Comments & Questions

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Jane Austen’s Persuasion through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

COMMENTS

SIR FRANCIS HASTINGS DOYLE

A friend of mine, Miss Ursula Mayow, being on a visit at a country house in the Austen district, was taken to an afternoon party by her friends. Whilst there, some of the guests began to talk of Mrs. Gaskell’s ‘Cranford,’ then just published, and a voice was heard in the distance saying this: ‘Yes, I like it very much; it reminds me of my Aunt Jane.’ To Miss Mayow, a devoted Austenite, there could be no doubt who was meant by ‘my Aunt Jane,’ and accordingly she went as soon as she could and introduced herself to the speaker. This was the story told her, and if it be true, why Mr. Austen Leigh and Lord Brabourne say nothing, and apparently knew nothing about it, I cannot explain. Mr. Austen, accompanied by his two daughters, Cassandra and Jane, took advantage of the long delayed peace to undertake a foreign tour. Whilst in Switzerland they fell in with a young naval officer, the Captain Wentworth we may assume, afterwards delineated with such tenderness and skill in the novel of ‘Persuasion,’ a novel not given to the world till after her death. This course of true love ran perfectly smooth, and but for the cruelty of fate, Jane Austen’s career would probably have been altogether a different one, happier perhaps for herself, if less important to the world. But before the arrangements for this marriage were taken in hand, so at least in their blindness Jane and her lover imagined, a momentary separation was agreed upon between them. Mr. Austen and his daughters settled for themselves, that whilst their friend enjoyed himself in climbing mountains, and threading difficult passes, they would jog on to Chamouni, and wait quietly there till he rejoined them. This was done, but they did not find him on their arrival, nor did any tidings of his whereabouts reach them. Anxiety passed into alarm, and alarm into sickening terror; then at last, just as the Austens were about to return home, full of the gloomiest apprehensions, the fatal message they had been expecting came to them from a remote mountain village. Jane’s lover had over-walked and over-tasked himself. After a short illness he died of brain fever, but he had just managed, before his senses left him, to prepare a message for the Austens to tell them of his coming end. They returned to England, and according to the narrator, ‘Aunt Jane’ resumed her ordinary life as the rector’s daughter, never recurring to her adventures abroad. She seems as it were to have turned a key on the incidents of that year, and shut them away from her for ever. She had a desk which her niece promised to show to Miss Mayow, if she would come over to their house, and to this desk ‘Aunt Jane’ retired whenever the work of the parish left her any leisure, and wrote a letter or a chapter in a novel as the case might be. This story lends a great charm to ‘Persuasion.’ When we think of this woman of genius, at once delicate and strong, who had determined to live a life of duty and patient submission to the inevitable, unlocking her heart once more as she felt the approach of death, and calling back to cheer her last moments those recollections which she had thought it her duty to put aside, whilst there was yet work to do on earth, we are drawn to her by a new impulse, which heightens our admiration, and warms it into a real personal affection.

—from Reminiscences and Opinions (1886)

W. B. SHUBRICK CLYMER

The qualities that appear in [Austen’s other novels] are in “Persuasion” perhaps more successfully fused than before. Through it runs a strain of pathos unheard in its predecessors, which in the chapter before the last combines in harmony with the other motives in a way not suggested in the previous novels. That chapter is as well composed as Thackeray’s chapters about Waterloo. As Shelley, toward the end of his life, with more complete control of his material, gave promise of more satisfying work than any he had done, so Jane Austen, always master of her material, gave evidence, in her last book, of wider scope. “Persuasion” does not, of course, like “Vanity Fair,” echo the distant hum of the whole of human life; it is, however, a “mirror of bright constancy.” Jane Austen’s observation, unusually keen always—and that is no mean qualification, for has not humor its source in observation?—here unites with the wisdom of forty to make a picture softer in tone, more delicate in modeling, more mellow, than its companions of her girlhood, or than its immediate predecessors in her later period. The book marks the beginning of a third period, beyond the entrance to which she did not live to go. It is not pretended that she would, with any length of life, have produced heroic paintings of extensive and complicated scenes, for that was not her field; it may reasonably be supposed that, had she lived, her miniatures might, in succeeding years, have shown predominantly the sympathetic quality which in “Persuasion” begins to assert itself.

—from Scribner’s Magazine (March 1891)

 

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

From the girlish jeu d‘esprit The Mystery, a satire on the prevailing school of comedy, to Persuasion, with its quiet undertones and atmosphere of afterglow, Jane Austen was essentially a comic writer. We have but to compare her Emma with Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda to know the difference between the affectionately comic and the tragic treatment of similar characters. Miss Austen could never have solved the problem of modern art, which has been to portray the human will rising superior to a new “necessity” more terrible than the “fate” the ancients knew,—a necessity which, as Walter Pater wrote, “is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.” Such devious coverts of dismay were not for the feet of Jane Austen.... She is always the novelist of manners, but of such manners as spring most directly from character and temperament, and tend to exhibit these with the most lively reality.

—April 1902

 

HENRY JAMES

The key to Jane Austen’s fortune with posterity has been in part the extraordinary grace of her facility, in fact of her unconsciousness: as if, at the most, for difficulty, for embarrassment, she sometimes, over her work basket, her tapestry flowers, in the spare, cool drawing-room of other days, fell a-musing, lapsed too metaphorically, as one may say, into wool gathering, and her dropped stitches, of these pardonable, of these precious moments, were afterwards picked up as little touches of human truth, little glimpses of steady vision, little master-strokes of imagination.

—from The Question of Our Speech (1905)

QUESTIONS

1. Jane Austen is often described as “a novelist of manners.” What happens when the manners depicted in her novels no longer prevail? Given her continuous popularity, there must be something else. What would that be?

2. Does Jane Austen ridicule a particular set of people with her wit? Or is she witty at the expense of everybody? Is it possible to derive a system of values from her wit?

3. Do we have any equivalent to the markers of social rank depicted in Austen’s novels?

4. Would you describe Jane Austen as reactionary, conservative, middle-of-the-road, liberal, or radical—or eclectic?