Jane Austen published “Persuasion” posthumously in 1817, which meant that the novel was composed by her in her late thirties, far beyond when she was likely to marry, but she seems still in her later years to have pined about having never managed to marry. She was, in fact, a maiden aunt, tending the children of relatives, which is just what Anne Eliot, the fictional heroine of “Persuasion” believes has begun to happen to her, nursing children and putting up with her whiny and self indulgent sister as best she can. Anne’s is a rather grim future, even if Jane seems to have gotten along with her real life sister. So Austen, so committed to the notion of bourgeois matrimony, as it includes both romance and children, crafted “Persuasion” as a fantasy about what might have been: how a lover she jilted comes back on the scene and after a while she and he reawaken their mutual sense that they were meant to be together, that they both had persistence in their mutual devotion despite the fact that people will persuade them to be otherwise and so lose several of their years before finding one another again. Anne gets everything: a suitor arises before she gets the man she wants, and even gets the childhood estate she wanted as the place where she and her new husband will live. What makes the story other than a silly girlie romance is the perspicacity whereby Austen looks into family dynamics and the context of the times that make what is happening to the characters’ individual lives. First off, however, is how harsh Austen is to the people in this last of her novels, much more so than was the case with other Austen figures who are also undeserving. Mr. Collins is a clown and so is so patently insufferable that he is amusing. Even Mr. Wickham, who is a cad, is discovered to be just what he is and so to be avoided or sent away, his main purpose is to let Darcy to be seen as how noble he is. But the people who surround Anne are dangerous and insufferable and deplorable and it is a wonder that Anne can follow through the crowds of ingrates and social climbers so as to find her own true love. The main setting for the romance of Anne and Frederick Wentworth is set in Bath, the fashion spa developed only recently in the 1770’s,where the wealthy live in what we would call a planned community of mostly grand apartments, as accompanied with musicals and shops. The poor are there only so as to provide service., as is the case with a modern ski resort. As in all of Austen’s novels, the pace races ever more quickly towards its ending, and Anne does so, going to see Frederick before he will leave and admit to him that she loves him even as he is trying to send him a letter admitting that he loves her, and so both of themselves proposing to one another, which is just a perfect thing. The anxiety comes from all those other people interfering, and most of them malicious, including a distant relative, a Mr. Eliot, who is told by another that he was a cad who wanted her title and would have had a mistress if he had married Anne. It would not seem that it was much too fit that Anne learned he was right to distrust Elliot, but Austen tends to do that, making who was good and bad all too certain rather than left murky, as happens when Mr. Wickham is not just an opportunist but a seducer and the good people overcome the bad rather than just do what they do while the particularly good people find one another. In “Persuasion”, there are so many bad people, and we have to sort out their kinds of badness. Jane is getting bitter.
“Persuasion” has multiple stories. Alongside Anne’s romance, there is also a very penetrating study of how one generation tries to live a different life from the life of its parents, supposedly a better one, and manages to do so while still retaining sometimes unpleasant associations with the older generation. Anne was a diffident child, her sisters apparently doing much better than she. One marries young to a man interested only in shooting and herself always complaining, and Anne has another sister, who treats herself as mistress of her father’s house but never seems to have married, a problem for two of the three daughters that suggests that the girls do too much doting on their parent now that their mother is not available to mind the father. While Anne said little and minded her manners and the interests prompted by others, such as Mrs. Russell.who was not at all interested in romance but in wealth and position and so Anne had allowed herself to be misguided by Mrs. Russell in that way though Anne did not blame others for her having missed the main goal of having an acceptable spouse. It shows that her character is estimable in that she takes on her own responsibility, which is a considerable virtue in these circles. Over the years when she matures beyond the time when she had spurned Wentworth, she takes on resources of independence, an expression of her clearly deciding on her own what she would do, so that Wentworth finds her, years later, as able to take charge of illness while his sister cannot do so. Wentworth believes that Anne had always been steadfast, a rock when others waver, but she is to be forgiven for thinking so because he loves her, and may be correct about her that her deepest character had been steadfast even if it seemed otherwise or that he had not known that Mrs. Russell had persuaded Anne not to agree to a marriage with Wentworth when she was young. Not everyone learns what will have happened in their own histories.
Remember that in the next generation the star struck lovers are remote from the urban fray, as if it takes isolation to allow love to work. That is the case of “Wuthering Heights”, set on an isolated moor, and Jane Eyre, set in a separate mansion where there is time and place for Rochester and Jane to become acquainted. The same was true of most Austen novels. The suitors are few, a major event when they show up, even if these pickings are some of them pretty thin. Not so in Bath, which have many suitors and friends to distract people from their purpose and not allow long contemplation about their merits. It is only after that, in “Vanity Fair”, does an author manage to have souls intertwine in an urban context and only because Becky is so determined and insistent on making it happen and so seems opportunistic.
Also remember that we are at the very beginnings of the industrialization of England, when towns create factories and a working class way of life. Rather, we are still in the transition between landed aristocracy and wealth. Anne’s father transitions from having a manor house which he is unwilling to rent but to which he will never return and finds his place in Bath, where people trade in their titles, taking up with their own kind and trying to preen at their names. But living in the gated village of Bath makes those titles antiquated because they have no function, as was clear enough in the real Regency period, when he who would be William IV was thought trashy and decadent. It was among those people that Anne and Frederick would find their true North. Frederick could even buy the old manor house as a decoration for his wealth and so suit his new wife’s nostalgia rather than because he needed a manor house as providing his identity. After all, Admiral Cross and his wife were presented as the idyllic couple who had traveled for years at sea in very constricted circumstances and so thought of the estate they rent as a bauble rather than a matter of identity, while, in the city, in Bath, people stand out for their personalities and sociability, however much this is trying for Anne because there are so many people who push themselves forward to make their personalities matter. Character is for a later generation. Personality alone will do, and that is why the two will have to be strong to tie them together, inventing, as it were, in that generation, the difference between personality and character. Otherwise the two will feel what will be described just a generation later as the alienation of people not only from land but from everything else it might mean for those people who feel estranged from the world, as is Heathcliff, or estranged from religion as well, as was true of Kierkegaard. Anne and Frederick will force their lives so that they are not estranged, neither of them loners by inclination. Anne keeps up with her family, however deficient is her life, and Frederick is considerate of social customs, as when he considers whether he had goten entangled with a lady he did not mean to. Neither of them shun convention: they just want to do what permission will allow.
Then there is the third story, the one about Anne’s father, who was center stage in the opening chapters of “Persuasion”, but who seems overtaken by Anne’s belated romance, though not so, who finds a way to change as the times change, as people do. The book opens with a comic portrait of Sir Walter Elliot as a Baronet who is completely unalienated from his way of life. His country estate is the expression of his personality, much adorned with carriages and furniture and lands and the house itself. He could not imagine himself otherwise, including having the smooth and still; handsome face so different would be if he had been a naval officer rather than an aristocrat, he was able to keep his face from being weather beaten. Sir Walter often reads his listing in books of peerage so as to remind himself of his family’s history and even its future. Indeed, a more modernist reading of “Persuasion” would read the novel of having been an unfolding of the record briefly recorded in a book of the peerage, one of those many people who do not offer a detailed history of their own transitions across the generations, Sir Walter’s episode consisting of moving from a minor aristocrat to being an antiquated one, given that he has to relinquish his manor and settle up with Bath, shorn of its accomplishments other than his title and still considerable wealth. Austen makes clear that it was a trend rather than a fancy that led Sir Walter to leave his manor. The end of the Napoleonic Wars meant that there were many now wealthy naval officers, rich from their purses of having captured the enemy, who were out to rent or buy places and that this was the time to sell at high prices so long as the demand remained. This was the time to buy rather than to try to simply marginally cut down on costs.This was a sea change in property rather than a temporary thing.
The battle between the aristocracy and the wealthy had ended by that same generation. The new queen, Victoria, had become a bourgeois monarch, just as Louis Philippe had become in France. Victoria was a stable and respectable monarch who had lost all political power, and so a symbol of the state and only that. The new fight was between manufacturing and the working class. Pennsylvania had discovered oil in the 1840s, the United States having discovered universal white male suffrage before that and so having established the basis for an industrialized nation within an already secure democracy, something not accomplished in England until the 1880’s. So it is easy enough to forget the transition between aristocracy to bourgeois life as a major transition. The republican impulse seems so antiquatedbecause we do not remember the era that had preceded it and had become past, while the Nazi and Soviet revolutions are still near enough so that we can see their menace. But Jane Austen was in the midst of that transition from title to wealth and documented it and detailed its dynamics.