Reading Notes: Persuasion
What an orderly book Jane Austen’s last novel is! I had never noticed before that it is so neatly divided into two books of twelve chapters each. And almost as evenly divided between county (Somersetshire) and town (Bath).
Has Persuasion ever been so beloved? It seems, these days, to be second in popularity only to Pride & Prejudice. Toward the end, every other page sparkles with a well-quoted line. Perhaps this novel, like its heroine herself, has been rediscovered because Austen has so many more older readers. Austen has always been important to thoughtful and intelligent young women, but she is no longer their particular property — as, I suspect, the Brontës always will be. People go on re-reading Austen — and finding that a lot of what she has to say is lost to anyone under forty. And ageing boomers are far less likely to be vexed than girls might be by the matrimonial prospects of a woman of twenty-nine who has lost (only) her “bloom.”
The penultimate chapter contains the very grown-up climax. In the dining room of a suite at a resort hotel (the restaurant had yet to reach England), we find five characters. In the background, chatty (but very nice) Mrs Musgrove relates her daughters adventures and misadventures to patient (and very nice) Mrs Croft, while Mrs Croft’s brother, Captain Wentworth, sits at a table to one side, writing a letter. Anne Elliot, our heroine, regards a miniature of Captain Benwick, the man whom Mrs Croft’s daughter will be marrying. The man holding the miniature, Captain Harville, gently complains that Benwick has been quick to recover from the loss of one Fanny, his great love and Harville’s late sister.
“Poor Fanny! she would not have forgotten him so soon!”
“No,” replied Anne, in a low feeling voice. “That, I can easily believe.”
“It was not in her nature. She doated on him.”
“It would not be in the nature of any woman who truly loved.”
There follows a discussion that is rare in Austen. The subject is big — which is superior, the love of a man or the love of a woman — but the parties are not engaged in amatory fencing. They’re like brother and sister, we’re told. And although Anne is painfully conscious of Captain Wentworth’s presence in the room, she does not speak for his ears; she believes that the letter that he is writing, allegedly to Benwick, occupies his full attention. (Of course he hears her every word, but we don’t know that until later in the chapter, when we read the letter along with Anne — having discovered that it was intended for her — a thrilling development that Austen captures with very forceful economy.
What interested me just now about the “argument” that Anne has with Harville is that Harville never really takes up Anne’s claim, which is that women love longer. He claims that men love more passionately, more desperately, more whatever-you-please, than women, and Anne allows almost all of it, while holding quietly to her point. Actual disagreement with her thesis will come not from Harville but from Wentworth himself, in his letter, in which he confesses that, despite his best efforts, he has never stopped loving Anne in the ten years since Lady Russell persuaded Anne to break off their engagement. And by the time that Anne reads the letter, she is no longer much interested in proving who loves longer; she’s much too happy about not having beaten Wentworth. Her love has not outlasted his.