Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  Mrs Clay is, as her name suggests, malleable, adaptable, and in Persuasion there are advantages to malleability. Those who don’t bend will break.

  Persuasion is the book in which Jane confronts the reality of sudden and untimely death, memorialising the falls which had killed her cousin Jane Cooper and her friend Anne Lefroy. It features the bad colds and wasting diseases usual in one of Jane’s novels, but the characters are also menaced with violent accidents and fractures – little Charles Musgrove’s broken collarbone, the accompanying fears that he might have damaged his spine; Louisa Musgrove’s severe, mind-altering concussion. Elsewhere in Jane’s adult writing accidents are usually averted – Jane Fairfax isn’t dashed overboard, someone grabs her in time – and if they aren’t averted they’re minor, resulting in no more than a sprained ankle. It isn’t Tom Bertram’s fall which makes him ill towards the end of Mansfield Park, but the excessive drinking which accompanies it. In Persuasion, accidents threaten death or paralysis.

  There’s also a thematic significance to them. Jane makes the point quite explicit.

  Shortly before the main characters set off on their visit to Lyme, Anne accidentally eavesdrops on a conversation between Louisa and Captain Wentworth. Louisa has cleared the field by forcing a reconciliation between her sister Henrietta and Henrietta’s intended; she has Captain Wentworth to herself. Captain Wentworth – imprudently, we might think – begins to praise Louisa’s firmness. Half-jokingly, he uses a nut, a hazelnut, as a sort of visual aid, as a symbol for Louisa herself:

  ‘Let those who would be happy be firm. Here is a nut,’ said he, catching one down from an upper bough, ‘to exemplify: a beautiful glossy nut, which, blessed with original strength, has outlived all the storms of autumn. Not a puncture, not a weak spot anywhere. This nut,’ he continued, with playful solemnity, ‘while so many of his brethren have fallen and been trodden under foot, is still in possession of all the happiness that a hazel nut can be supposed capable of.’ Then returning to his former earnest tone—‘My first wish for all whom I am interested in, is that they should be firm. If Louisa Musgrove would be beautiful and happy in her November of life, she will cherish all her present powers of mind.’

  This passage was written about fifteen years before the first record of the use of ‘nut’ as slang for ‘head’; but slang commonly enters spoken language some time before it appears in writing and ‘nut’ seems to have originated among sailors. Jane may quite possibly have intended an ironic allusion here, because after all, when Louisa, refusing to listen to caution, jumps off the upper part of the Cobb, it’s her skull, and only her skull (‘there was no injury except to the head’) which gets smashed on the stones below.p The result, translated into modern medical thinking, is a massive concussion and probable minor brain damage. Louisa’s ‘health, her nerves, her courage, her character’ are, it appears, permanently changed; as her brother says, ‘she is altered; there is no running or jumping about, no laughing or dancing; it is quite different’.

  After her accident Louisa remains painfully sensitive to external stimuli, jumping at sudden noises – ‘if one happens only to shut the door a little hard’, complains Charles, ‘she starts and wriggles like a young dab-chick in the water’. Louisa, who prided herself on being someone who had ‘no idea of being so easily persuaded’, is reshaped. She is ‘turned’ into a different person, ‘a person of literary taste, and sentimental reflection’ like Captain Benwick, her betrothed. Anne is amused by the idea, but also indulgent; so too is Jane. There is ‘nothing in the engagement to excite lasting wonder … nothing to be regretted’, ‘no reason against their being happy’.

  The outcome isn’t so very terrible. Firmness, total immunity to outside influence, isn’t sustainable. Captain Wentworth didn’t get his nut metaphor quite right. The ‘firm’ nut which has ‘outlived all the storms of autumn’, which is ‘glossy’ and ‘in possession of all the happiness that a hazel nut can be supposed capable of’ won’t stay glossy for long – it will dry and wither, while its ‘brethren’, ‘trodden underfoot’, exposed to the sun and the rain, flourish and grow.

  You have to open your mind – at least a little. Change can’t be evaded; it’s a law of nature, there’s no use in arguing with it.

  It’s only Sir Walter – vain, ‘half a fool’, clinging to outdated loyalties – who thinks that he’s immune to the processes of time, who believes that he and his favourite daughter Elizabeth are ‘as blooming as ever, amidst the wreck of the good looks of everybody else’. He fondly imagines that he is untouched and unaltered in spite of the fact that he can ‘plainly see how old all the rest of his family and acquaintance were growing. Anne haggard, Mary coarse, every face in the neighbourhood worsting.’ Even Elizabeth, nearly as vain as her father, can’t quite convince herself that time has stood still for her, that she is ‘the same handsome Miss Elliot that she had begun to be thirteen years ago’. Feeling ‘her approach to the years of danger’, she doesn’t read the Baronetage any more. She dislikes being reminded of ‘the date of her own birth’.

  ‘To my eye you could never alter’, declares Captain Wentworth to Anne, in the first flush of love renewed. But however ‘pleasing a blunder’, this is patently untrue – when they first met again, after nearly eight years apart, he found her ‘wretchedly altered’. And Anne has changed – Jane doesn’t allow us to ignore the fact, or to rush over it in a flood of romantic feeling. ‘Time’, as Wentworth remarks, ‘makes many changes’. For Anne, time not only changes, it destroys, it obliterates: ‘What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals—all, all must be comprised in it, and oblivion of the past—how natural, how certain too!’

  When Anne visits her old school-friend Mrs Smith, the ‘first ten minutes’ are full of ‘awkwardness’ and ‘emotion’:

  Twelve years were gone since they had parted, and each presented a somewhat different person from what the other had imagined. Twelve years had changed Anne from the blooming, silent, unformed girl of fifteen, to the elegant little woman of seven-and-twenty … and twelve years had transformed the fine-looking, well-grown Miss Hamilton, in all the glow of health and confidence of superiority, into a poor, infirm, helpless widow.

  Wentworth has changed as well. It’s surely only Anne’s romantic partiality which leads her to see, on their first meeting at Uppercross, ‘the same Frederick Wentworth’. If nothing else, he’s spent the intervening eight years on board ship, on active service. His sister, we’re told, looks older than she is, ‘the consequence of her having been almost as much at sea as her husband’. The sea, as Mrs Clay observes, ‘is no beautifier’. Neither Anne nor Wentworth is the same person.

  Nor is their love really the same love. What was it based on, when they were young? Good looks – he was ‘a remarkably fine young man’, she was ‘a very pretty girl’ – and generally desirable character traits – his ‘intelligence, spirit, and brilliancy’, her ‘gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling’. But, Jane tells us, ‘half the sum of attraction … might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly anybody to love’. The pair fall in love ‘rapidly and deeply’, seeing in each other ‘highest perfection’. And at the first test, the first trial, the relationship crumbles. Their second love, their fully mature love, is a different creature. They are ‘more tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other’s character, truth, and attachment; more equal to act, more justified in acting’.

  Attachment revived, interest re-kindled, acquaintance re-established – none of them are the same. Re-union isn’t the same as union. The original typesetting of the novel, which hyphenates a large proportion of these kinds of words, makes the break explicit.q Restoration, return; they’re fictions. The past is out of reach.

  Jane has Anne articulate this same idea. Anne is tempted, terribly tempted, just for a few moments, by the prospect of marrying her cousin Mr Elliot, not so much for the man himself, but for other reasons:

&n
bsp; For a few moments her imagination and her heart were bewitched. The idea of becoming what her mother had been; of having the precious name of ‘Lady Elliot’ first revived in herself; of being restored to Kellynch, calling it her home again, her home for ever, was a charm which she could not immediately resist. Lady Russell said not another word, willing to leave the matter to its own operation; and believing that, could Mr Elliot at that moment with propriety have spoken for himself! – she believed, in short, what Anne did not believe. The same image of Mr Elliot speaking for himself brought Anne to composure again. The charm of Kellynch and of ‘Lady Elliot’ all faded away. She never could accept him.

  It takes magic to create the illusion that paradise can be regained, or that time can stand still – ‘charm’, bewitchment. It takes wilful stupidity to believe it. William Elliot’s claim that Anne’s name ‘has long possessed a charm over my fancy’, his expressed wish that it ‘might never change’ – that she remain an Elliot by marrying him – both are unreal. His feelings are only pretend. Spells fade, mirages vanish; they’re no good in the real world.

  But Anne acknowledges that she might have been ‘induced’ to marry her cousin. She acknowledges – just as Jane acknowledges – the potent draw of the past, the fantasy that by going back, you will find what is perfectly safe and familiar. The past, her family, have a hold on her. Quite early on in the novel, we find Anne trapped by yet another Walter, her two-year-old nephew. She’s kneeling next to the sofa in the drawing room in her sister’s house, trying to settle her other nephew – Charles, the one with the injured collarbone. Walter, in the manner of two-year-olds, climbs on her back. ‘She could not shake him off. She spoke to him, ordered, entreated, and insisted in vain. Once she did contrive to push him away, but the boy had the greater pleasure in getting upon her back again directly.’ One of the other two adults present tries to coax the child into behaving, but Walter is having none of it. What happens next? Captain Wentworth strides across and plucks the child off her:

  In another moment, however, she found herself in the state of being released from him; some one was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much, that his little sturdy hands were unfastened from around her neck, and he was resolutely borne away, before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done it.

  That’s what Wentworth represents for Anne: separation from what she knows, from the weight of her own history. When she chooses Wentworth, she rejects the title and the big house, family and tradition – all the things that novel heroines had wanted since the novel began. They have little to offer her. Her father can afford to give her ‘only a small part’ of the dowry to which she is legally entitled under his own marriage settlement. What she chooses is a life which is fundamentally unsettled, uncertain – even dangerous.

  At the end of the novel she is restored, not to her childhood home or to her mother’s title, but only to ‘the rights of seniority and the enjoyment of a very pretty landaulette’ – a dashing carriage. When, earlier in the book, the Crofts drive Anne back to Uppercross in their gig, they narrowly avoid, in turn, a ‘post’, a ‘rut’, and a ‘dung-cart’. Captain Wentworth claims that they are ‘upset’ – overturned – ‘very often’. Anne – who shares a name with Anne Lefroy, whose birthday is the anniversary of Jane Cooper’s death in a carriage accident – is taking a terrible risk in that ‘pretty landaulette’. Jane Cooper was married to a naval captain, too.

  Prudent though she was as a young woman, Anne, in the end, embraces risk. It’s the price she has to pay, the price that she is willing to pay. The novel ends with Napoleon’s escape from Elba; its first readers knew how that would be resolved, but still they would have shared Anne’s ‘dread of a future war’ – another war – and ‘the tax of quick alarm’, the ever-present threat that the ‘sunshine’ may be dimmed – perhaps permanently.

  Jane begins the final chapter of Persuasion by asserting that ‘When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point’. ‘This may’, she acknowledges, ‘be bad morality to conclude with, but I believe it to be the truth’. The British Critic thought this was the whole point of the work.r It’s difficult to believe that Jane wasn’t playing with the critics here. For a start, the whole plot has been driven by the fact that Wentworth and Anne couldn’t ‘carry their point’, that they were separated. And there are other elements, in this final chapter, which could be objected to, for various reasons. There’s the indulgent treatment of Mrs Clay; Lady Russell (an older woman, Anne’s godmother, in a position of moral authority) having to ‘admit that she had been pretty completely wrong’; the improvement in Mrs Smith’s financial circumstances when she recovers her husband’s property ‘in the West Indies’.

  But all the way through Jane has been working her readers towards one very particular moral, one revolutionary conclusion.

  Persuasion, from the very beginning, challenges us to think about history not as a smooth, orderly progression, but as disrupted, random, chaotic, filled with death and destruction, invasion and revolution. It seeks to make us aware, in Lady Russell’s words, of ‘the uncertainty of all human events and calculations’. And further than that, it asks how, if the past is filled with uncertainty and violent change, if the land you’re standing on was once under the sea, you can be sure of anything? How can you rely on tradition or order or identity when the whole world is mutable, when dynasties crumble and all your deepest beliefs might be based on fiction? All the accumulated wisdom of the past – ‘all histories, all stories, prose and verse’ – is partial, biased. It isn’t enough.

  History can’t be divided into neat chapters, it doesn’t come to conclusions, it doesn’t keep moving in the same direction. The characters in the novel think that the war is over, that Napoleon is defeated; but as Jane shows us the Elliots, and the Dalrymples, and the Musgroves, and the Crofts, all drifting towards Bath to drink the waters and attend concerts and card parties, she’s taking us closer and closer to the resumption of hostilities. She takes some pains to provide us with the details which enable us to work out that the reconciliation between Anne and Wentworth takes place during the last week of February 1815, the very same week, in fact, that Napoleon escaped from Elba.

  You can’t escape the tide of history, you can’t stay firm against that kind of pressure; you have to give way and let yourself be carried, if you want any hope of surviving.

  In Lyme, Jane confronts her readers with the unimaginable scale of geological time, and their own insignificance. In Bath, one gleaming white city built on the ruins of another, she shows us a hero and heroine learning to accept and let go of the past and walk together into the unknown.

  And it is – it always will be – unknown. Advice, in the end, is ‘good or bad only as the event decides’. There’s no way of knowing whether ‘cheerful confidence in futurity’ or ‘over-anxious caution’ is the right course. There is no right course. Early on, Anne thinks that ‘exertion’ and ‘Providence’ should be trusted. But for Wentworth, Providence is very little more than a joke. In the inn at Lyme, bored by Mary Musgrove’s flood of talk about how peculiar it is that they should be in the very same inn with ‘the heir to Kellynch’ and not know, he remarks, faintly derisive, that ‘we must consider it to be the arrangement of Providence’. And by the end of the novel, ‘Providence’ is consigned to the history books, connected to the vanishing past and the atrophying Sir Walter. In the chaotic world of Persuasion, you can’t trust that even God has a plan; if he does, it must be beyond human understanding.

  Anne, in addition to being the most mature of Jane’s heroines, is the most modern. Like other naval wives, Anne will have to learn how to live by herself when her husband is at sea, perhaps for years at a time, how to exist independently of anyone, to manage business. Alone of all Jane’s heroines, there will be times when Anne is her own woman. We can imagine her – if she weathers the dangers of that carriage, and of childbearing – living on into
the nineteenth century, as Jane’s brothers and sisters did, watching the railways and the factories arrive, seeing the British Empire rise.

  Jane feels confident enough, in the chapter she revised, to boast, indirectly, of what her novels are doing. Up till now, the ‘pen’ has been, as Anne and Harville agree, in the hands of men; only a few lines earlier, Jane makes Wentworth drop his. It’s time – at last – for women to start telling their own stories.

  But by the time Jane finished writing Persuasion, her own end was already in sight.

  Footnotes

  a Based on a letter from Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen (14th September 1804).

  b Jane refers to Delamere in her History of England, dated 1791.

  c There are other borrowings from Charlotte Smith in Jane’s novels; Professor Jacqueline Labbe, of Sheffield, has written extensively about them.

  d I mentioned The Janeites briefly in Chapter 4. It deals with the experiences of an ordinary British soldier in the trenches and his belief that his superior officers – admirers of Jane’s novels – belong to a secret society called the Janeites, a belief which begins as broad comedy and ends by saving his life.

  e Willoughby gives Marianne a horse, but we never see her ride it. Lizzy Bennet is ‘no horsewoman’, though her sister Jane is. We’re never shown Catherine Morland, Elinor Dashwood, or Anne Elliot on horseback. Frank Churchill asks whether Emma is ‘a horsewoman’ – we’re not given an answer, but presumably not.