Jane Austen’s last novel, Persuasion, is an intimate novel permeated with an air of sadness and loss. It shows what wrong turns can be taken when peer pressure mixed with poor advice steers the individual into needless self-sacrifice.
The overriding temptation when reading Jane Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion (1818), is to think of it as a work influenced by its author’s declining health. A general tone of autumnal introspection and reflection permeates, of opportunities missed and love forgone. Austen backgrounds her story with overt themes of autumn, describing these months as “sweet and so sad”, mingling subtle emotions of longing and desire with the natural cycle of decline and expected renewal. Elsewhere autumn is described as “that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness”.
Compared to Persuasion’s two immediate predecessors, Emma (1816) and Mansfield Park (1814), novels which showed a confident, even ambitious Jane Austen, this final completed fiction, while exhibiting no diminution in aesthetic and intellectual power, is nonetheless somewhat of a smaller, more intimate work. With Persuasion Jane Austen moves from the enlarged social worlds of Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma, with their often comic incidents, witty dialogue, and irrepressible heroines, to a more intense focus on the self in society.
Jane Austen’s Most Understated Heroine Anne Elliot
Anne Elliot, one of Jane Austen’s most understated heroines, puts the sometimes fickle opinion of friends and family ahead of her own interests when she declines a marriage offer at the age of nineteen from naval officer Frederick Wentworth. While Anne may keep her family happy by acceding to their low opinion of Frederick Wentworth, she is by contrast held of little account herself. We learn that in her own family Anne “was nobody with either father or sister; her word had no weight, her convenience was always to give way--she was only Anne”.
This is the great irony of Persuasion, that Anne is treated as a second rate citizen by her family, yet sacrifices her happiness for them. Her friend and mentor, the cautious Lady Russell, also advises against marriage to Frederick Wentworth. If there is a subtle lesson to be learnt in Persuasion, it’s to rely more to your own intuition and judgement. But as ever with Jane Austen, balancing this judgement is a very finicky business, especially when weighed against societal expectations. Anne Elliot sacrifices happiness for a family that thinks her a ‘nobody’ anyway. Austen shows that so much of society’s power to compel conformity may be of dubious value; power inexorably perpetuates itself, not the virtue that its authority implies. In the end, the downtrodden and repressed individual can only rely on their moral character, and a philosophical outlook, to pass through life’s travails.
All Jane Austen novels end with happy marriages, fairy tale endings, as a sort of author’s indulgence. Persuasion is no different. Anne Elliot gets her second chance of marriage when Frederick Wentworth re-enters her world seven years after his initial offer, a successful captain and now quite wealthy. As he comes to realise he is still in love with Anne, and hears her discuss her views on woman’s greater constancy when it comes to love, he writes her a heartfelt letter with another offer of marriage. The novel’s sadness derives from the knowledge that this fairy tale ending is just that, and more often than not the Anne Ellitots of this world do not get a second chance at happiness, and when a cherished love is lost, it may never, ever return. All that can comfort then is a stoical attitude during life’s emotional autumn, an attitude that surely Jane Austen cultivated herself, like her heroine Anne Elliot.
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