My rating: 4 of 5 stars
When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other’s ultimate comfort.
While reading Jane Austen my first and final impression, and the most constant sensation throughout, is of a keen intelligence. Her mind is like a rapier, sharp and graceful; and with this implement she needles and probes our mortal frame.
Austen’s concise novels explode with meaning; they can be read on so many levels. We see Austen the anthropologist, explaining and mocking the customs of her English countryside; Austen the moral philosopher, searching for the keys to human conduct; Austen the formal innovator, pioneering new techniques in fiction; and Austen the humorist, the Romantic poet, the psychologist, and so on.
In many ways Persuasion is the mirror image of Emma. Whereas Emma Woodhouse is young, beautiful, and immature, Anne Elliot makes her appearance as a poised woman past her prime. Emma is vain and silly, while Anne is the maturest and wisest character in the book. Thematically, too, the two novels are opposite. Emma, as Gilbert Ryle observed, is primarily concerned with influencing other people. When is is beneficent, when is it egotistic, and when is it mere meddling to involve oneself in another’s affairs? Persuasion, as its name implies, tackles the opposite problem: Under what circumstances should we yield to advice, and allow ourselves to be persuaded?
As usual with Austen, the social world her characters inhabit is the pinched life of the country gentry. Modern readers cannot help finding the dictates of manners and the demands of politeness to be harsh and constraining. If it were only more socially acceptable to speak one’s mind—or, God forbid, to engage in some form of romance without marriage—then the plots of the books would fall apart, as with so many other classic novels.
What makes it tolerable is Austen’s often wry lampooning of the social order. This is especially sharp in Persuasion. Anne’s father, Sir Walter Elliot, is a contemptible baronet who prides himself in his looks and cannot manage his estate. Anne’s relation, Lady Dalrymple, is a viscountess with no charms, mental or physical, whom Anne’s father and sister nevertheless slavishly follow for her rank. The Royal Navy serves as the foil to these exalted oafs, a true meritocracy that allows young men with talent, but no birth, to make their way in the world.
On a formal level I found the novel interesting for its dearth of dialogue. Instead, Austen employs her technique of “free indirect discourse,” a kind of mixture of dialogue and reported speech. The result is that we see the world filtered through the narrator’s understanding—and in this book, this understanding is almost identical with Anne Elliot’s, Austen’s only character who is almost as intelligent as herself. This creates some interest effects.
Normally, characters in novels know somewhat less than the audience. We can, for example, immediately see that Emma Woodhouse’s schemes are ill-conceived, while she remains ignorant. But in Persuasion, Anne figures things out just as fast as we do; and her actions are consistently well-considered. What is more, while in most novels the character must undergo some change before the end—Emma must swear off her meddling ways—Anne Elliot’s challenge is to stay absolutely constant to the same good impulse that guided her eight years earlier. She begins the book wise, and remains so throughout.
The final result of these elements—indirect discourse, the stability of Anne’s character, as well as some clumsiness in pacing and plot—makes Persuasion a somewhat less exciting read than other Austen novels. But this lack of excitement is more than compensated by the wealth of interesting questions posed by the text. Jane Austen was an artist of the highest order, with a mind that would put many philosophers to shame.
Lotz in Translation 