her into the Crofts’ gig. There are signs that Anne, too, will be granted spring again, but her interpretation is cautious—she cannot allow herself the luxury of hope: “He could not forgive her,—but he could not be unfeeling” (Volume 1, Chapter 10). The events of the year ’06, known only to themselves, generate both intimacy and estrangement. On the journey towards reconciliation, they move forwards and backwards in time simultaneously. Daily encounters with her former lover revive Anne’s suffering in full force—her feelings “so compounded of pleasure and pain, that she knew not which prevailed”—but in altered proportions to the unremitting hopelessness experienced at Kellynch. The physical removal to Uppercross effects a mental shift, but still not sufficient to overcome Anne’s accustomed pessimism and allow her to acknowledge Wentworth’s returning interest.

Something must happen to dispel Anne’s debilitating lack of energy to reclaim the man she loves and the transformation begins at Lyme. A seventeen-mile journey transports her into a promising, unfamiliar environment, of high cliffs, “green chasms,” “romantic rocks” and “luxuriant growth.” In only two chapters, smiles come more easily as she experiences “amusement” on three separate occasions, together with “pleasant feelings” and “great pleasure.” Jane Austen’s love of Lyme, formed over two holidays there in 1803 and 1804, suffuses the description of the place and its immediate environs, but it is in the scenes she goes on to describe that the worth of Lyme comes to be understood in terms of Anne Elliot’s returning confidence. This is the desired cure, rather than the fading out of her lingering constancy to Wentworth, although at Lyme, opportunities for a second attachment present themselves. Anne’s body as well as her mind responds to the curative properties of the sea, thus increasing her physical appeal. She is earnestly appraised by Mr. Elliot on the seashore, receives a “bright look” from Wentworth and is the conscious object of “some dawning tenderness” in Captain Benwick. Male admiration serves, in collaboration with the sea breeze, to improve Anne’s complexion and animate her spirits.

Greater pleasure is experienced in Lyme than in any location so far, but along with the peaks come the troughs. Anne’s dual loss, of Kellynch and of Wentworth, brings into sharp focus what home and companionship constitute for others. For the sociable Musgroves at Uppercross it is open house and everyone welcome. For the Crofts, wherever they are together is home. In the Harvilles’ cramped but ingeniously fitted up lodgings at Lyme, Anne’s head and heart respond to “the picture of repose and domestic happiness” it presents and she experiences “a great tendency to lowness” as she believes that the chance has gone for closer ties with Wentworth’s brother-officers (Volume 1, Chapter 11).

She is drawn to James Benwick in particular by the strength of a common grief, his worn on his sleeve, hers hidden. Here is a man whose very recent loss appears as irrevocable as her own; Fanny Harville dead, Frederick Wentworth dancing attendance on Louisa Musgrove, as good as. She foresees future hope in Benwick’s life, while denying it in her own: “‘he has not, perhaps, a more sorrowing heart than I have. I cannot believe his prospects so blighted for ever … He will rally again, and be happy with another’” (Volume 1, Chapter 11).

Acting on this perceptive premise, she attempts to reason him out of his addiction to the kind of poetry “which imaged a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness.” The fortifying selection of prose she recommends is of course familiar to her, from her eight year struggle against similar afflictions at Kellynch, but it is less than a week since the walk to Winthrop, when she herself conjured up poetic lines on declining happiness and withered hope. The subject raises, for the first time, a touch of humour, as Anne reflects on the irony of “coming to Lyme to preach patience and resignation … nor could she help fearing … she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination” (Volume 1, Chapter 11).

At last we see signs that Anne Elliot is capable of eloquence, but not yet in her own interests. She is listened to with gratitude and interest by Captain Benwick and if Harville is aware of her sympathetic exertions, so is Wentworth, but he and Anne never communicate beyond “the common civilities.”

Louisa’s fall from the Cobb causes widespread suffering. Anne alone stays rational; although her “wretchedness” is mentioned, it is not elaborated. She has enough to do in directing operations. Her decisive actions win Wentworth’s admiration, “‘if Anne will stay, no one so proper, so capable as Anne!’” spoken “with a glow, and yet a gentleness, which seemed almost restoring the past” (Volume 1, Chapter 12). Anne blushes with emotion at the intimacy implied in the use of her first name, and on the journey back to Uppercross, Wentworth’s appeal to her judgement is interpreted as “a proof of friendship, and of deference for her judgement, a great pleasure.” Even though she persuades herself that “she was valued only as she could be useful to Louisa,” she does at least recognise that she is valued.

A return to the familiar, unchanging landscape of Somerset threatens to undo the rejuvenating aspects of the sea, with Anne’s final days at Uppercross following the same pattern of self-effacing usefulness as the first. Alone on a wet November day, convinced that Louisa will recover and marry Wentworth, she indulges in the most desolate view of the future to date:

A few months hence, and the room now so deserted, occupied but by her silent, pensive self, might be filled again with all that was happy and gay, all that was glowing and bright in prosperous love, all that was most unlike Anne Elliot!

The hopes raised at Lyme seem buried, but they are robust enough to surface again. As she leaves, her thoughts are the usual compound of pain and pleasure:

Scenes had passed at Uppercross, which made it precious. It stood the record of many sensations of pain, once severe, but now softened; and of some instances of relenting feeling, some breathings of friendship and reconciliation, which could never be looked for again, and which could never cease to be dear. (Volume 2, Chapter 1)

A brief period at Kellynch Lodge acts as a watershed between the dramatic events at Lyme and the removal to Bath; between the lowest point of Anne’s despondency and a lightening of spirits. Anne is on familiar territory once more, but with altered perceptions. Lady Russell notices and compliments her improved looks and Anne has “the amusement of connecting them with the silent admiration of Mr. Elliot, and of hoping she was to be blessed with a second spring of youth and beauty” (Volume 2, Chapter 1). She becomes aware of a mental change in attitude to her former home. Superseded by Uppercross and Lyme concerns, Kellynch affairs are now of secondary interest. The Crofts prove more responsible caretakers than her father and, in Anne’s opinion, painful though the thought may be, deserve to occupy her former home. No longer is suffering attached to the thought of Wentworth at the Hall; there is a greater degree of apprehension in imagining an encounter taking place under Lady Russell’s eagle eye. From this point, having learnt to leave Kellynch regrets behind her, Anne begins to focus on redressing her own situation.

Of all the locations Anne loves or comes to love, Bath is where she suffers least and achieves most. Her ingrained dislike stems from the circumstance of having been three years at school in the city after her mother’s death and from passing a winter season there with Lady Russell following the break with Wentworth. It is a sign of Anne’s altered mentality that in Bath, the deadening weight of the past loses much of its influence, although it appears at first that she will be subject to the same kind of stultifying confinement experienced at Kellynch, since exclusivity is still Sir Walter’s chief preoccupation. He and Elizabeth congratulate themselves on the lofty situation of their house in Camden Place, from where they look down on the city spread beneath them and attend none but the most prestigious private parties. Lady Russell has a house in slightly lower Rivers Street; the Crofts are lower still, in Gay Street, leading off the Circus. The Musgroves are in the centre of things, at the White Hart Hotel and Mrs. Smith in Westgate Buildings on the edge of gentility, close to the hot bath. Viscountess Lady Dalrymple leases a house in Laura Place, on the fashionable eastern side of the river. Sir Walter’s rank-obsessed vision appears to dominate character placement in the city, but a more democratic Bath belongs to the sociable Musgroves and Crofts, who are happy where they are, able to take full advantage of the pleasures on offer: the theatre, the shops, the lively public spaces.

Bath’s winter season provides Anne with company and several escape routes—to Mrs. Smith’s lodgings, to the White Hart, to the thronged streets, where she frequently sees the Crofts—allowing an autonomy impossible at Kellynch. Rather than closing life down, as Anne had anticipated, Bath facilitates an opening up and her previous anxieties are succeeded by more pleasant concerns. To begin with, Wentworth is relegated to the background, as Mr. Elliot occupies centre stage in Anne’s thoughts and conjectures. She smiles frequently at and with him and feels “agreeable sensations” when told of his admiration. Because he listens to her, she speaks with growing confidence and at greater length. At Camden Place, Anne is able to smile at her father and elder sister’s foibles, the first time she is described as taking their attitude lightly.

In Austen’s cancelled chapter 10, Anne sighs over the fate of her father’s house in the hands of her disreputable cousin, but only once in the final version of the text does she consider Kellynch in connection with the future. Presented with a picture of herself occupying her mother’s place as the next Lady Elliot, Anne’s imagination and heart, we are told, are “bewitched,” but the charm fades when she thinks of the impossibility of marrying Mr. Elliot. This is the final stage in her growing away from Kellynch. She relinquishes it with hardly a backward glance.

A whole month passes before news of Uppercross, Lyme and Wentworth reaches Camden Place. When it does, and Benwick’s engagement to Louisa bursts upon Anne, near-ecstasy succeeds astonishment. In Bath, Anne’s suffering dissipates and now, filled with excited anticipation, she allows herself to hope:

Anne’s heart beat in spite of herself, and brought the colour into her cheeks when she thought of Captain Wentworth unshackled and free. She had some feelings which she was ashamed to investigate. They were too much like joy, senseless joy! (Volume 2, Chapter 6)

Bath’s opportunities for social interaction in a multiplicity of public places encourage a certain liberation and boldness in Anne. From Molland’s pastry shop, she sees the newly-arrived Wentworth before he sees her and determines to make contact. In a crucial passage, Anne’s consciousness takes up the dual struggle between her confident and her cautious self:

She now felt a great inclination to go to the outer door; she wanted to see if it rained. Why was she to suspect herself of another motive? Captain Wentworth must be out of sight. She left her seat, she would go, one half of her should not be always so much wiser than the other half, or always suspecting the other of being worse than it was. She would see if it rained. (Volume 2, Chapter 7)

Her initial response to the sight of him is “overpowering, blinding, bewildering,” and even given preparation time, “she had enough to feel! It was agitation, pain, pleasure, a something between delight and misery.” The following day, Wentworth is spotted in Great Pulteney Street from Lady Russell’s carriage, tantalisingly close, but unapproachable. The Bath that brings together can also, for purposes of novelistic suspense, keep apart.

On the evening of the concert, Anne is filled with a kind of desperate courage to act on the next opportunity that offers. Taking the bold initiative of stepping resolutely away from her family into Wentworth’s path as he enters the Assembly Rooms brings him to a standstill by her side. This buzzing public space accommodates a very private exchange. Wentworth’s clear conviction on the subject of constancy encompasses their past shared experiences at Kellynch, Uppercross and Lyme, but he speaks also of the present and future—“‘A man does not recover from such a devotion of the heart to such a woman!—He ought not—he does not.’” Anne is “struck, gratified, confused, and beginning to breathe very quick, and feel an hundred things in a moment,” but she keeps control of herself and of the conversation, encourages him to talk of Lyme and creates an opening to say something of her own feelings:

“The last few hours were certainly very painful, … but when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering — which was by no means the case at Lyme … I have travelled so little, that every fresh place would be interesting to me — but there is real beauty at Lyme: and in short” (with a faint blush at some recollections) “altogether my impressions of the place are very agreeable.” (Volume 2, Chapter 8)

She moves into the concert with “exquisite, though agitated sensations” and a growing confidence that Wentworth “must love her.” But neither they nor the reader are “hastening together towards perfect felicity” just yet. Mr. Elliot’s too close attentions cause Wentworth’s hasty exit, leaving an exquisitely gratified but anxious Anne to wonder, “How was such jealousy to be quieted? How was the truth to reach him?”

The answer to those questions lies in her own agency. In a place that encourages autonomy, she must be more proactive.

Austen’s first attempt to finish Persuasion allows Admiral Croft to take control over Anne’s movements as she hurries home from Westgate Buildings. He ushers her into his lodgings in Gay Street, where she is left alone with Captain Wentworth to refute the report of an engagement to her cousin. The power of speech is assumed by the Admiral, then Wentworth. Anne voices only brief denials, adopting a largely passive role in the ensuing reconciliation entirely at odds with her growing determination to clear Wentworth’s suspicions. Fortunately, Austen realised that this unsatisfactory conclusion negated the distance her heroine had travelled, in terms of body and mind.

The rewritten scenes unequivocally confirm Bath’s role in Anne’s future. Two opportunities are created for her to act and although she must try as usual to stay calm in Wentworth’s presence, this time physical and mental control has the opposite purpose to concealment—she must speak and speak to be heard. On the first occasion, she voices indifference to Mr Elliot’s comings and goings, Wentworth “listening with his whole soul.” Next morning, back in the Musgroves’ bustling rooms at the inn, Mrs. Croft and Captains Harville and Wentworth are already in attendance when Anne arrives, to find herself

plunged at once in all the agitations which she had merely laid her account of tasting a little before the morning closed. There was no delay, no waste of time. She was deep in the happiness of such misery, or the misery of such happiness, instantly. (Volume 2 Chapter 11)

Mrs. Musgrove and Mrs. Croft audibly canvass the undesirability of long engagements, a subject guaranteed to ignite a “nervous thrill” in Anne and for Wentworth to pause in writing his letter. This is their own sad history with an unexpected twist and in that instant the past exerts a more positive force, as Wentworth returns Anne’s instinctive glance with “one quick, conscious look.” She joins Captain Harville at the window, to speak emotionally but eloquently on the collective burden of female constancy. Yet she can only judge by and speak of her own past suffering—loving longest when all hope is gone. That it is past she already knows; Wentworth’s protestations of constancy in the Upper Rooms have convinced her of that. He alone hears and understands the personal reference to Anne’s pain and reciprocates with heartfelt eloquence on paper.

The almost unbearable tension trapped within one small room is released as Anne, her “spirits dancing in private rapture” is accompanied alone by Captain Wentworth, into Union Street. Away from the busy scenes at the inn and in the crowded streets, in the “comparative quiet and retired gravel-walk” on the long way home to Camden Place, the lovers’ reconciliation becomes “a blessing indeed” and promises “all the immortality which the happiest recollections of their own future lives could bestow.” Present and future merge as they create in the here and now happy memories for the years ahead. The painful past also has its place, in the recognition that their earlier relationship, that had developed primarily because Anne had no one to love and Wentworth nothing to do, has been strengthened—“more tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other’s character”—by eight years and a half of “division and estrangement” (Volume 2, Chapter 11). Encounters at Uppercross and Lyme, distressing and pleasurable alike, have contributed to that deeper knowledge, making those places precious, but Bath, of all the locations in Persuasion, holds and will continue to hold a special position in Anne and Wentworth’s hearts and minds.

In the late spring of 1816, the second volume of Persuasion almost complete, Jane Austen made the longest journey of her final year, travelling seventy-seven miles from Chawton to Cheltenham. Various unpleasant health disorders had begun to manifest themselves and a spa water cure proposed. After a fortnight, she returned to Hampshire by way of Kintbury, where family friends noted Austen’s physical deterioration. She never travelled any great distance again. It is sadly ironic that she was working on Persuasion at this time, creating characters who had sailed the world’s oceans and opening up travel opportunities for Anne Elliot as her own were closing down. As the wife of a naval officer, Anne can expect to experience the kind of unsettled life, on land and perhaps at sea, in favour of which well-travelled Mrs. Croft argues with vigorous energy: “‘We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days.’” Jane Austen herself had claimed to look forward to a less fixed existence in one place as a benefit of the move from Steventon in 1801: “there is something interesting in the bustle of going away, & the prospect of spending future summers by the Sea … is very delightful.—For a time we shall now possess many of the advantages which I have often thought of with Envy in the wives of Sailors” (Letter 29, 3-5 January 1801).

At the resolution of Jane Austen’s five earlier novels, we imagine the heroines breathing a sigh of relief as they settle into secure, largely uneventful married lives. On Anne’s marriage, she is welcomed into a community of brothers and sisters, Wentworth’s blood relatives and naval friends. She gains the family she both desires and deserves, but no safe-haven equivalent of Donwell, Mansfield Parsonage, Pemberley, Woodston or Delaford. Jane Austen’s most moving novel ends fittingly with the heroine learning that home is not a geographical entity, but an emotional certainty, located wherever the heart belongs.

Quotations are from the Cambridge University Press edition of Persuasion, edited by Janet Todd and Antje Blank (2006) and the Oxford University Press edition of Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye (4th edition, 2011).

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Twenty-fourth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Maggie Lane, Judith Sears, and Sheila Johnson Kindred.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

What Women Most Desire: Anne Elliot’s Self-discovery

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may remember Maggie Arnold’s guest posts on Mansfield Park and Emma , along with one she wrote last fall on L.M. Montgomery’s novel The Blue Castle . Welcome back, Maggie!

Maggie and I read Pride and Prejudice together in a high school English class—and I remember discussing Persuasion with her not long after that, on a walk through Point Pleasant Park (which happens to have been one of L.M. Montgomery’s favourite places in Halifax).

The Rev. Dr. Maggie Arnold is the Associate Rector at Grace Episcopal Church in Medford, Massachusetts. Her book Christ’s Chosen Preacher: Mary Magdalene in the Era of Reformation will be published this fall by Harvard University Press. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.[image error]

According to Chaucer’s famous pronouncement, what women most desire is to get their own way in everything. At first glance, it would seem that this is what Anne Elliot gains through her perseverance in Persuasion: keeping faithful to Captain Wentworth despite rejection of the relationship by her family and friends, until at last he proposes again and she can marry the man of her own choosing. And yet, there is more at stake than a mere triumph of the will in Persuasion, or an exercise in delayed gratification. Over the course of the eight and a half years between their first love affair and their ultimate marriage, Anne comes to know her place in the world, she finds a sense of her own usefulness, and it is this discovery that allows her to accept Captain Wentworth and to make a life of her own, with him.

The agency of her choice is confirmed, at the end of the novel, by her assertion that she was, in fact, right to refuse Captain Wentworth initially. A simpler treatment of her character as being too influenced by others would have had her show regret for the wasted time they had spent apart. Instead, she maintains that she was right to have mistrusted their brief relationship, and to have relied on the judgement of her family and especially of Lady Russell. She concludes in her defense that “a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman’s portion.” She and Captain Wentworth were certainly in love when she was nineteen, but he was a young naval officer who had not yet proved himself—his early promise and energetic temperament were as yet untried. Anne herself was inexperienced, a weakness which only time could correct, as she comes to know more people and to witness their failures and successes.

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Maggie Arnold, collage, 2016

Over the years she observes the effects of the interaction of character and circumstances. She sees her father and sister’s family pride and vanity undermine their financial situation, causing them to lose the stability of Anne’s childhood home. They have failed in their vocation as landed gentry, neglecting the stewardship of their inheritance, their leadership in the community. She watches the only example of marriage available to her in her family circle, that of her younger sister, Mary, and is disappointed by Mary’s selfishness, seeing how it erodes the respect of her husband and her judgment as a parent. Anne’s developing insight leads her to withhold approval from Mr. Elliot when he comes on the scene, though her family and Lady Russell are seduced by his wealth and elegant manners. Her ambivalence is justified by the story of her friend, Mrs. Smith, who inspires Anne with her courage and industry in the face of illness, poverty, and loneliness.

The opposite of Anne’s idle and vain family, useless to themselves and others, is demonstrated in the group of Navy families that surrounds Captain Wentworth. Admiral Croft and his wife are devoted to one another, models of a union in which each partner values the other’s gifts and both serve the best interests of the family’s chosen calling, traveling together to keep up morale, bravely exploring in the far-flung ports where they are posted. In the crisis of Louisa’s injury, Captain and Mrs. Harville are hospitable and supremely capable, efficiently nursing the patient in stark contrast to Mary, who is hysterical and must be taken out on walks by Captain Benwick so that she does not get in the way in the small but ship-shape house.

All of these impressions combine with Captain Wentworth’s professional stature so that Anne can clearly see the path of her desire as the life to which she can commit herself, now with the maturity of “a collected mind.” She knows her own worth, and others acknowledge it, too: “Mrs. Musgrove’s real affection had been won by her usefulness when they were in distress” (Volume 2, Chapter 10). Like her husband-to-be and his colleagues and friends, she is steady and resourceful, a member of an emerging aristocracy of merit, those on whom the world will rely. In choosing her heart’s desire, a marriage and a life in which she can be useful, Anne is able to move beyond the pettiness and provinciality of her small, local sphere, to a life of duty and service to the nation and the dawning empire.

Quotations are from the Penguin edition of Persuasion, edited by Gillian Beer (2003).

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Jamaica Pond, Massachusetts. Photo by Maggie Arnold.

Twenty-third in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Hazel Jones, Maggie Lane, and Judith Sears.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Three Generations in Search of Anne Elliot

In 2014, when I hosted a celebration in honour of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Mary Lu Roffey Redden wrote a guest post on Mary Crawford’s claim that “A clergyman is nothing.” I’m very happy that she agreed to write for this year’s blog series on Persuasion, and that she chose to share a personal story about a pilgrimage she and her mother, her sister, and her niece made to Lyme Regis. Welcome back, Mary Lu! In last week’s guest post, Carol Adams wrote that “On the Cobb, each visitor can appraise the three candidates for the location of Louisa’s fall.” Many visitors, including Mary Lu and her family, focus on the steps called “Granny’s Teeth.”

Mary Lu recently retired as the director of Halifax Humanities 101, a registered charity offering university level, non-credit Humanities education to adults living on low incomes in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has an MA in Philosophy of Religion from McMaster University and she has worked as both a university and community college instructor. She received a Doctor of Civil Law (honoris causa) from the University of Kings College, Halifax, for her work as an advocate for Humanities education.

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“I am for Bath. I have always said Bath is incomparable.” With these words from Nick Dear’s screenplay for the 1995 film of Persuasion, three generations of my family decided our itinerary for a ten-day visit to the south of England in 1998. My mother, at age 78, was making her first trip across the Atlantic, as was I, then in my mid-40’s. My older sister and her twenty-two-year-old daughter had both spent considerable time in Europe but neither had done the sort of literary pilgrimage we envisioned.

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Four women: one an undergrad in English, one a PhD In English literature, another an MA in Philosophy, and our mom and grandma, probably better read than all of us, but from a family that during the Depression had no money “to waste on educating a girl,” setting out on a journey to discover places dear to Jane Austen. Persuasion was the novel that would dictate part of our itinerary.

I have often wondered just what the appeal of Persuasion is. It is not a sparklingly witty book like Pride and Prejudice, it lacks the intense emotional character of Sense and Sensibility, and it has as its heroine a modest, quiet, overlooked young woman. But thinking back to that trip I have some thoughts. To my mother, whose longing for education was ignored by her six older siblings and her parents, Anne Elliot, “who never seemed considered by the others” (Volume 1, Chapter 2), must have seemed a sympathetic character. To my niece, who was full of excitement that summer, having just met the young man she would marry two years later, the romance of the novel held a strong appeal. For my sister, the English professor, of course any Jane Austen novel is compelling for the beauty of its writing and the depth of its insight. And for me, at the time a stay-at-home mom of children in school, Anne’s quiet life and capacity for reflection paralleled my own rather quiet existence out of the workforce.

Well, yes, we were all “for Bath,” but to be true to the events as they unfold in Persuasion, we headed to Lyme Regis first. Our heads were full of lines from the recent film of Persuasion and while we had each read the novel a few times, as can happen with a film adaptation you like, the dialogue had stuck in our heads supplanting what Jane Austen often left as narrated description rather than direct dialogue.

(In fact, a few years later, my sister was teaching an undergraduate course that included Pride and Prejudice on the syllabus and when she asked her primarily female class to name a scene in the book they particularly loved, a majority of her students described the famous “wet shirt” scene featuring Colin Firth.)

Lyme Regis on a blustering, chilly day in July was both a disappointment and everything we hoped for. The waves were crashing over the top of the Cobb and it was too dangerous for my mother and her middle-aged daughters to try to walk that slippery, wet surface—the very conditions that rendered the high part of the Cobb off limits to the “ladies” in the novel. But my niece could see no reason not to attempt to climb “Granny’s Teeth,” the steps that seemed to be the very ones Louisa Musgrove, also young and impulsive, could not resist. Reciting lines from the film version, I played Captain Wentworth: “No! It is too high!” “Louisa, don’t be so foolish….”

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We weren’t just play acting. The steps really are very treacherous and the day being wet and windy made them even more so. I wasn’t just Captain Wentworth at that point, but a concerned auntie worried about my laughing, exuberant niece. Fortunately, she did not meet the fate of Louisa Musgrove and we had a great laugh about our silliness when she jumped down, from one of the lower steps.

It was a lovely moment that we all enjoyed thoroughly in spite of the wind and wet. The next day we set out for Bath from our rented cottage near Salisbury and had a lovely lunch in the Pump Room, where our shared excitement at being in the very room Jane herself had frequented was immense. Three years later, my mother began to show signs of the dementia which ravaged the last 12 years of her life. How grateful we are to have made that trip where all four of us pretended ourselves into a favourite Jane Austen novel. Our experience has probably been duplicated countless times by Jane Austen enthusiasts, and I hope that it will continue to be so for generations to come.

Quotations are from the Penguin edition of Persuasion, edited and with an introduction by Gillian Beer (1998) and from Persuasion, screenplay by Nick Dear (1996).

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Twenty-second in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Maggie Arnold, Hazel Jones, and Maggie Lane.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

After the Fall

“Falls communicate something, if we are paying attention,” writes Carol J. Adams in today’s guest post on Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Carol’s essay “Jane Austen’s Guide to Alzheimer’s,” in honour of the 200th anniversary of the publication of Emma, was published in the New York Times in December of 2015. Carol is the author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory and many other books. You can visit her website and follow her on Twitter @_CarolJAdams. She’s currently completing a memoir of reading Jane Austen’s novels and providing care to elderly patients. I’m delighted to introduce her guest post on Louisa Musgrove and Lyme Regis.

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Beechen Cliff. Box Hill. The steps at the Cobb at Lyme Regis.

The notable aspect of each of these locations in Jane Austen’s fiction is that they are actual places. One isn’t confused about where Beechen Cliff or Box Hill is. (They make their appearances in Northanger Abbey and Emma respectively.) But an ongoing debate about the steps that Louisa Musgrove fell from at the Cobb continues. The Cobb has three distinctly different sets of steps to choose from.

Upon arriving at Lyme Regis, Tennyson supposedly asked to be taken to the Cobb so he could see for himself where Louisa Musgrove fell. I wonder to which of the three stairs on the Cobb he was taken.

Like Tennyson, some readers are drawn to the Cobb, a jetty-like barrier providing protection against the winds and waves of the English Channel. John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) describes it as “a long claw of old gray wall that flexes itself against the sea. … [T]he most beautiful sea rampart on the south coast of England … a superb fragment of folk art. Primitive yet complex, elephantine but delicate; as full of subtle curves and volumes as a Henry Moore or a Michelangelo, and pure, clean, salt, a paragon of mass” (Chapter 1).

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Austen stages one of the most dramatic moments in her fiction on the Cobb:

There was too much wind to make the high part of the new Cobb pleasant for the ladies and they agreed to get down the steps to the lower, and all were contented to pass quietly and carefully down the steep flight, excepting Louisa; she must be jumped down them by Captain Wentworth. (Volume 1, Chapter 12)

Louisa, thrilled by jumping and being caught by Wentworth, immediately turns around and runs back up the stairs to be jumped down them again. Though Wentworth says he is not ready, she jumps:

she was too precipitate by half a second, she fell on the pavement on the Lower Cobb, and was taken up lifeless! There was no wound, no blood, no visible bruise; but her eyes were closed, she breathed not, her face was like death. The horror of that moment to all who stood around!

There she lies, and who will determine what to do next? Anne, only Anne.

Louisa’s fall raises Anne up.

For the story, it is immaterial from which stairs Louisa precipitately self-precipitated herself. But for some readers, myself included, our love for the novel draws us to the Cobb. The novel prompted me to think about the notable falls in my family. Falls communicate something, if we are paying attention. Falls aren’t only about clumsiness, or bad timing, or vertigo; they may be telling us something about frailty, or emotional collapse, or post-traumatic stress disorder.

Falls ask us to make decisions, to identify resources, to recognize that something significant has changed. Austen captures all this, too, in the dramatic scene on the Cobb.

On the Cobb, each visitor can appraise the three candidates for the location of Louisa’s fall. The first set is a double set of stairs at the “Gin Shop.” My friends and I passed this option quickly; too solid, too stolid, too near the land.

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The most popular choice is “Granny’s Teeth,” the second set of steps. (This is the answer offered by no less venerable an institution than the Jane Austen Centre.)

Granny’s Teeth looks like this:[image error]

Okay, maybe a young woman, burdened by the Regency clothing of her time, might have run back up those steps. I—burdened only by a winter coat—certainly did not. (And what does the name of those stairs says about the dental health of elderly women?)

As many have pointed out, Austen describes the stairs as being part of “the new Cobb.”  The new Cobb was rebuilt at the end of the eighteenth century after a storm destroyed it. A plaque commemorates its completion.

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When Jane Austen visited Lyme Regis in 1803 and 1804, she would have seen the new stairs and the plaque.

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Perhaps the party from Uppercross on their first visit to the Cobb went up the first steps, and came down the second (Granny’s teeth). And maybe on the second day they went down the third, the new steps.

We could say it does not matter which stairs were the scene of Louisa’s fall. The steps that really matter are those in our mind, where the event—as with all of Austen’s fiction—really takes place. After the fall, Anne speaks up, reclaims her voice, and begins to control the narrative of her life.

But anyone who stood on that “noble hill,” Beechen Cliff, or experienced the vista from Box Hill, understands the frisson of connection to Austen and her characters. And there at the foot of the steps on the Cobb, we find ourselves head over heels in the novel itself.

We might run up the stairs toward the upper part of the Cobb thinking about Louisa (or a family member). Walking on the upper part of the Cobb, I remembered the dramatic falls of my life. Jane Austen gave me the chance to see them from these heights—and reimagine each of them, first from the Gin Shop, then from Granny’s teeth, and finally from the “new” steps with the turmoil of the sea so close.

But on the lower part of the Cobb, it was Anne, only Anne, who held sway.

Quotations are from the Cambridge University Press edition of Persuasion, edited and with an introduction by Janet Todd and Antje Blank (2006).

All photographs of Lyme Regis are by Carol J. Adams.

Twenty-first in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Mary Lu Redden, Maggie Arnold, and Hazel Jones.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

What Anne Knew

“Anne at the beginning of Persuasion has nothing to learn, no knowledge to gain from ‘till this moment I never knew myself’-style epiphanies,” writes Jessica Richard in today’s guest post for the blog series I’m hosting in honour of the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.[image error]

Jessica is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. She’s the author of The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Palgrave, 2011) and editor of Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (Broadview, 2008), and she’s co-founder and co-editor of The 18th-Century Common, a public humanities website for enthusiasts of eighteenth-century studies. It’s a pleasure to introduce Jessica’s guest post for “Youth and Experience.”[image error]

The scholar Eve Sedgwick once lambasted Austen criticism for “its unresting exaction of the spectacle of a Girl Being Taught a Lesson”; critics of a certain era seemed to be obsessed with performing disciplinary-didactic readings of Austen’s works. Sedgwick pulls lines from Tony Tanner to illustrate this, though he’s hardly the only offender:

“Emma… has to be tutored… into correct vision and responsible speech. Anne Elliot has to move, painfully, from an excessive prudence.” “Some Jane Austen heroines have to learn their true duties. They all have to find their proper homes.” Catherine “quite literally is in danger of perverting reality and one of the things she has to learn is to break out of quotations”; she “has to be disabused of her naïve and foolish ‘Gothic’ expectations.” Elizabeth and Darcy “have to learn to see that their novel is more properly called…” (Tanner, Jane Austen [1986], quoted in Sedgwick “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Critical Inquiry 17.4 [1991], with Sedgwick’s emphasis).

Yet Anne Elliot’s learning process does not take place over the course of Persuasion; it does not anchor the novel’s plot; rather it happened before the novel itself begins. Indeed, this significant change in her views—“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older”—is stated but not explained, described but not accounted for. We are told at the outset that “Anne, at seven and twenty, thought very differently from what she had been made to think at nineteen,” but we don’t know exactly when this change took place, what prompted it, what stages of reassessment Anne may have undergone during the eight years “since this little history of sorrowful interest had reached its close” (Volume 1, Chapter 4). It seems clear then that Anne’s lesson-learning is not of narrative interest to Austen. Instead, Anne at the beginning of Persuasion has nothing to learn, no knowledge to gain from “till this moment I never knew myself”-style epiphanies (Pride and Prejudice, Volume 2, Chapter 13).

Not only does Anne already know herself thoroughly at the beginning of Persuasion, understanding completely (now that such knowledge is irrelevant) that an engagement to a man with an uncertain future would have made her happier than the “certain immediate wretchedness” of breaking it off. She also knows Wentworth thoroughly as soon as he crosses her path after an eight-year separation. Anne reads his smallest gestures with complete accuracy. When he declines an invitation to breakfast at Uppercross Cottage, “Anne understood it. He wished to avoid seeing her” (Volume 1, Chapter 7). When Mrs. Musgrove sighs over the fate of her late son Richard, Anne reads in “a certain glance of his bright eye, and curl of his handsome mouth,” Wentworth’s real opinion of the hapless younger Musgrove. “It was too transient an indulgence of self-amusement to be detected by any who understood him less than herself” (Volume 1, Chapter 8). When he silently compels her into the Crofts’ carriage after an exhausting walk to Winthrop, “She understood him. He could not forgive her,—but he could not be unfeeling. Though condemning her for the past, and considering it with high and unjust resentment, though perfectly careless of her, and though becoming attached to another, still he could not see her suffer, without desire of giving her relief” (Volume 1, Chapter 10).

When they meet in Bath, Anne comprehends that Wentworth’s “sentences begun which he could not finish—his half averted eyes, and more than half expressive glance,—all, all declared that he had a heart returning to her at least; … She could not contemplate the change as implying less.—He must love her.” And by the evening’s end she understands that “jealousy of Mr. Elliot! … [was] the only intelligible motive” for Wentworth’s hasty departure before the concert concluded (Volume 2, Chapter 8). Every narrative declaration of Anne’s complete comprehension of Wentworth’s inner thoughts is confirmed by subsequent action or by Wentworth himself. Eventually, even Wentworth realizes that Anne has read him thoroughly: “I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine” (Volume 2, Chapter 11).

Yet neither the reassessment of prudence that Anne undertook before the novel began nor her repeatedly demonstrated understanding of Wentworth bring her the tiniest bit closer to happiness. For this she is entirely dependent on the chance circumstances that nudge Wentworth into self-knowledge and consequent understanding of Anne. Luck brought Wentworth back into Anne’s life (through the chance encounter of Admiral Croft and Mr. Shepherd when he was looking for an estate to rent); luck released him from the seemingly inevitable union with Louisa (through her injury and Benwick’s proximity during her recovery). Anne’s passive constancy, her woman’s “privilege” of “loving longest, when existence or hope is gone,” is rewarded by Wentworth’s belated recognition of her merits (Volume 2, Chapter 11). But this happy ending can hardly be said to be earned by Anne through lessons learned. Austen goes out of her way to undermine a didactic interpretation of the novel by making use of the narrative resources of improbable romance (luck, chance) rather than probable realism. And the novel’s concluding paragraph highlights the instability of this happy ending, this romance. No amount of self-knowledge or knowledge of each other can reduce “the dread of future war” that clouds Anne and Wentworth’s horizon.

Quotations are from the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Persuasion, edited by James Kinsley, with an introduction and notes by Deidre Shauna Lynch (2004).

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“They were divided only by Mrs Musgrove.” Illustration by C.E. Brock (from Mollands.net)

Twentieth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Carol J. Adams, Mary Lu Redden, and Hazel Jones.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Revisiting Persuasion: Jane Austen on history and History

Today’s guest post is by Daniel Woolf, Professor of History, and Principal and Vice-Chancellor, at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He has previously held positions at Dalhousie University, McMaster University, and the University of Alberta. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Society of Antiquaries of London, and the Royal Historical Society, he is the author of four books, most recently A Global History of History (2011) and The Social Circulation of the Past (2003), and editor or co-editor of several others, and of many articles and book chapters. He was general editor of the five-volume Oxford History of Historical Writing (2011-12). I’m delighted to introduce Daniel’s contribution to “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.”

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Over a decade ago I (a historian rather than a literary scholar, and a specialist on a much earlier period of history than Jane Austen’s) published a brief essay in the journal Persuasions addressing the question of how Jane Austen dealt with history (“Jane Austen and History: the Past, Gender, and Memory from the Restoration to Persuasion,” in Persuasions 26 [2004]). In that essay I contended that, notwithstanding the caricature of Austen as being anti-historical (the oft-quoted exchange between Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney being the most often cited, though not the exclusive, evidence to support this view), the novelist demonstrates an interest in the past and a reconciliation with it in the course of her novels. I suggested Mansfield Park as something of a turning point, given Fanny’s turn to the role of history-educator late in that novel. Persuasion, I argued, was the culmination in this reconciliation and is the most historical of Austen’s novels, both in the sense that Anne Elliot engages in the forensic work of the historian (“she distrusted the past, if not the present” in evaluating Mr. Elliot’s character) in reconstructing and sorting through conflicting versions of events (as Elizabeth Bennet was able to do before her), and in the sense that Persuasion is the only novel that Austen specifically and deliberately situates in chronologically-specific, historical time.

The former essay focused mainly on Austen’s attitude to what might be called “small h” history, namely the study (it was not yet a “discipline” in any meaningful sense) or writing of history. In the present brief re-exploration of Persuasion, I want to shift the focus slightly to a different subject, namely Austen’s preparedness to engage with “capital H” History. By this I intend (and follow Reinhardt Koselleck’s usage of) the modern popular meaning of “history” as being not simply the representation of the past as a story (its accuracy and artfulness thus matters for epistemology, rhetoric and aesthetics) but the actual cumulative course of events, a transition in meaning that is thought (Koselleck again) to have occurred during the late Enlightenment. I believe it can be argued that in Persuasion, more fully than in the earlier novels, Austen gazes beyond the bubble of middle-class and gentry life and more fully out toward a horizon in which political, social, and economic forces are at work fashioning a world very different from that into which she was born, and very different from that fictional England inhabited by the Bennets, Tilneys, Knightleys, Bertrams, and Dashwoods.

This engagement with “History” as well as “history” is signified very clearly at the novel’s outset in the devastatingly ridiculous portrait of Sir Walter Elliot. Fixated on Dugdale (the seventeenth-century antiquary who first recorded his ancestor’s ascendancy to a baronetcy) and an uninterrupted succession since then, as found in the assorted Debretts and Burkes, Sir Walter is utterly blind to the decline of his own class, and to the social and economic factors that have, quite apart from his own profligacy, brought his family near to ruin. It is of course signified again in Austen’s use of dates to situate her story—Wentworth’s references to “the year six” (Volume 1, Chapter 8) being a case in point. (And the shorthand reference carries a radical association, given the French Revolutionary calendar with which Austen was familiar).

Austen’s novels are often praised for their accurate descriptions of the social world and manners of late eighteenth-century and Regency England—how the country “was.” While the earlier novels certainly depict isolated elements of transition and change, Persuasion is the work that most fully dwells on historical liminality. It is a novel not of was, or even is, but of yet to be: of becoming rather than being. This is true in several different respects. Obviously, several the characters are in process of becoming different versions of their former selves–at least those not immune to reform such as Sir Walter and his sociopathic nephew (“black at heart, hollow and black” [Volume 2, Chapter 9]); William Elliot’s major transition is simply one, outside the narrative, that has made him more like Sir Walter himself in prizing the very “blood and connexion” that he had previously repudiated in favour of money (neither being especially praiseworthy motivations) (Volume 2, Chapter 9). Mary (Elliot) Musgrove stays a silly echo of Lydia Wickham in her annoying insistence on precedence over her mother in law Mrs. Musgrove; eldest sister Elizabeth is and remains by and large a female clone of her father. In contrast, other characters mature. Lady Russell, while remaining wedded to a traditional social order, at least repents with respect to her snobbish advice to Anne, years earlier, that resulted in her engagement to Wentworth being broken. Anne herself is a few years older and wiser (though at 27—the modal age for Austen females—in a different state of transition from maiden to potential spinster), Wentworth less headstrong and more forgiving.

Such character arcs of course occur in the earlier novels, especially among the heroines. What is different here? I suggest it lies, again, in the relation of the novel to external, real historical events and trends. In a political sense, the novel is set exactly during the period of Napoleon’s first exile. England, and Europe, are at that point poised between a period of violent revolution and war, and the prospect of peace and commerce. But the peace is uncertain, and not to come easily, as we and Austen both know. It is a kind of Schrödinger’s cat historical junction in which Napoleonic Europe is simultaneously alive and dead, with the year 1814—explicitly identified, in un-Austen-like fashion, in the first chapter—and, more literally, the exile on Elba, providing the temporal “box” whence the cat might emerge either alive or dead.

But Austen the social observer (and still suspicious of “name and date” history après Catherine Morland) isn’t content to focus on political or military transitions. While the wars provide a convenient plot device (not least in the book’s closing reference to “the dread of a future war”, and the admission that a sailor’s wife is often in the situation of not knowing, for months on end, whether she may be a widow—a further variant on Schrödinger), they are not the focus of the novel, nor its most important historical theme. That, surely, lies in changes to the wider world, such as the economic forces that, for instance, impoverish an invalided widow like Charlotte Smith, brought to ruin by a husband’s colonial speculations, and that creates grasping parvenus like William Elliot. (These are changes which, as William H. Galperin observes in The Historical Austen [2003], are unimaginable in Mansfield Park where “any change, apart from mobility in the most monolithic sense, is plainly out of bounds”).

It is important to note that the coming world is not necessarily better than the old one; Austen is no proto-positivist, nor a Benthamite. Little improvement in the position of women can be either discerned or anticipated in Persuasion, and references to the fortunes to be made in the West Indies—the seat of slavery, which we know Austen disliked—are ambivalent. Yet change the world will, from one dominated not by an old aristocracy and gentry, but by the professions; the down to earth Admiral Croft, a worthy tenant of Kellynch is the prime but not only example. As Robert Morrison observes in the introduction to his edition of Persuasion “the world enshrined in the Baronetage” is beginning to collapse.” An age of reform and empire, which Austen did not live to see, but seems to have sensed, lies ahead, and the future belongs to those prepared to adapt. They will either do useful work for the nation (most notably Croft, Wentworth and most of the naval characters, the agents of England’s transformation into imperial “Britain”), and the entrepreneurially self-made (Wentworth and Croft again), rather than to those who live idly on inherited rank (Sir Walter) nor those who seek to gain such rank through strategic and often loveless marital alliance (William Elliot; Mrs. Clay). Fittingly, the Janus-faced novel that begins in one period of history with Sir Walter gazing into his family past and unable to deal with the present, closes vertiginously poised on the edge of a new era. Austen, the conservative (if always sensitive to inequality and social injustice) depicter of and critic of cultural norms, peers cautiously around the sharp corner of History to become the early nineteenth century’s most subtle prophet of social change.

Quotations are from the Belknap Press edition of Persuasion, edited by Robert Morrison (2011).

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Nineteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.”  Coming soon: guest posts by Jessica Richard, Carol J. Adams, and Mary Lu Redden.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Jane Austen and Adventure

Is Anne Elliot Jane Austen’s most adventurous heroine? This is the question Elisabeth Lenckos addresses in her guest post for “Youth and Experience.” Elisabeth is an author, editor, lecturer, and reviewer currently at work on a novel about Marian Hastings, a seafaring adventuress. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and she has taught fiction and philosophy for seventeen years.

Elisabeth’s Austen-inspired stories were selected in the Chawton House Library Short Story Competition and published in Wooing Mr. Wickham (2011) and Beguiling Miss Bennet (2015). She wrote about Harriet Smith’s “Most precious treasures” for my “Emma in the Snow” blog series, and when I hosted a celebration of Mansfield Park, she contributed a guest post on flattery and charm. It’s a pleasure to share her post on “Jane Austen and Adventure” with you today.[image error]

“If adventures will not befal[l] a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.”

Northanger Abbey, Volume 1, Chapter 1

“I can safely say that the happiest part of my life has been spent on board a ship.”

Persuasion, Volume 1, Chapter 8

Jane Austen and Adventure? But we think of her world as orderly and serene, a place where accidents, hazards, and events of which we have no direction—these are Dr. Johnson’s explanations for the word adventure—rarely happen! What is more, we would not want an Austen lady to suffer mishaps, tempt fate, or place her lovely self in peril, would we? On the other hand, if she doesn’t take a risk and leave the house, isn’t life bound to pass her by?

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It almost passes by Emma Woodhouse, who rarely ventures beyond the borders of the Hartfield estate. By contrast, the Dashwood, Bennet, and Price ladies have no choice other than to be housebound; since money is in short supply, they travel rarely and mostly from necessity. Yet, families and friends must be visited; husbands found elsewhere if none offer in one’s village or hamlet; and, as one’s gets older, one’s health must be improved in Brighton or Bath.

Luckily for Austen’s young ladies, her world contains patronesses with a taste for adventure, such as Mrs. Allen in Northanger Abbey, who is keenly aware that a young lady yearns to venture “abroad” and invites Catherine Morland to Bath. Lady Russell in Persuasion neglects her duties towards Anne Elliot, but Mrs. Musgrove corrects her oversight, as she welcomes her into the family, and—so I assume—helps foot the bill for her sojourns to Lyme Regis and Bath.

Could it be that despite her quiet nature, Anne is Austen’s most adventurous principal heroine, as well as—we must look to her future to answer that question—the one who travels more than any other? In the brief space of the novel that tells her story, Anne is transported from Kellynch Hall to her sister’s estate, and hence to Lyme Regis and to Bath; but more importantly, there is the possibility that after her marriage to Captain Wentworth, she will accompany him on his ocean voyages.

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Persuasion concludes with a vision of Anne’s married life, a passage that Roger Michell, in his cinematic adaptation of the novel, translates into the romantic image of Anne sailing into the sunset with Frederick Wentworth. Anne has a forerunner: Mrs. Croft, the wife of Admiral Croft, who rents Kellynch Hall from her father. During a dinner at the Musgroves’, Mrs. Croft enthuses about traveling the seas with her husband—the statement I quote above is hers. She reports never feeling sick in their fifteen years of touring together, unless she is parted from him.

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Michell depicts this moment beautifully. As Mrs. Croft relates her adventures, Anne listens intently, her eyes sparkling with secret exhilaration. Captain Wentworth’s stories about his exploits as a captain in the navy have preceded Mrs. Croft’s little speech, but her account adds something that Anne has not hitherto considered; that rather than staying home—which Anne later bemoans is the fate of women according to the epics and annals of history—a wife might venture out into the world with her husband.

Venturing out into the world with her husband—those of us who think that this is Anne’s future, might also suggest that it makes Persuasion the most modern and prophetic of Austen’s novels, as it foreshadows the century to come when British women followed their husbands, brothers, and lovers to the far reaches of the globe. During Austen’s time, however, female migration was still very rare. Her aunt Philadelphia Austen Hancock was one of the few women traveling to Madras, Bombay or Calcutta.

According to William Austen-Leigh and Richard Austen-Leigh in Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters: A Family Record, Austen wrote an early sketch about a young woman undertaking the passage to the East Indies, which they believe may have been inspired by her Aunt Philadelphia. However, by the time Austen conceived Persuasion, her seafaring adventuress had transmogrified into a captain’s wife, and luckily so, since Mrs. Croft stands as the one of the most likeable, kind, and honest personalities in Austen’s oeuvre. When she speaks frankly about her devotion to her husband, she reveals to Anne what happiness a woman of spirit might find in an untraditional marriage.

There are precious few happy couples in Persuasion apart from the Musgroves—can it be a coincidence that the most interesting harmonious relationship in the novel exists between a sea captain and his wife? I think not, as Austen considers in her final completed work the partnership of two mature people, who must base their union on something more than mutual attraction. Therefore, I would like to suggest that Anne marries Frederick because she hopes that life with him will be an adventure.

Unlike the women of legend, whom Anne pities in her exchange with Captain Harville, she will not stay home, but sojourn around the world with her man. And if her handling of Louisa Musgrove’s Lyme Regis fall is anything to go by, Anne will do more than rise to the challenge of an adventurous existence. She will come into her own; a woman no longer pitied or overlooked, but remarked upon, deferred to, and admired; in short, a true heroine.

Quotations are from The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford University Press, 1933).

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Eighteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.”  Coming soon: guest posts by Daniel Woolf, Jessica Richard, and Mary Lu Redden.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).

Sir Walter Elliot Sleeps Through History

Bao Bui is a lecturer in the Department of History at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas, and he has taught courses on American history, international relations, media studies, human rights, gender and women’s history, the politics of food, the history of courtship and weddings, and Jane Austen. At the 2016 JASNA AGM in Washington, DC, he gave a paper on epistolary culture in Emma in which he asked whether Austen sees “the accessible, affordable, and potentially secretive mail as a threat to the orderly world of Highbury and the social environment of its citizens.” The paper was published in Persuasions On-Line: “Epistolary Culture in Emma: Secrets and Social Transgressions.”

Bao studied English literature at Pomona College and his graduate degrees are from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It’s my pleasure to introduce his guest post on Sir Walter Elliot for my blog series “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion .”

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In the opening chapter of Persuasion Jane Austen informs us of Sir Walter Elliot’s birth year, 1760. Sir Walter would have spent most of his adulthood living in the shadow of the French Revolution and Napoleonic campaigns. Unlike Continental Europe, Britain saw neither the scourge of large-scale warfare nor sudden, drastic upheavals in the social and political order. Still, the British population, particularly its literate elite, would have no difficulty keeping abreast of the latest news, rumors, and gossip—not to mention the casualty lists—resulting from Britain’s generation-long military struggle against Napoleon. Persuasion opens in the summer of 1814, just months after the Allies have forced Napoleon to abdicate the French throne and go into exile on the island of Elba. The downfall of Napoleon would have dominated the news cycle of the time. Elites and commoners alike would have discussed the news with great interest.

Yet, the opening line of Persuasion tells us that such news did not interest Sir Walter:

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. (Chapter 1)

Sir Walter seems oblivious, if not altogether dismissive, of the much wider world beyond the boundaries of his estate. While millions throughout Europe struggled, fought, and died under some of the most atrocious of circumstances and in titanic battles year in and year out, Sir Walter appears perfectly content to read only the Baronetage, and no more. His curiosity, his mind, and indeed, his attention span, encompass no more than the estate that he inherited. His mental and physical gaze look no further than the multitude of mirrors that surround him in his bedroom, all the better to remind him of divine grace having bestowed on him both “the blessing of beauty” and “the blessing of a baronetcy.” If he gives any thought at all to his servants or the tenant farmers on his estate, he does so only to view them as part of his entitlement. These human beings, who no doubt have friends, families, and acquaintances who serve abroad in the British army and on the seven seas with the Royal Navy, represent to Sir Walter merely the instruments put on earth to perpetuate and signify his most fortunate existence.

Readers of Austen’s time would have no difficult picking up Austen’s deliberate depiction of Sir Walter as a grotesque caricature of self-absorbed aristocratic vanity. One suspects that Lady Russell, for all her class snobbery, reads the papers and knows of events transpiring beyond England’s shores. Persuasion makes it clear that Anne Elliot knows not only the names of naval officers and their deployments, but also that the sailors and ships of the Royal Navy have kept Britain and her civilian population safe from revolutionary blood shedding that has swept across Europe from shores of Portugal to the gates of Moscow. Sir Walter’s thoughts, concerns, and dialogue suggest a vast, unrepentant, unapologetic ignorance of the historical, transformative events transpiring in his lifetime, both in his own country and on the Continent. The only history that interests Sir Walter appears in the Baronetage, where “he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.” In that regard, readers, then and now, must take Austen’s creation of Sir Walter with a grain of salt, for no adult person in England in 1814 could possibly reach such depths of blockheadedness. Jane Austen would have to witness our own present national circumstances in the United States to see a public figure who could elevate both vanity and ignorance to such unbelievable, giddy excess.

Quotations are from the Project Gutenberg ebook of Persuasion.

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“Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did.” Illustration by C.E. Brock (from Mollands.net)

Seventeenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.” Coming soon: guest posts by Elisabeth Lenckos, Daniel Woolf, and Jessica Richard.

Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on  Facebook ,  Pinterest , or Twitter ( @Sarah_Emsley ).