Persuasion

Persuasion was Jane Austen’s last completed novel. Writing to her niece Fanny Knight in March 1817 she noted: “I have a something ready for Publication, which may perhaps appear about a twelvemonth hence. It is short, about the length of Catherine”. By Catherine she meant Northanger Abbey. 

Jane Austen was a prolific correspondent with her sister Cassandra but sadly after Janes’s death, perhaps desirous of curating her sister’s legacy, Cassandra destroyed many of the letters between them. Of course, in doing so, the remaining small nuggets about Jane’s character and craft are few and far between.  

Jane Austen referred to this final book as The Elliots - and must have talked about it to her relatives as such. Tragically she died in July 1817, so the book was published by her brother under the title Persuasion. Every author endlessly discusses what a book title should be with family and friends, and her work was the subject of much interest and pride with her relatives. 

Compared to Pride and Prejudice or Emma for example, for a long time Persuasion languished in popular esteem but later it garnered more positive comment. Virginia Woolf wrote a wonderful essay about Jane Austen and her novels commenting on the "personal" quality of the novel Persuasion but saying that one of the problems of reading Jane Austen was that “of all the great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.”  “There is a peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness in Persuasion.”

Persuasion’s story is about Anne Elliot, now 27 years old, whose family took great pride in their lineage but lived too extravagantly and found that they needed to cut their cloth, rent out their house and move to reduce their debt. Their new tenant was an admiral and his wife. The wife's brother, Captain Frederick Wentworth, had once been engaged to Anne in 1806, but the engagement was broken when Anne was persuaded by her friends and family to end their relationship on the grounds that he was not good enough. Anne and Captain Wentworth, still both single and unattached, meet again after a separation lasting almost eight years, setting the scene for a second, well-considered chance at love and marriage for Anne - she only learned romance as she grew older and the novel is remarkably tender. 

This last novel is infused with the little phrases through which her characters speak which are so familiar so that we instantly recognize similar traits amongst our own acquaintances, and so on point that we can almost hear the characters’ voices and see their facial expressions. It is full of twists and turns which endlessly reveal the characters’ main concerns over position and appearance, of doing and saying the right thing, which were a constant and precarious balancing act. Life was fragile, particularly for women. 

Jane Austens’ sense of place is legendary in all her novels so much so that apparently, 50 years later, Lord Tennyson wanted to see the exact spot where Louisa Musgrove fell from the seawall in Lyme Regis.

 Critics comment that Persuasion has an autumnal feeling to it, but perhaps this is because we read it with the retrospective knowledge of Jane’s imminent death. Equally it was a downcast time in England. 1816 became known as the year without a summer, a sunless time of death and famine following the eruption of Mount Tambora, a stratovolcano in Indonesia. Although 7,800 miles away from Janes home at Chawton Cottage in Hampshire, the blast remains the most powerful in recorded human history. It triggered extreme weather, poor harvests and disease in many areas around the world. Jane did mention the sunless weather and was not at all well, yet hoped her health would improve  

Ultimately though, I feel that writing Persuasion was almost an act of optimism for Jane given her health and that the story itself is also optimistic and full of the possibilities of second chances. Something we all need occasionally.