Persuasion (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

You could not shock her more than she
shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle class
Describe the amorous effects of “brass,”
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.

—W. H. Auden

 

J
ust as Jane Austen is the favorite author of many discerning readers,
Persuasion
is the most highly esteemed novel of many Austenites. It has the deep irony, the scathing wit, the droll and finely drawn characters of Austen’s other novels, all attributes long beloved of her readers. But it is conventionally said that as her last novel, the novel of her middle age, it additionally has a greater maturity and wisdom than the “light, bright and sparkling” earlier novels, to use Austen’s own famous description of
Pride and Prejudice,
her most popular work. In other words, Persuasion has often been seen as the thinking reader’s
Pride and Prejudice.

But
Persuasion
is less “light” in more than one sense; Anne Elliot, its heroine, is introduced as more unhappy and constrained by her situation than any heroine of Austen’s since Fanny Price of
Mansfield Park.
In contrast to Elizabeth Bennet’s or Emma Woodhouse’s sparkle and volubility, Anne’s “spirits were not high” (p. 14), and remain low for much of the novel. But whereas Fanny Price, like Anne ignored and held in low esteem by family members, is perfectly poised to be rescued by love, in fact Anne is barely a Cinderella figure, and not only because she is wellborn, of a better social rank than even the heroine of
Emma.
In fact, Anne Elliot has more in common with Charlotte Brontë’s Victorian heroine Jane Eyre in that she seems at first distinctly ineligible for the role of a beloved, appearing to the world as apparently unlovable and without much physical charm. Anne, however, has none of Jane Eyre’s ready temper, tongue, and fire; she tends to think and feel alone and in silence—except, of course, that we, her readers, share the literary mind she inhabits and see the world with her through her finely discerning eyes. Heroines are always subjected to surveillance in nineteen-century fiction; here the heroine is invisible but voluble in her mind, as Lucy Snowe is in Charlotte Brontë’s
Villette.

Anne Elliot is a creature of thought and feeling, not what she seems to others. The same may be said of Jane Austen herself, whose life and writing often appear as one thing in the popular mind, yet turn out to be far more complex than convention allows when closely examined. There is the real Jane Austen, who left little in the way of biographical material (no diary has ever been found, and most of her letters were destroyed by their recipients or their heirs); and then there is the Jane Austen of the contemporary imagination. This latter version has colored the many films and television productions of her work, not to mention the societies and cultish fan enthusiasm, which constitute what the critic Margaret Doody calls “Aunt Jane-ism,” a phenomenon she defines as “imposed quaintness.”

It is easy to see why Austen’s novels have become a kind of cinematic fetish: Film adaptations selectively focus on the clear trajectory of the courtship plot, the fine detail, the enclosed, knowable, seemingly nonpolitical world in which everyone seems to know his place. In fact, for many the novels have come to stand for a nostalgia of pre-Industrial Revolution England, an idyll of country houses, gentrified manners, and clear moral standards, an Old World apart from the chaos of urban, tech nologized life and the struggle for modern capital. So solidified has this mythical vision become that there is now a popular series of mystery novels by Stephanie Barron that feature Jane Austen as the amateur detective, similar to Agatha Christie’s spinster figure Miss Marple, solving fictional mysteries with pert and ingenious wit in her quaint village.

Into this escapist vision of sentimental village days, the life of Jane Austen was molded to fit to perfection from the first biographical sketch of her. This was a short preface to the posthumous publication of
Northanger Abbey
and
Persuasion
by her brother Henry Austen, called “A Biographical Notice of the Author”; it emphasized her modesty, sweetness, and simple piety. He informs us: “Short and easy will be the task of the mere biographer. A life of usefulness, literature, and religion, was not by any means a life of event.” Nor, according to Henry Austen, did his sister take her literary activity very seriously: “Neither the hope of fame nor profit mixed with her early motives [for writing].” For more than one hundred years after her death, the major biographies were in fact written by family members, who painted Austen as sweetly old-fashioned, genially mild and reserved, spirited but primly spinsterish. As a writer she was treated as a kind of modest, supertalented amateur, without the taint of unladylike ambition, someone who diffidently put aside or even hid her pages when anyone came in the room. (Her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh insists on the much-quoted idea that Austen wrote on single sheets she could quickly hide, but in her biography Claire Tomalin argues that it is unlikely she could have done her extensive revisions one sheet at a time. In reality, the author had a handsome writing desk in the dressing room she shared with her sister, and regularly read work in progress aloud to her appreciative family.) In fact, critical interest in Austen grew to contemporary proportions only after the 1870 publication of A
Memoir ofJane Austen,
by Austen-Leigh (see “For Further Reading”), which reinforced the idea of the uncomplicated decency and pure gentle spirit of a “dear ‘Aunt Jane’ ” who lived in a simpler age, “before express trains, sewing machines and photograph books.”

At the turn of the century Henry James wrote about his distaste for the “pleasant twaddle ... [about] our dear, everybody’s dear, Jane,” poking fun at the idolatry of a fictitious nonthreat ening version of Jane Austen (James, “The Lesson of Balzac”). Yet James himself evaluated Austen as “instinctive and charming” rather than a deliberate craftsman, of “narrow unconscious perfection of form” whose chief failure is “want of moral illumination” in her heroines (letter of June 23, 1883; in James,
Letters).
In this estimation James merely echoes her nephew’s notion of Austen as a gentle, cheerful, prim, domestic woman whose writing was a kind of amateur activity and whose evident genius and durability was therefore a “mystery.”

Though real evidence for what Jane Austen was really like is slim, the publication in the twentieth century of her early fiction and the surviving letters has revealed much that does not fit comfortably into her persistently quaint image. The short early pieces she wrote, dedicated to various family members and probably read aloud, are absurd, extravagant, and flippant in tone, rather than modest or prim. They appear to be parodies of forms such as lurid Gothic or weepy sentimental fiction, both extremely widespread in the late eighteenth century. Just as the Brontes’ juvenilia was lurid, melodramatic, and hyperromantic, Jane Austen’s earliest fiction surprises with the antisocial liberties it takes. It is more reminiscent of eighteenth-century models such as Sheridan or Fielding than it is like Victorian moral realism. Though unrefined in more than one sense, those earlier works glow with the “sparkle” Austen referred to in relation to
Pride and Prejudice,
but without that novel’s serious social and moral values.

The letters, sharp-tongued and acerbic, like the early fiction, shocked and even offended some readers when they were first published. Jane Austen’s nephew, writing in his memoirs before their publication, cautioned that their “materials may be thought inferior” because they “treat only the details of domestic life. They resemble the nest which some little bird builds of the materials nearest at hand.” But in fact they are filled with harsh, pointed, and dark wit: She calls one person a “queer animal with a white neck”; she writes that she “had the comfort of finding out the other evening who all the fat girls with short noses were that disturbed me.” There is nothing of Fanny Price’s or Anne Elliot’s “gentle manner” and “elegant mind” here, nor is there anything like the prissy, quaint, modest, humble Aunt Jane of the myth.