Persuasion (Barnes & Noble Signature Editions)

By Jane Austen and Christina Bartolomeo

Eight years ago, Anne Elliot broke off her engagement to the dashing young naval officer Frederick Wentworth. Though she loved him with all her heart, she followed the advice of Lady Russell, her only true friend, whose greater experience and wisdom she trusted. Lady Russell was as worried by Wentworth’s self-confident manner as by his lack of any title, land, or money. Wentworth was crushed and embittered by Anne’s rebuke. Anne was only crushed. Now twenty-seven and considered a faded beauty, she is resigned to a spinster’s life. Then she learns that Wentworth, now a captain and wealthy with prize money from the Napoleonic Wars, has returned.

     While Anne visits her married younger sister, Mary, Wentworth pays frequent calls on Mary’s two charming sisters-in-law, and Anne must endure Mary’s debates with her husband over which of the girls Wentworth should marry. Anne takes solace in the fact that only Wentworth and Lady Russell know that he courted her. She tries to avoid him. When she cannot, she is polite but formal, and he pays her little notice. She knows he has not forgiven her, and his presence is a constant reminder of what she has lost. Wentworth, meanwhile, may have ideas of his own.

     Filled with Jane Austen’s trademark wit and hilarious lampoons of the British upper class, Persuasion is both a delightful romantic comedy and an insightful exploration of our need to persuade, and be persuaded by, others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781435141216

Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775-1817) was an English novelist known for six major novels, Pride and Prejudice; Sense and Sensibility; Becoming Jane; Emma; Mansfield Park>; and Northanger Abbey. Her writing style has been widely thought of as a cross between realist and romantic genres. Austen’s prose is poignant, and always features a strong-willed female protagonist. While sparing no detail depicting the lavishness of women in the English upper class, Austen also portrayed the reality of gendered social dynamics in the 19th century. Austen has been hailed as a heroine of her own time, in large part because most of the novels of the day were written by men. Indeed, her literature portrayed a female narrative that was often overlooked in the catalogue of male authors at the time. Austen’s platform gave an important voice to girls and women in literature, and it is for that reason, among countless others, that her works continue to inspire readers today.

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Introduction, Annotations, and Further Reading

© 2012 by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

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CONTENTS

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JANE AUSTEN

INTRODUCTION

PERSUASION

ENDNOTES

BASED ON THE BOOK

FURTHER READING

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JANE AUSTEN

INTRODUCTION

A LOVE STORY FOR GROWN-UPS

PERSUASION, A DEEPLY FELT STORY OF LOVE LOST AND LOVE RENEWED, IS arguably the most authentically romantic of Jane Austen’s novels. In Persuasion, some scholars suggest, we may come closer to the real Jane Austen than in any of her other novels: closer to her own romantic past, closer to ways in which Austen was beginning to question the society in which she lived, closer to her vision of what a marriage of true minds might look like.¹

Persuasion is many things: an engaging Cinderella story; the quintessential second chance at love novel; a social comedy that mocks class pretensions and pays homage to the brave men of the British navy. But for the many of us who count Persuasion as our favorite Austen novel, its most appealing quality is how tenderly and believably Austen portrays the journey of its heroine, hopeful spinster Anne Elliot, from solitary, blighted romantic longing to a passionate marriage of equals. Austen, writing at the height of her powers, achieves a new depth of emotion in Persuasion, making it, as scholar Richard Jenkyns puts it, a book that can command a special kind of affection.² Pride and Prejudice may dazzle, Emma may endlessly delight—but Persuasion will steal into your heart and win it completely.

Persuasion was written near the end of Jane Austen’s too-short life, and finishing it in the face of a fatal illness was an achievement of will. But then, Austen’s entire body of work was a triumph, given that in her day she was far from being recognized as the immense talent she was.³ Although Austen saw four of her books published to a modicum of critical praise in her lifetime, only decades after her death was she acknowledged for her keen social satire, realistic characterization, witty dialogue, and pivotal role in shaping the novel form. Today she has an unchallenged place in the pantheon of great English novelists, and her readership is ever widening, with no sign of the current Austen mania flagging.⁴

Born in 1775 in Steventon in Hampshire, England, Jane Austen was the daughter of a country rector, one of eight children in a close-knit, book-loving family who encouraged her writing and struggled for economic security throughout Jane’s life. In 1801, Jane’s parents, Jane, and her sister and confidante Cassandra, moved to the fashionable resort of Bath, where the latter part of Persuasion is set. After her father’s sudden death in 1805, Jane, her mother, and Cassandra eventually settled at Chawton Cottage near her brother Edward’s estate in Chawton, Hampshire, where Persuasion was finished in August 1816. Persuasion was published posthumously in 1818 to little fanfare.⁵ It is not even certain if Austen picked its title. She died on July 18, 1817, of what was once believed to have been Addison’s disease but may have been another illness—possibly lymphoma, bovine tuberculosis, or a form of typhus.

Recent biographies have shown that Jane Austen was never the prim, secluded maiden lady and amateur writer enshrined by the Victorians. In fact, Austen was a rigorous, professional writer and—as her novels reflect—decidedly not sheltered. Austen’s family experienced dramatic rises and reversals in fortune, and they were directly impacted by the great events of their time, including the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Austen came by the sophistication of her novels firsthand: her family had ties to the British nobility, she visited at the estates of wealthy relatives and friends, and she spent years in the sophisticated, high-society town of Bath.

Professor Carolyn Heilbrun calls Persuasion one of those rare books for which only a lifetime is adequate preparation to write.⁶ In Persuasion, Austen has moved into a phase of reconsideration. For example, as biographer Claire Tomalin notes, Austen is clearly applauding changes in England’s rigid class structure, a structure she sometimes seemed to defend in earlier books: "[Persuasion] is a remarkable leap into a new mood and a new way of looking at England. . . . [It] points approvingly towards a society in which merit can rise."⁷

Heilbrun may be saying that only at this moment in her life—a time of emotional maturity, artistic control, and reevaluation of the world around her—could Jane Austen have given us Frederick Wentworth (a new kind of hero, the self-made man) and Anne Elliot (a grown-up heroine who has known heartbreak and knows herself, as earlier Austen heroines sometimes do not). In Persuasion, Austen retains her youthful sparkle, but the emotion in the novel is even deeper and more nuanced than in her earlier books, and her protagonists have been tempered by life—giving us this lovely novel of renewal that begins in autumnal wistfulness and ends with what Austen calls a second spring for its heroine.

Austen stacks the deck against Anne from the beginning, ensuring our empathy. At a time when life expectancy for women was about forty-one years, unmarried Anne, at twenty-seven, is past her youthful bloom. She is the middle, least-favorite, daughter of the vain, extravagant Sir Walter Elliot, who as the book opens, must rent out his Somerset estate to make ends meet and rent lodgings in Bath. Unlike Austen herself, Anne is constantly lonely: solitariness, as C. S. Lewis has pointed out, is her hallmark.⁸ Anne is only Anne, Austen tells us: scorned by her haughty older sister Elizabeth (who favors instead the scheming Mrs. Clay, a clever young widow with matrimonial designs on Sir Walter), and under-appreciated by her self-absorbed younger sister, Mary (one of Austen’s best comic characters), who has married Anne’s former suitor Charles Musgrove. Mary uses Anne as a convenient babysitter⁹ and nurse to Mary’s fits of hypochondria.

The Cinderella setup is complete, down to a wicked stepmother waiting in the wings—and such a plot was a familiar one in novels by Austen’s contemporaries.¹⁰ But Anne’s back story and its realistic playing-out in the novel set Persuasion apart for its time.

Eight years before the action of the book begins, Anne has been persuaded by her family and a close friend, Lady Russell (who believe, in modern terms, that Anne could do better), to break off her engagement to a poor young naval officer, Captain Frederick Wentworth. Austen is careful to say that Anne breaks off the engagement because she’s convinced that the long wait she and Wentworth face before they can afford to marry will harm Wentworth himself:

It was not a merely selfish caution under which she acted, in putting an end to it. Had she not imagined herself consulting his good, even more than her own, she could hardly have given him up.

Wentworth, hurt and angry, goes off to sea, and Anne comes to deeply regret her decision:

She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel to an unnatural beginning.

Soon after the novel opens, Wentworth returns, having made his fortune in the Napoleonic Wars. Wentworth’s sister and her admiral husband—the Crofts—have rented Sir Walter’s estate. (Sir Walter moves to Bath with Elizabeth and the insinuating Mrs. Clay.) While visiting Mary, Anne is drawn into a social circle that includes Wentworth, the Crofts, and Mary’s in-laws, the exuberant Musgrove family. Anne must watch as Wentworth courts the pretty, silly Musgrove sisters, Louisa and Henrietta: dancing with them while Anne plays the piano, regaling them with tales of his naval exploits, and flirting heavily with Louisa on a walk in the country. Humiliatingly, Mary tells Anne that Wentworth has exclaimed that Anne is so altered that he should not have known her again.

Things don’t stay so one-sided, however. While visiting the seaside town of Lyme, Anne meets Wentworth’s naval friends, including the recently bereaved Captain Benwick, who seems taken with her. She also encounters and attracts William Elliot, Sir Walter’s charming heir. Wentworth sees this, and begins to wake up. When Anne joins her family in Bath, and the pleasing Mr. Elliot intensifies his attentions, the tantalizing plot questions multiply: Will Anne choose Mr. Elliot, becoming the restored mistress of her family’s estate? Will Captain Benwick reappear and press his suit? Will Wentworth come to his senses? And will Sir Walter fall prey to the snaky Mrs. Clay? In the end, Anne seizes her happiness in her own hands, and we get not one but two ravishingly romantic declarations of love, set (because Jane Austen was not a Brontë-esque Romantic) not against the wild coast of Lyme, but in the mundane bustle of a crowded hotel.

There are numerous themes at work in Persuasion. There is the theme of a new social mobility, with a rising self-made class contrasting with the moral weakness of the nobility.¹¹ As with other Austen novels, there is also the theme of the social world vs. the natural world (outdoors, Austen characters often break through social constrictions).¹² There is the theme of marriage, ranging from Anne’s family’s concept of the institution as a social alliance, to the fluffy romantic ideal the Musgrove girls hold, to the quarrelsome relationship of Charles and Mary (who might pass for a happy couple), to the union of equals Anne envies in the Crofts. In the Crofts we find a portrayal of marriage that is revolutionary for Austen’s time. The Crofts make decisions as a team, spend their days in happy, active companionship, and have weathered the risks of a life at sea together. They show a possible future for Anne and marriage itself, one in which the woman is not shut away while the man experiences the world. As Tomalin observes, Mrs. Croft is a remarkable portrait of a distinctly new woman.¹³

But the central theme of Persuasion is renewal. The novel tracks the passing of seasons, from autumn to winter to the anticipated second spring of youth and beauty that Austen has in store for Anne. During the country walk when Wentworth flirts with Louisa, Anne feels the muted beauty of fall—an underrated, quiet beauty like Anne’s own—but Austen also notes that the ploughs at work, and the fresh made path spoke the farmer . . . meaning to have spring again. Later, waiting to travel to Bath, Anne is left alone in an empty house, depressed by the autumn rain. In Bath, Lady Russell enjoys the winter pleasures—a telling image of the cold, sterile society Anne’s family inhabits there.

Throughout these bleak passages, Austen gives signs that rejuvenation is coming. The book is full of instances of injury and healing. Anne’s little nephew dislocates his collarbone, but recovers quickly under her care. Louisa Musgrove nearly dies from a fall, but instead finds love during her recovery. Anne’s impoverished girlhood friend, Mrs. Smith, begins to recover physically and financially at the end of the novel, thanks in part to Anne’s own happy ending. Bath itself is a city whose medicinal springs were thought in Austen’s time to promote healing.

Most endearingly, we witness the rejuvenation of Anne. Faded and weak at the novel’s beginning, by its conclusion, Anne is described as glowing and lovely, and more generally admired than she thought about or cared for. Wentworth, finally admitting his love, tells Anne, to my eye you could never alter. As several scholars have noted, Anne is frequently silenced or unheard by the other characters early on, but becomes increasingly decisive, expressive, and physically stronger. We see her beginning to make her own choices: she offends her snobbish father by visiting Mrs. Smith instead of noble cousins; she actively befriends Benwick. She argues spiritedly for women’s faithfulness and endurance in a famous protofeminist passage:

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.

Anne’s revitalization signals the start of a new life for her, with a marriage offering new freedoms. In imagining this ending, was Austen reimagining an alternate ending for her own romances?

We don’t know a great deal about Jane Austen’s romantic history. There are hints—only hints—of Jane in Love. One family acquaintance reportedly described the young Jane as the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly.¹⁴ We know that Austen may have been in love, disappointedly, with Tom Lefroy, a handsome Irish law student she met over the Christmas holiday of 1795. There is evidence that Lefroy and Jane flirted and danced together enough to draw attention, but Lefroy had his way to make in the world and reportedly his family did not want him to marry the penniless daughter of a country clergyman.¹⁵ We know that, according to a later recollection by her sister, Cassandra, Jane met a man during an 1802 visit to a Devon resort town, a clergyman who seemed to have intentions, but shortly after died. We know that, like Anne with Mr. Elliot, Austen was briefly tempted by the chance of a comfortable match: in 1802, she accepted a proposal from a well-off young man who was the brother of close friends, then changed her mind the very next day.¹⁶

Several biographers have speculated that Persuasion’s underlying strain of sorrow may exist because Austen did not herself find a marriage of true minds. On the other hand, there is a poor Jane, she never married tone that creeps into discussions of Austen’s singleness that is rarely used with any male author of her rank. The fact is, we also know that Jane Austen was clearheaded about the demands of marriage in her time. She wrote letters about the energy that housekeeping gobbled up, and was aware of the risks of death in childbirth, having lost three sisters-in-law that way.

Certainly, though, there are echoes in Persuasion of Austen’s experiences of cruel fate coming between young lovers. Anne’s broken engagement may reflect the prudence that separated Jane and Tom Lefroy. Jane’s sister, Cassandra, lost her fiancé to fever while he was on an expedition to the colonies, hoping to make enough to afford to marry. In Persuasion, Benwick, having made his fortune, is coming home to marry his fiancée, when he learns that she has died during his absence.¹⁷

We will never know enough. In the end, it is Anne and her story that stay with us. And Anne, whatever Jane Austen’s disappointments, is a triumphant creation.¹⁸ She has the intellect of an Elinor Dashwood (Sense and Sensibility), the warmth of a Marianne Dashwood (Sense and Sensibility), the keen perceptions of Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice), the moral compass of a Fanny Price (Mansfield Park), without Fanny’s youthful priggishness. But Anne is more than a collection of admirable qualities. She is no model of virtue: she has a temper, even if it’s usually kept in check. She is infuriated by reading an old letter of Mr. Elliot making fun of her family, and she resents Sir Walter’s rebuking her for visiting her widowed friend, Mrs. Smith, recognizing his hypocrisy in favoring the widowed Mrs. Clay:

[Anne] left it to herself to recollect that Mrs. Smith was not the only widow in Bath, with little to live on, and no surname of dignity.

Anne has a quiet, perceptive sense of humor. For example, she is amused by the way Mrs. Croft repeatedly tweaks the reins to keep the Admiral from overturning in his gig, realizing that their style of driving . . . [was] no bad representation of the general guidance of their affairs.¹⁹ There is plenty of deft humor in Persuasion itself. Austen, from a lively family with its own fusses and fights, portrays wryly the loving Musgrove clan’s small resentments and quarrels. And Mary, Anne’s younger sister, is a hilarious character, with her enjoyable hypochondria, her tendency to think herself ill-used, and her complaining, self-contradictory external monologue:

I am sorry to say that I am very far from well; and Jemima [Mary’s servant] has just told me that the butcher says there is a bad sore throat very much about. I dare say I should catch it, and my sore throats, you know, are always worse than anybody’s.

Mary is funny, not because she’s an over-the-top character like Lady