With its West Country setting and initial focus on the loss of the family home, Persuasion is reminiscent of Sense and Sensibility, though the later section in Bath, perhaps influenced by the recovery of the ‘Susan’ manuscript from Crosby, has more in common with Northanger Abbey. The opening chapters, with their satirical portrayal of Sir Walter Elliot, also recall the embarrassing parents and exaggerated comic characters of Pride and Prejudice. Sir Walter’s daughters have reached the age at which Charlotte Lucas deemed it prudent to accept Mr Collins, and so the pressure to find a husband, which afflicts so many of Austen’s female precursors to Emma, is once again under scrutiny. At the same time, the interest in a baronet’s household, his extravagant expenditure and the effect of external influence on domestic decisions seem more akin to Mansfield Park, especially since aristocratic assumptions about the world are so clearly contrasted with those of the navy. The symbolic transfer of Kellynch Hall from a flawed baronet to a capable naval commander seems a natural development from Mansfield Park; in replacing Lieutenant Price’s noisy house with the admirable domesticity of Captain Harville and Admiral Croft, Jane Austen was extending her affectionate tribute to Frank and Charles, just when they needed it most.
If Persuasion reconsiders almost every major theme from the earlier novels, however, it is most indebted stylistically to Emma. Persuasion is a personal book in a way that none of the others are, but its private quality is achieved through the intense concentration on the mind of its heroine. In Emma, Jane Austen developed ways of presenting the narrative largely from the perspective of the central character, creating passages in which Emma’s thoughts dominate the narrative interest, and even restricting much of the novel’s dialogue to the subject of Emma. Persuasion, too, moves rapidly from the external portrayal of Sir Walter and his selfish obsessions to the secret inner life of his middle daughter. Anne Elliot may be disregarded by her family, but to readers, what goes on in her mind is far more compelling than what comes out of her father’s mouth. The drama in Persuasion is psychological, as the entire novel reflects the peculiarly sensitive interior of the heroine. Where Emma’s thoughts are often quick and decisive, reflected in short sentences, broken by dashes or exclamation marks, Anne Elliot’s restrained contemplation is represented by long, beautifully controlled sentences that can run on for ten lines at a time. Even the passages of more detached narration retain an affinity to Anne’s perception by adopting similar sentence patterns:
They were come too late in the year for any amusement or variety which Lyme, as a public place, might offer; the rooms were shut up, the lodgers almost all gone, scarcely any family but of the residents left – and, as there is nothing to admire in the buildings themselves, the remarkable situation of the town, the principal street almost hurrying into the water, the walk to the Cobb, skirting round the pleasant little bay, which in the season is animated with bathing machines and company, the Cobb itself, its old wonders and new improvements, with the very beautiful line of cliffs stretching out to the east of the town, are what the stranger’s eye will seek; and a very strange stranger it must be, who does not see the charms in the immediate environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it better.
This striking paragraph carries all the conviction of first-hand experience and is obviously drawn from Jane Austen’s memories of holidays in the Dorset resort in 1803 and 1804. Although the detail impresses the reality of the place on the page, its muted tone conveys the thoughtfulness of retrospect, of someone who understands what it means to feel that she has come too late. The bathing machines Jane Austen used when she spent all day swimming in the little bay had been packed away, and the impulse to retrieve them imaginatively – to relive remembered pleasures – was checked by the cool knowledge that that time was past, and all its aching joys were now no more. Persuasion nevertheless demonstrates the abundant artistic recompense derived from acknowledging the very difference.
Though much indebted to the innovations of Emma, reflective passages, such as the description of Lyme, distinguish Persuasion from the earlier novels, while also demonstrating that the very process of reconsidering them has paved the way to new achievement. When Jane Austen observed that ‘these places must be visited, and visited again, to make the worth of Lyme understood’, she was writing from her own experience – not just of Lyme itself, but of intense imaginative visiting and recollection. After completing Emma, she was returning to her personal and literary past. Persuasion is at once nostalgic and experimental, its unique character arising from the perpetual interaction between the sense of then and now, and from quiet, though often painful, reflection on the changes.
Persuasion is the first novel in which Jane Austen makes the past a crucial part of her narrative, impressing its importance from the opening chapter. Sir Walter Elliot’s obsession with his family tree and Elizabeth Elliot’s ‘consciousness of being nine-and-twenty’, with thirteen years of presiding over Kellynch Hall behind her, prepare the way for the real focus of the novel: Anne’s preoccupation with her own unhappy history. At twenty-seven, Anne is older than any of the heroines in the earlier novels. Unlike her predecessors, her character has been formed by experiences that are not narrated directly. Whereas Emma enjoyed her teenage years with very little to distress or vex her, Anne Elliot’s were marked by loss and loneliness. The successive blows of her mother’s death and her broken engagement take place before the novel begins, and so the narrative is perpetually gazing backwards at the months of intense happiness, as well as the prolonged grief that occupies so much of Anne’s internal experience.
Emma is also kept entirely free of dates, while Persuasion announces the dates of birth of the principal characters on the first page, and is then so specific about their ages that it is very clear to readers that the action of the novel takes place in 1814. The ‘short period of exquisite felicity’ enjoyed by Anne in the company of Captain Wentworth took place in 1806, a summer made all the more golden by its contrast with the surrounding years of warfare. Though Jane Austen had made passing references to public events in her previous novels, she had never before set the lives of her fictional characters so firmly against the great dramatic backdrop of her own turbulent times. Anne Elliot’s sufferings are of a kind that anyone bereft and broken-hearted might experience, but they achieve a greater intensity through the additional fears relating to international conflict. When her fiancé left the country after their engagement was ended, he went off to a war in which his chances of survival were very uncertain. If Emma had caught the joyful mood of the moment of national peace, Persuasion reflected on the long years of anxiety that had preceded it.
As Jane Austen allowed her pen to dwell on feelings of misery in a way that she had never done before, she was establishing the most remarkable aspect of Persuasion: its almost imperceptible change of mood. If, at the beginning of the novel, Anne seems virtually paralysed by the distressing burden that has weighed on her for so many years, by the end she is staggered by ‘an overpowering happiness’. The satisfaction of the novel’s conclusion is greatly enriched by the sensitivity with which the heroine’s feelings have been traced from dull depression, through moments of extreme pain, to a dawning capacity for amusement and a slowly recovering self-confidence, until hope and the possibility of fulfilment become real again at last. The scene at the White Hart, which Jane Austen carefully rewrote after rejecting the first ending she had conceived, is perhaps the most powerful emotional moment in her entire oeuvre. It is certainly one of the most complicated and sophisticated chapters, with its extraordinary control of a roomful of characters engaging in different conversations, each of which carries additional resonances for Anne and Wentworth, though they do not exchange a word. In the end, Jane Austen reverted to the device she had loved as a girl – the fictional letter. Where, in her youth, she had invariably made fun of the written declaration and used her epistles as a medium for parody, she now allowed Captain Wentworth to compose the most passionate address without a trace of i
rony. At forty, it seems, Jane Austen was prepared to lay down her comic defences when the situation demanded and allow unalloyed feeling to burst out across the page. No wonder that Anne Elliot is stunned, and those around her momentarily at a loss.
Persuasion is barely two-thirds of the length of Emma, and yet its slim form contains the greatest extremes of emotion, the most striking contrasts in narrative tone, the widest spectrum of social classes, the longest sweep of time and the most ambitious connections between the domestic and the national of any of her novels. Though most concise in its dealings with minor characters, it is the most generous in its development of the heroine. Though the most preoccupied with location, it also seems the most displaced of all. While each of the earlier novels sent their heroine on a significant journey, they also allowed her to return home, enlightened by her travels, whereas when Anne returns to Kellynch, she realises that her home has ‘passed into better hands than its owners’, and recognises that her expulsion is permanent.
It is only as she begins to look forwards rather than backwards, however, that the hints of an internal transformation can be fully realised. Once she has revisited Kellynch and seen that the world is not contained there, but lies all before her, Anne is ready to be restored to her true self. She learns from the past as she is liberated from its more restrictive influence, becoming ready to embrace new life, wherever it may take her. The openness of Anne’s future, in comparison with the carefully located heroines of the earlier novels, is entirely consistent with the flexibility of Persuasion. She may be without her familiar habits and circle, but, in her new freedom, she is intensely happy. Jane Austen, too, had discovered hidden strengths in the course of writing Persuasion and, as she put down her pen in July 1816, seemed poised for future greatness. The emotional honesty of the book is such, however, that it also succeeds in conveying a dim sense that the happiness being celebrated so warmly is perhaps wishful thinking.
‘WINCHESTER RACES’
1817
Jane Austen had no illusions about mortality. By 1817, she had seen the lives of two first cousins, three sisters-in-law, her sister’s fiancé and her cousin’s husband all cut short. She had lost her father and mourned the deaths of aunts and friends. Her letters are scattered with references to stillbirths and miscarriages, to mothers who died in labour and to infants who succumbed soon afterwards. She had nursed both her mother and her elder brother through illnesses that had nearly carried them off; she was even now hoping for an end to the suffering of her little niece Harriet, whose mysterious brain disease was driving Charles Austen to distraction. In her novels, however, death is never described directly, figuring largely as a plot device to bring about an enabling change for the surviving characters. There are moments when death seems uncomfortably close – in Marianne Dashwood’s sick chamber, at Mansfield Park during Tom Bertram’s fever, on the hard stone of the Cobb in Persuasion – but, in each case, death is warded off, the mood lightens and the story continues. Much of the time, illness provides comedy: Mrs Bennet’s nerves and Mr Woodhouse’s worries are there to make us laugh rather than cry. As Jane Austen’s own symptoms became more severe, she might have decided to abandon her writing and rest. Instead, she embarked on a new novel that satirised contemporary medicine.
In Persuasion, she had recalled the Dorset shoreline with remarkable passages of lyrical beauty, but in Sanditon the sea breezes are more biting. The little Sussex village that has suddenly been ‘planned & built, & praised & puffed, & raised . . . to a Something of young Renown’ by Mr Parker could hardly be more different from the wistful evocations of Lyme Regis.59 The cool comment on the fleeting nature of fame encapsulated in Mr Parker’s regret over his choice of ‘Trafalgar House’ for his new establishment (‘for Waterloo is more the thing now’) seems to anticipate the spirit of Byron’s new poem Don Juan rather than to recall Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’. In Persuasion, the satire had broken open to reveal the romantic yearning within, but Sanditon, even in its fragmentary form, reveals little sign of deep emotion beneath the rapid conversations about bilious attacks and rheumatism. In Emma, the relative merits of South End and Cromer are debated in the brilliant comic scene in which Mr Woodhouse and John Knightley are each determined to demonstrate the superiority of their own doctor. In Sanditon, the medical humour is much less subtle, shooting out in Mr Parker’s ludicrous enthusiasm for Sanditon’s fresh air and deep water: ‘They were antispasmodic, anti-pulmonary, anti-septic, anti-bilious & anti-rheumatic. Nobody could catch cold by the Sea. Nobody wanted Appetite by the Sea, Nobody wanted Spirits, Nobody wanted Strength.’ The very things that Jane Austen most wanted, in fact, were being offered as hollow promises in the determinedly comic novel she was struggling to write. Even Sir Edward Denham’s very funny attempts to seduce Charlotte by quoting the poetry of Burns are poignantly ironic, since Burns himself died of a fever developed after medical attempts to treat his life-threatening illness sent him sea-bathing in the Solway Firth. Beneath the comedy of Sanditon runs the knowledge that, whatever energy, money or hope human beings might invest in medical treatment, they will always be confronted in the end with the truth of their own mortality. Even when Mr Parker is at his most persuasive, his enthusiasm is quietly punctured when he announces that sea air and bathing are ‘nearly infallible’.
In letters written during the early months of 1817, Jane Austen maintained the same resolutely cheerful front, reassuring Fanny that she was ‘tolerably well again, quite equal to walking about & enjoying the Air’, but her health was failing all the time.60 By May, the apothecary in Alton had given up on attempting to cure the violent attacks and overwhelming exhaustion that had seized her, and so Mr Lyford, a first-class surgeon from Winchester, was called to Chawton. Since it is clear, with hindsight, that she was in the grip of either Addison’s disease or some form of cancer, any improvement could only be a temporary respite. What the Austens saw, however, was what they wanted to see – that Mr Lyford had worked wonders and ‘gradually removed the Evil’, and that Jane should therefore go to Winchester to continue receiving his care.61 Her old friends Elizabeth and Alethea Bigg, who were now living in the cathedral close, found a pretty house in College Street for the Austen sisters to stay until Jane recovered. ‘I am now really a very genteel, portable sort of an Invalid,’ she observed in May, when faced with the prospect of being bumped along the sixteen-mile journey by carriage.62 Still she maintained her faith that ‘the Providence of God’ had restored her to better health, adding, with a characteristic blend of wit and humility, ‘& may I be more fit to appear before him when I am summoned, than I shd have been now!’.
The house overlooked the headmaster’s garden at Winchester College, and she could hear the shouts of schoolboys through the bow window. Across the street, at the front, was the great grey wall of the close, built of flint and meant to last for ever. The chimes from the massive cathedral helped to order her prayers and calm her spirits. Although the doctors continued to be encouraging, Jane Austen knew well that her condition was serious and she was making appropriate preparations. She had made a will on 27 April, several weeks before the move to Winchester and, apart from a few small gifts, had left everything to her ‘tender, watchful, indefatigable nurse’, Cassandra.63 When she thought of what she owed to her sister and ‘to the anxious affection of all’ her beloved family, she confessed, ‘I can only cry over it, and pray to God to bless them more.’64 Six weeks after expressing these feelings, she suffered another attack that left her barely conscious. She died two days later, at half past four in the morning of Thursday 18 July 1817.
For Cassandra, Jane’s death was devastating. ‘She was the sun of my life,’ she wrote three days later, ‘it is as if I had lost a part of myself.’65 The funeral, attended by Edward, Henry, Frank and James’s eldest son, James Edward, took place early on Thursday 24 July in order to be over by the time the first service began in the cathedral. The sense of loss that convulsed the Austens is preserved on the large black tomb
stone in the floor of Winchester Cathedral, which states that ‘their grief is in proportion to their affection’ and that ‘they know their loss to be irreparable’. The moving inscription speaks of the ‘benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper, the extraordinary endowments of her mind’ and the ‘warmest love’ Jane Austen inspired in those closest to her. But it makes no mention of her writing.
Although the monument seems to represent the final statement, the last words composed by Jane Austen herself adopted a rather different tone. Three days before she died, she dictated a poem to Cassandra. By now, her mind was on the cathedral – the tombs and the prayers, the vaulted ceilings and the arching aisles, the shrine of St Swithin behind the high altar. Rather than composing a devotional lyric, however, Jane Austen’s imagination was playing over the old legend of St Swithin’s Day – if it rains on 15 July, it will rain for forty days afterwards. The story has its origins in St Swithin’s canonisation, which took place on 15 July 971, when his bones were moved from the old grave outside to a new shrine within the cathedral. As Jane Austen lay dying on St Swithin’s Day 1817, she noticed that the Winchester races were taking place that very day, and she was struck by what ‘the old Saint’ might think of the fashionable parade at the race meeting. Though her body was weak, her mind was still capable of imaginative leaps, as the description of St Swithin springing from his shrine to address the Winchester racegoers from the cathedral roof proves:
‘Oh, subjects rebellious, Oh Venta depraved
When once we are buried you think we are dead
But behold me Immortal. – By vice you’re enslaved
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