Something More, Or Less, Than Gratification

On Reading Austen's Persuasion

Prior Park, Bath, UK

All of Jane Austen’s novels are great. This is not one of my more interesting opinions, though they certainly vary in their critical reputations and in their degrees of popular adulation. Having been steered by a mix of both, I think I’m fairly typical in the order in which I encountered them: first the marquee Pride and Prejudice, then its close cousin Sense and Sensibility, then on to the slightly more divisive Emma (a serious contender for Austen’s most precise and brilliant pen-portrait), the lit-crit staples Mansfield Park and Persuasion, and finally Northanger Abbey (less a “spoof” of gothic novels, as you’ll often hear it called, than a warm and clever book about a girl who’s read too many). Nor do I think I’m unusual in finding myself drawn, again and again, to Persuasion, Austen’s last finished novel, published posthumously in late 1817. It stands out from the rest of her oeuvre in some respects: Northanger Abbey aside, it is the shortest of her novels, and notably the only one to include specific dates (instead of a shorthand like “in the year 18—”), reflecting a historical awareness that befits a novel of remarkable social precision, even by Austen’s standards. It’s a rich, mature novel, more melancholy and perhaps less ‘fun’ than Austen’s other works, though for my money still irresistibly readable; it’s a book that reveals greater depth with each new reading, and a skeleton key of sorts to the sensibility (sorry) of Austen’s other works.

In brief, Persuasion is the story of Anne Elliot, and it finds her nearly eight years after the apparent end of her life’s great romance. As a girl of nineteen she fell in love with a young sailor named Frederick Wentworth, but was persuaded by a family friend, Lady Russell, to reject his marriage proposal; his fortune was too meager, his prospects uncertain. She has since repented her decision and spent her twenties unobtrusively wasting away, emotionally neglected by her vain and fatuous father and her vain and selfish sister, coming to terms with her quiet conviction that her sole opportunity for happiness has come and gone. The chance return of Wentworth, now dashing Captain Wentworth and flush with naval prize-money, forces her to confront these emotions and to navigate a classically Austenian gauntlet of fraught social encounters. The customary delights and mortifications of a typically incisive comedy of manners are muffled here by the weight of Anne’s regret; she may yet have her happy ending, indeed we imagine she will, but nothing life can give her now will wholly expunge the past. The eight years she has all but lost are never coming back.

It’s a truism that Austen virtually invented the modern romantic comedy, and it is always tempting to reduce her books to their most “relatable” relationship elements; by this standard, Persuasion is a book about the nightmare of awkward social contact with your ex. With Austen, however, I think the challenge is never to let the universal totally overwhelm the particular. In truth her “marriage plots” map rather uneasily onto ours, situated as they are in such radically different social worlds. It’s banal to observe that the paradigmatic modern romantic comedy centers on a professional-class woman with options Austen’s heroines do not have; a direct attempt to modernize the Austenian marriage plot, like Celine Song’s Materialists (2025), cannot help but highlight the degree to which the choice to “marry poor” is simply different for a woman who can support herself. Austen’s only heroine of true financial independence, Emma (of Emma), notably begins that novel with the fixed intention of never marrying, and well she might, already a rich, important woman and mistress of her house. For Austen’s other protagonists these are prizes that only marriage to a gentleman will bring; they face varying degrees of financial precarity, but true autonomy outside of marriage is denied them all. Though all are ultimately rewarded for prioritizing loving partnerships with men of good character, Austen is too practical, too socially aware, to disregard the bigger picture entirely. Modern readers find it easy to laugh at Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs. Bennet, with her monomaniacal fixation on marrying off her daughters; Austen, I think, laughs a little more fondly, a little more knowingly. In the social world of Austen’s England Mrs. Bennet, one suspects, is a little more right than not.

This is not to say, however, that Austen sees the choice of a husband as the sole potential outlet for female agency; in fact Persuasion is particularly alive to the different kinds of household roles a woman can play. A broad but all-important concept in the novel is “being of use,” contributing in some substantive way to a social or domestic situation, and in the course of the narrative numerous examples are suggested: tending to children, caring for the sick or injured, assisting in the selection of a rental property. To be allowed to “be of use” is a sign of value within the household, and the refusal of Anne’s father and sister to give Anne her due in this regard is a persistent source of distress to Lady Russell, who considers that a worthier household would be alert to her protégé’s many gifts. Here, ironically, Lady Russell sees eye to eye with Captain Wentworth, for whom Anne’s clear-headed competence in the great crisis of Louisa Musgrove’s injury is the occasion for his renewed attention to her virtues. There is a modern sense that patriarchal cultures value women only for their physical appearance or capacity to transmit property, but the historical record suggests this has never quite been universal. The first-century BCE Roman nobleman’s eulogy for his wife, generally called Laudatio Turiae, remembers a keen financial manager, a fearless legal advocate, an assiduous steward of younger relatives’ affairs, and a cool head amidst political catastrophe; the twelfth-century Life of Christina of Markyate suggests that Christina’s family believes her intelligence and strength of character will help make her a desirable marriage as much as her beauty. Persuasion seems to document another society which cruelly restricts and subordinates women while still leaving avenues for textured social participation. Those who love Anne Elliot love her not as a porcelain doll, but for who she is, for what she can do. To see her happy, in the world of Persuasion, is to respect her enough to let her be of use.

That Anne could still play an important role as an unmarried sister is another clear implication of Persuasion, which does not see the “nuclear” family as a normative domestic situation subsuming all variation. In truth Austen’s families always interact and commingle in a number of ways, and flexibility with respect to the makeup of the household appears as one of the most important unspoken freedoms of the wealthy gentry and lesser nobility: the plot of Mansfield Park, for instance, is driven by the Bertrams’ decision essentially to adopt a poor relation. In Persuasion we see Mrs. Clay, the widowed daughter of the Elliots’ lawyer, absorbed into the family as a companion and confidante for Elizabeth, and Captain Benwick made essentially a permanent member of the Harville household after the tragic end of his engagement to Captain Harville’s sister. These are natural expedients for a class with the disposable wealth to make additional dependents a trivial matter, but natural also for a social world in which marriages and friendships are continuously reshaping sprawling networks of affection and mutual obligation. To marry into the Musgroves might also be to form some relationship with the poorer and less respectable Hayters, with the haughty and downwardly mobile Elliots, with the cheerful and unpretentious Crofts, and on and on. Anne’s movement through these overlapping social spheres is not strongly shaped by her own preferences, but it matters nonetheless; hers is a far richer and more complex social world than her own immediate family would provide. One’s own blood relations, even one’s own spouse, these are only the tip of the iceberg.

Marriage, then, transforms one’s life in ways that go far beyond the immediate marital partnership. For a modern reader it can sometimes be too easy to under-emphasize Austen’s assiduous awareness of this fact, and to assess her novels in the context of a fairly simplistic idea of “marrying for love.” Take, for instance, the famous passage in Pride and Prejudice where Lizzie Bennet marvels at Pemberley, the vast estate of Mr. Darcy, and later alludes to this as the moment when she started to fall in love. Nowadays it’s common enough to wrinkle one’s nose good-naturedly at this moment, with its whiff of materialism, and to feel it carries a pardonable but unfortunate suggestion of her marrying Darcy for his money. Persuasion, however, in its constant attention to the totality of marriage, helps contextualize moments like this in Austen’s other works. Anne is fixated not just on Captain Wentworth in his person, but on the depth and texture of the life they might have had, the friends of his that might have been hers. In a remarkably suggestive passage, paralleling Lizzie’s first visit to Pemberley, she looks around the cramped but carefully-arranged apartments of Captain Harville and his wife:

The varieties of the fitting-up of the rooms, where the common necessities provided by the owner…were contrasted with some few articles of a rare species of wood, excellently worked up, and with something curious and valuable from all the distant countries Captain Harville had visited, were more than amusing to Anne, connected as it all was with his profession, the fruit of his labours, the effect of its influence on his habits, the picture of repose and domestic happiness it presented, made it to her a something more, or less, than gratification.

She thinks here, of course, of life as the wife of a naval captain, but also of life as the wife of a person, of the married home as an expression of a couple’s character. Marriage for Anne, for Austen, is all of this, the person you marry, their family, their friends, their home and the things they will make of it; it’s a life, with all its circumstances. Lizzie Bennet’s fixation on Pemberley is not superficial; a spouse is inseparable from the home they have built, from the life they will bring you. You get all of this, for good or ill, and you’d better think about it all while you can.

The potential consequences of failing to consider these “ancillary” features of married life are instantiated in Persuasion in the person of Mrs. Smith, Anne’s former school friend who has fallen on hard times. Mrs. Smith entered into a loving marriage which she does not now regret, but has been nearly undone by something outside the strict scope of her marital partnership: her husband’s friendship with Mr. Elliot, whose personal licentiousness and total lack of regard for his friend’s well-being help drive Mr. Smith into the utter penury which we see now afflicting his widow. Mrs. Smith’s sorry condition would be transformed by the settlement of her husband’s West Indies property (a thorny reminder, here as in Mansfield Park, that the wealth of Austen’s heroines is always bound up in exploitation), but this Mr. Elliot refuses to do, and so she languishes, disabled and largely forgotten. The immediate narrative purpose of this circumstance is to reveal Mr. Elliot’s lack of moral character, and to place Anne on her guard during a critical stretch of the novel; in a broader sense, however, this is another of Austen’s reminders that a loving marriage is not enough, that social and material conditions will intrude, that a broader complex of social relations is needed for a happy life. In a strange way this is vindication for Anne regarding the subject of her life’s defining tragedy: even after reuniting with Captain Wentworth she admits she cannot entirely fault herself for listening to Lady Russell, a beloved friend and mentor whose disapproval would have substantially diminished Anne’s happiness. In the world of Persuasion all loving relationships are potential anchors of a happy life, and a marriage will never suffice unless it preserves or strengthens the web of social bonds that nourish and sustain.

The role of Mr. Elliot is another aspect which distinguishes Persuasion from many of Austen’s other works. A stock figure in her marriage plots is the false suitor, whose romantic candidacy appears promising until some ineligible dimension of his character or situation is revealed: Mr. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice is of course the most famous of these, though there are comparable male characters in virtually all of Austen’s novels, sometimes more than one. They generally serve a dual purpose in these narratives, first introducing some facially plausible mystery into the question of whom the protagonist will ultimately marry, then embodying some aspect of the novel’s ethics. Wickham, for instance, first presents as an ideal match for Lizzie, and then demonstrates—with his duplicitousness and lechery—that appearances can be deceiving, and that Darcy deserves a second look. As noted above, Mr. Elliot certainly fulfills this second function: his deplorable behavior not only reveals the perils of a false friend, but affirms the soundness of Anne’s judgment against that of Lady Russell. What he does not do is serve as even a facially plausible object for Anne’s affections. Even when idly diverted by fantasies of a future as Lady Elliot, mistress of Kellynch Hall, Anne is matter-of-factly resolute in her feeling that no suitor but Captain Wentworth can ever really be considered. In a novel centrally concerned with questions of changeability and conviction, the direction of Anne’s affections is a settled matter: she will have Captain Wentworth or she will have no one. The only way Mr. Elliot might influence the outcome is by accidentally convincing Captain Wentworth, at the crucial moment, that his attentions are unwanted.

That she cannot simply address herself to Wentworth, for reasons both societal and personal, is of course among the novel’s structuring agonies. Unlike several of Austen’s other works, Persuasion seems to have no truly canonical screen adaptation, a fact for which the text itself must be at least partially to blame: even by Austen’s standards it is an extraordinarily internal book, driven almost entirely by Anne’s emotional responses to various twists of the psychological knife, and by her silent reflection on events which throw her into inner turmoil. The 2022 Netflix adaptation of the novel—which I confess I did not watch in its entirety—seemed to find a solution in direct address to the camera; an intuitive enough expedient, but my instinct says an utterly misguided one. Nothing could more grossly misunderstand Persuasion than the confiding tone of these fourth-wall breaks; this is as much as anything a book about being unable to confide. Virtually all of Austen’s novels are like this to some extent, of course; both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility generate dramatic irony or pathos at key moments from their heroines’ inability to share important facts or feelings with their key confidantes. What makes Persuasion different is that this torment has lasted years, it has spanned virtually the whole of Anne’s adult life. The only person in her immediate circle who cares about her in the least is the inadvertent architect of her misery, and can never be told what she’s suffering now; everyone else who might lessen her burden is consumed by self-involvement, distracted by cares of their own, waylaid by well-meaning myopia. This is a novel about being afraid one might explode; Anne’s happiness comes not a moment too soon, for her and, more importantly, for us.

Anne Elliot, as B.D. McClay’s excellent recent essay on Persuasion reminds us, is twenty-seven. For many readers there is something quietly absurd, even frightening, in this, in the suggestion that at twenty-seven her life can be regarded as having nearly passed her by. I am not frightened, however, by Anne Elliot’s age (not least because, as McClay points out, the book is much less clear in presenting twenty-seven as over the hill than is sometimes suggested). The number that transfixes me when I read Persuasion is not twenty-seven but forty-one, Jane Austen’s age when she died, the same year Persuasion was published. By that age she had written six great novels, of which the last is probably the richest and most sophisticated. This week I turn thirty-eight, and an admittedly ungenerous part of me feels that I have accomplished nothing, though I have a good and loving marriage, and all the broader appurtenances of a good and happy life. I am frightened, I admit, to imagine the shape of my life if it ended when Austen’s did, and I contemplate my own unimportant work now with a mix of headlong urgency and dread. Mostly, though, I feel sorrow for Jane Austen, for a life and career cut short; I reflect with sadness on the loss of the works that Persuasion promised, novels of extraordinary depth and acuity by one of the sharpest and most engaging character writers in the English language. I read and reread this wonderful book about living with what might have been, and I hope one day I can learn to live with it myself, or to make peace, at the very least, with what comes next.