William Deresiewicz

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  36. See Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), p. 48. As Lukács remarks, this intertwining of the personal and the national continues to be central to Scott’s design in the novels: “certain crises in the personal destiny of a number of human beings coincide and interweave within the determining context of an historical crisis … the split of the nation into warring parties always runs through the centre of the closest human relationships.” 37. Litz sees the novel as involving a shift to modernity in terms of its delineation of character, from the “stable self” to one marked by “dynamic growth and unpredictable change” (” `A Development of Self’: Characters and Personalities in Jane Austen’s Fiction,” in Jane Austen’s Achievement, pp. 7576). For a dissenting view, see Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body, pp. 157158, who disputes the idea that the novel registers a social transformation, pointing out that the Elliots will return to Kellynch in seven years. Among others who discuss the function of history in the novel, Wiesenfarth argues that “history provides the realistic context in which Jane Austen works out the myths,” like Narcissus and Cinderella, that structure the novel’s action (“Persuasion: History and Myth,” p. 167). Speaking of Mansfield Park, Leo Bersani writes that “[i]n 1814, English society is on the threshold of major changes” (A Future for Astyanax [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], p. 75), while Tanner, writing of the same novel, calls the years 18111813 “a period of great stability just about to give way to a time of unimagined changes” (Jane Austen, p. 144). 38. Strictly speaking, Queen Anne (like Mary II, who was, of course, a mere figurehead) also belonged to the House of Stuart, but she ruled, like William III, by grace of the Revolutionary settlement. Indeed, the fact that she was a Stuart strengthens the parallel between the Elliots and the Tudor-Stuart line, each family including an Elizabeth and a Mary who represent the old order and an Anne who represents the new. 39. Modert notes this discrepancy (“Chronology Within the Novels,” p. 58). 40. Two final pieces of coded information, unrelated to the foregoing analysis, that may appear in the passage. Anne is born August 9, the day after Austen started writing the novel. Lady Elliot’s maiden name of Stevenson is extremely close to Steventon, the village where Austen was born and raised. As Lady Elliot embodied the home that Anne has lost, so did Steventon surely play something like the same role in Austen’s psychic life. 41. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, p. 51. 42. See Lukács, Historical Novel, pp. 5153. 43. For a different view of the influence of Scott’s early novels, see Millgate, “Prudential Lovers and Lost Souls,” who argues that in the three that were published by the time Austen had finished Persuasion—Waverley, Guy Mannering, and The Antiquary, the last two of which are set more or less in the present—Scott looks more like a novelist of Scottish manners than of his nation’s history. 44. One can understand why the navy in particular might have started being forgotten even during the war’s later stages, displaced in the national consciousness by the army. As for after the war, Byron, writing Don Juan I in the summer of 1818, notes just such a displacement:

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  Nelson was once Britannia’s god of War, And still should be so, but the tide is turned; There’s no more to be said of Trafalgar, ‘Tis with our hero quietly inurned; Because the army’s grown more popular, At which the naval people are concerned; Besides, the Prince is all for the land-service, Forgetting Duncan, Nelson, Howe, and Jervis. (stanza iv) 45. Tanner sees the naval officers as forming “a potentially new model of an alternative society or community” (Jane Austen, p. 228). 46. Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), p. 77. Litz speaks of a “new natural aristocracy of the navy” (“Persuasion: Forms of Estrangement,” p. 231). 47. Lionel Trilling, E.M. Forster (New York: New Directions, 1965), p. 118. Brown sees the question as applying to all of Austen’s novels (Jane Austen’s Novels, p. 146). 48. Fleishman, English Historical Novel, p. 49. 49. Brown claims, for example, that “the ambiguous, autumnal mood of Persuasion comes … from a full consciousness of the fate of marriage in the century to come” (Jane Austen’s Novels, p. 150). 50. Muir calls his chapter on the period between Napoleon’s abdication and return “The Year of Revelry” and quotes Samuel Romilly, writing in his diary at the news of that return, “The name of Bonaparte is one `—at which the world turns pale’ ” (Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, p. 345). 51. As Mooneyham says, loss in the novel is a permanent condition, never fully overcome (Romance, Language, and Education, p. 147). For a different view, see Auerbach, who sees loss as leading to recovery and enrichment (Romantic Imprisonment, p. 38). 52. It is a remarkable meteorological coincidence (or perhaps rather another source of inspiration) that in 1816, the year Austen finished the novel (in August), spring in England was severely delayed. In what became known as “the year without a summer,” frost lingered on the heaths until July (Tom Bissel, “A Comet’s Tale: On the Science of Apocalypse,” Harper’s Feb. 2003: 35). 53. As Mooneyham puts it, their home becomes “free-floating” (Romance, Language, and Education, p. 159).

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