Persuasion (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

The letters reveal a voice that does not shy away from the harsh realities of sexual and social life: “Another stupid party last night,” she comments to her only sister and beloved confidante, Cassandra. And while at the “stupid party,” she made the following observation:

Nor does she treat the most conventional subjects with any sentimentality. As for motherhood: “Anna has not a chance of escape.... Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty. I am very sorry for her. Mrs. Clement too is in that way again. I am quite tired of so many Children” (letter of March 23, 1817; see
Jane Austen’s Letters).
It is instructive to remember that her most frequent correspondent, her sister Cassandra, burned all the letters she considered most unsuitable for the public to read, which was the bulk of them. We may therefore safely infer that the ones that have come down to us tend to be the blandest.

In the twentieth century and beyond, scholarly criticism has caught up with this complexity and become complicated and divisive, if not defensive, itself. Virginia Woolf, always a discerning critic, emphasized the difficulty of reading Austen rather than her simplicity. While she has an “unerring heart and unfailing morality,” an “incorruptible conscience,” and “infallible discretion,” Woolf wrote, “Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads off.” But Austen truly began to be taken seriously as an artist when the renowned British critic F. R. Leavis saw her as a moralist, the innovator of the “great tradition” of the serious modern novel, in contrast to the standard view of her as merely charming. Following publication of the letters and short fiction, a new view of Austen as stringent, angry, even sour, began to emerge in the twentieth century. In this vein, D. W. Harding called her deep use of irony “regulated hatred” as a corrective to the previous emphasis on her saintlike character and supposedly sweet and whimsical humor. Edmund Wilson believed he was giving her the highest compliment when he praised Austen for being unlike other female novelists, with their “projection of their feminine daydreams,” grouping her with those who treat the novel as art, as “the great masculine novelists” do.

But as frequently happens, Austen is too rebellious for some and not rebellious enough for others. Feminist critics like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have seen her as subversive of hierarchy, especially in her depiction of the difficulties faced by single women; other critics, such as Marilyn Butler and Mary Poovey, focus on her strong conservative roots, her staunch To ryism and high valuation of rank when accompanied by responsibility, her support for religious morality, respectability, and authority when thoroughly informed by good character. Another branch of feminist criticism has corrected the Janeite view of her as modest and shy of acclaim and proposed that she was as personally ambitious as modern women. One recent type of analysis, one that has contributed enormously to our understanding of Jane Austen’s work and served as a counterbalance to the confining myth of her charm, is historicist. This body of criticism has allowed us to see through the enclosed world of the novels to the social complexities that underlie the seemingly smooth and simple surface of all of Austen’s fiction.

For example, though like others of Austen’s works
Persuasion
is in form a courtship narrative that ends with a marriage, it is a novel obsessed with—at the same time that it takes as its theme the obsession with—hierarchical rankings of value, both social and moral. Sometimes social and moral superiority coincide, while at other crucial places in the novel they are at odds with each other. As so often happens in the British novel, romantic love ignites the spark of opposition between the social and the moral, at the same time that it finally serves as a kind of glue that unites the two categories into the coherent world that we expect of a nineteenth-century work. But courtship is only part of the story. Towns, houses, carriages, furnishings, reading materials, manners, leisured preferences, all are subjected to a systematic analysis that reveals social rank. Income, property, possessions, and tastes are constantly weighed in the balance as indices of worth. In the end
Persuasion
is not simply a love story, but a story about competing forms of value, including above all the relative value (and price) of feeling and reason, of authority and desire.

Austen’s structure of value is as complex as the Janeites depict it as simple. For example, in her novels she plays on the theme of inequity with intricate patterning: Thus Anne Elliot is of high merit but low value in her world, while her relatives such as Sir Walter and her sister Elizabeth are of high social value and low merit. We are made intensely aware not only of shades of dominance in class, but of discriminations between the value of old and young, married and unmarried, sons and daughters, older sisters and younger, the respectable and the vulgar, and of the frequent arbitrariness of these unearned distinctions of worth and power. The titled are often fools, vain, pompous, deluded by self-love and self-importance—all of which implies that the author seeks ironic distance from a world that makes class distinctions in particular the barometer of personal worth. Yet ancient untitled families in Austen’s work, like the Darcys and the Knightleys, are frequently “knightlike” in stature, especially when they assume responsibility for dependents or those beneath them, as Sir Walter does not. These are “guardians” of society, as much as or more so than are the clergymen and naval officers.

In light of this, it is interesting to examine the role of the navy, in
Persuasion
as well as less prominently in
Mansfield Park,
as a symbol of the integration of social distinction and moral character. It is true that the navy was one of the few means by which men of low resources could use a combination of luck and merit to gain financial and social privilege in an age when trade or investment was still suspected of the taint of vulgarity. In reality, however, what Austen uncritically calls “connections” or “interest,” meaning a system of patronage, played an important role in advancement. The plot of Persuasion depends a good deal on the opportunity that the navy affords to Captain Wentworth to earn “rewards” (money gained from conquering enemy ships during war and selling their booty) and therefore to advance by “merit.” The task of the hero, and the heroine who must choose him as husband, is to integrate solid social rank with “character” based on principles and family values. The critic Juliet McMaster has called these heroes “moral aristocrats.”

Jane Austen’s own class position was a more problematic one than is commonly thought. Sentimental biography pictures her undisturbed in comfortable and stable village surroundings. But Jane lived at the troubled border of comfortability in a number of ways. Her family belonged to the so-called “pseudo-gentry,” the professional rank of a rural society still dominated by a land-owning class. Jane was the daughter of a clergyman who lived as middle-class, but at the price of continual debt, partly alleviated by taking in student-boarders throughout her childhood until the house was crowded. The Austen family was “gentry” not by birth but by virtue of her father’s (low-paying) profession, and they were frequently dependent on connections from whom they could borrow money. Jane Austen’s circumstances were unstereotypical, even painful, in other ways as well: She was a woman who was fully aware of the necessity of marriage to relieve the inequity of power and resources for women, and rejected that option at least once. While happiest in the village she was raised in, she was forced by her parents to live in uncongenial surroundings in the tourist town of Bath for years, until her father’s death. And not least, later in life she was a female novelist earning her own money, a very unusual circumstance in her class. Though Austen’s life tends to be conflated with those of her characters, it is ironic that even Elizabeth Bennet’s financial situation is in fact much better than her author’s was.

While her father, George Austen, was a country parson of limited means who frequently had recourse to borrow money from better-off relatives and could rarely afford a carriage of his own, Austen’s mother, the former Cassandra Leigh, came from a better-connected family with some intellectual and genteel roots. Jane’s father was kindly and indulgent, her mother hypochondriacal yet active and strong-minded. The social life of the family was extensive and complicated, with a wide-ranging network of kin and intimates to visit and entertain and gossip about, yet the picture of stable rural society most people associate with Jane Austen was not true even then. The Austens socialized most with people like themselves, the new professional class of people with some money and education but no ancestral land, who tended to mobility, renting or buying this property or that, moving from town to city and back again, changing dwellings with professions and very often driven away by debt.

Jane herself, as a single woman with no portion of her own, was considered a poor relative by the more successful members of the family, such as the family of her brother Edward. As a boy Edward had been adopted by wealthy childless kin, the Knights, and took their name after their death. He inherited an estate, Godmersham, to which Jane was invited often, and at which she was perceived as an outsider. Her niece Fanny, Edward’s eldest daughter, wrote after her aunt’s death that she was “below par” in refinement (though “superior in mental powers and cultivation”) and had deliberately to overcome her “common-ness” when visiting. Here is Austen’s cheerful assessment of herself in 1815: “I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.”

Jane Austen began to compose fiction at a young age, at least in early adolescence if not before, producing extravagant parodies, such as “Love and Friendship,” that she dedicated to various family members and friends. Her mother was in the habit of writing clever comic verses to amuse the family, and helped Jane read aloud her novels later on; her father seems to have encouraged her writing, since a notebook in which she transcribed her early stories is marked “Ex dono mei Patris,” which means “a gift from my father.” The first draft of
Pride and Prejudice,
called “First Impressions,” was probably composed when she was twenty, the same age as its protagonist, Elizabeth Ben-net, though it was not published until 1813, near the end of Austen’s life.

For a novelist so identified with romantic love, courtship, and marriage as literary subjects, her life is notoriously bare of evidence that she ever experienced love or romance. She did flirt with one young man, Tom Lefroy, but wrote of him coolly when he left the country: “This is rational enough; there is less love and more sense in it than sometimes appeared before, and I am very well satisfied. It will all go on exceedingly well, and decline away in a very reasonable manner ... it is therefore most probable that our indifference will soon be mutual unless his regard, which appeared to spring from knowing nothing of me at first, is best supported by never seeing me” (letter of November 17, 1798; see
Jane Austen’s Letters).

In fact, it is questionable whether she even desired marriage. “Oh what a loss it will be when you are married,” she wrote to her favorite niece, Fanny, “You are too agreeable in your single state, too agreeable as a Niece. I shall hate you when your delicious play of Mind is all settled down into conjugal & maternal affections” (letter of February 20, 1817; see
Jane Austen’s Letters
)
.
She is known to have accepted one marriage proposal, from a younger and quite well-off brother of friends whom she was visiting. From the mercenary point of view, she had everything to gain from marrying this young man, including presiding over a large house and estate in Hampshire. But the next morning she retracted her assent to his proposal, explaining that she did not feel enough for him to marry him. The only other rumored romance, of a brief love affair later in life cut off in its earliest stage by the suitor’s death, hinted at by her sister and part of the family tradition, has not been substantiated.

In general the letters reveal a strong endorsement of both romantic love as a basis for marriage and also the necessity of dealing realistically with the economic pressures faced by single women with few other options open to them:

One of the very few ways in which “spinsters” could earn money in Regency society was by writing, if they were lucky enough to have someone intercede to negotiate good terms and if their writing could then produce something like a profit. It was very difficult for women to publish in the eighteenth century, when they risked accusations of vulgarity (which could be adverse to their reputations and marriageability), yet there was an explosion of popular and, after the novelist Fanny Burney’s success, serious writing by the time Austen tried to publish.