Book Review: Persuasion, by Jane Austen (1817)

 

My teenage daughter is a bookworm – one with a particular taste for classics from the nineteenth century (see here). As such, she was unimpressed with the paltry number of novels from that era that I can claim to have read. To start to put that right, she persuaded me to read her so-far favourite work by her favourite author – Jane Austens’s Persuasion. Having now completed my first J.A. novel, I can say that I’m happy to have been persuaded.

I began reading at the start of December. There are a total of 24 chapters, most of which are relatively brief, and none are overly long. I concluded the book on Christmas Day and couldn’t help thinking it would make an excellent gift as a novel advent’s calendar – but don’t let that delay your reading of the book if it doesn’t happen to be that time of year!

Previously, it would have taken some persuasion to convince me to pick up a J.A. novel. This attitude dates back to when my two sisters were teenage bookworms themselves, and would boast of the brilliance of the latest Brontë or Austen novel they’d chalked off. Then, to make things worse, there was that unavoidable BBC series sometime in the 1990s, featuring Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy – enough to persuade any adolescent male to avoid J.A. for life. Yet here I am, with my daughter to thank for converting me into a fan. It was probably shrewd of her to have persuaded me to give this book a go rather than it’s better-known cousin, Pride and Prejudice.

Now for some general observations about J.A. Her writing is very readable. The old-fashioned style is present, of course, but is not a barrier. Some passages needed a second take, and the splitting of compound words like ‘every body’ and ‘any one’ somehow disrupted the flow, but only very slightly. She’s also rather scattergun with her use of commas. She’s not a needlessly descriptive writer, especially not with the appearance of her characters, which I appreciate. The image of Anne Elliot or Captain Wentworth are more or less left entirely to the reader’s imagination.

I suppose everyone knows that J.A.’s stories revolve around (upper-class) society from the age in which she lived. The focus is on the status of eligible bachelors and the prospects of an unmarried Miss becoming a Mrs. In this case it is Anne, the middle of three sisters, whose mother had died when she was younger and whose father (Sir Walter) was rather shallow, foolish and self-interested. At one point Anne appeared to have three potential suitors, putting me in mind of the plot in A Suitable Boy. However, two of them fall by the wayside fairly quickly, leaving only Captain Wentworth in the running. He was anyway Anne’s favourite, and they would have been married some eight years earlier had Anne not been persuaded to turn him down by her friend/surrogate mother, owing to his lacking of personal wealth. However, during the intervening period, Wentworth had been at sea with the Navy and returned a much better prospect. The suspense of the plot then rests on whether he still admires Anne, if he will forgive her earlier slight, and whether or not she has grown too old to still attract him (– at 28 years of age, much is made of this dilemma, believe it or not). The romance of it all is irrepressible.  

The story is fairly simple in terms of events and happenings. The action centres around a country estate that’s initially home to the majority of the cast, a trip to Lyme (‘The young people were all wild to see Lyme’ – a journey of 17 miles: ‘seven hours, as the nature of the country required, for going and returning’ – presumably today’s Lyme Regis), and the city of Bath. The privileged characters are not all pleasant. There’s plenty of arrogance and ignorance and pompous attitudes. It’s also striking how little they do of anything constructive – it’s all shooting trips and dinner parties and dancing and gossip, and waiting to get married or to go off to sea. But, as I’ve mentioned, the story is very well woven and enjoyable to read, and no doubt has far greater depth than my analysis eludes to. I suppose that’s the reason J.A. remains so popular and keenly read here in the twenty-first century.

 

Favourite Character: Miss Anne Elliot, the heroine of the story, in contrast to her sisters and father, possesses none of those ill virtues I previously eluded to. She is personified only by humility, patience, modesty, intelligence and grace.