Jane Austen, Persuasion (1818)
We shouldn’t think that we know all about Jane Austen (1775–1817) just because we’ve seen a few movies with period costumes. The English countryside of the turn of the nineteenth century was certainly the time and place in which Austen spent her relatively short life. She was the unmarried daughter of a clergyman who gave at least as much time to the flock in his fields as the flock in his church. Fifty years after her death, a nephew, also a clergyman, committed his fading memories of Aunt Jane to paper. He wrote, ‘Of events her life was singularly barren: few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of its course.’
‘Barren’ is an unfortunate way to describe a childless woman. Few of Austen’s contemporaries had the two-hundredth anniversary of their death marked with such warmth and affection, even love, as Austen did in July 2017. She is the many-times-great-grandmother of Bridget Jones’s Diary, The Jane Austen Book Club, Bride and Prejudice, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and countless other acts of filial devotion. Austen’s life was nothing if not fertile. It wasn’t ostentatious. Indeed, the opposite of that word could well be ‘austentatious’: the fine art of deflecting light from oneself in order to illuminate the follies and pretentions of others. Austen, the writer, had an ambiguous relationship with the other members of her species. Great writers tend to share this.
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Jane Austen can find the romantic side of even the most unromantic person. This is how I made her acquaintance. I was taught English for the last two years of my schooling by Mr Deegan, a man whose life was spent buffing the patina on antique passions and beliefs. He was eccentric and completely immune to such poisonous pragmatisms as ‘Will this be on the exam?’ and ‘How will this help us in later life?’ His refusal to dance to tinny tunes was, in fact, the best thing he could have done for us about later life. Mr Deegan was a card-carrying member of the Bona Mors Society, an organisation whose members prayed for a good death. That was what later life meant to him, I suppose. Some of his students argued at lunchtime about what a good death might mean. If his Bona Mors membership achieved nothing else, it enriched the conversation of adolescent kids. That is a sign of a great teacher.
I saw Mr Deegan five days a week and he always wore the same dark-green suit with a fine lace of dandruff on the collar and shoulders. There was no knowing if the suit had begun life that colour or if it had started out copper and slowly oxidised over the years. The weather made no difference to his appearance. Nor did the occasion, as he wore the same suit and tie to sports day. Perhaps he slept in this outfit: Mr Deegan was what used to be known as a confirmed bachelor and nobody really believed there was any such thing as his personal life. He was frugal, ascetic and—I see now—probably quite anxious. His forehead was furrowed from all the ideas that had been planted there. Little did we know that he had been part of the hockey squad for the Melbourne Olympics until a fractured leg had forced him out. Later, he completed in Rome a doctorate in philosophy.
Now he was consigned to the classroom, where he sat on the desk, put his feet on a chair and railed against any student who failed to sit correctly, especially those putting feet on chairs. Those who interrupted were invariably assigned an essay on the topic ‘Silence is golden’, a penalty that was so frequently applied that there developed a covert market in suitable one-page writings. They would make an excellent anthology if they could be retrieved but Mr Deegan was famous for not reading essays. Legend had it that one boy submitted his mother’s lasagne recipe as an essay on Hamlet and received an A. It must have been a good recipe.
His lunch was a handful of nuts that he counted on the desk in front of us, a bit like Scrooge counting his coins. My friend Matthew said that people who count nuts must themselves be nuts. Yet Mr Deegan loved the bawdiness of Shakespeare and explained it with a kind of life-affirming heartiness that has been completely blanched by the sexual correctness of today.
Jane Austen made Mr Deegan laugh. His laughter made us laugh. It rattled every bone in his fragile body as well as his teeth. When we studied Emma (1815), he paused at a particular description of Mr Elton, another clergyman and one of the central figures in Austen’s exquisite satire of self-importance. Mr Elton has the temerity to be in love with the wrong person. At one point, at the height of his romantic ambitions, he is described as ‘spruce, black and smiling’. What might the word ‘black’ mean in this context? It nails Elton’s sartorial fussiness with a single word and makes ‘smiling’ seem nothing but fake. We were hardly mature students of literature and had been used to laughing at every appearance of the word ‘intercourse’, a frequent visitor to Austen’s prose but always fully dressed. The description of Elton as ‘spruce, black and smiling’ moved us to another level of appreciation.
‘It’s a miracle of a line, isn’t it,’ said Mr Deegan. ‘What do you think, Petry?’
‘I’d say it’s a miracle, sir.’
In my last year, I was the only student to enrol in an extra English unit, so I had Mr Deegan all to myself for two classes a week. They were scheduled for 8 a.m. because they couldn’t otherwise be accommodated in the timetable. If I was late, which was usually the case, Deegan would already have started, sharing his enthusiasm with an empty room, declaiming the genius of Jane Austen to the back wall.
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That year, our tiny class studied Persuasion, published after Austen’s death, the last and in some ways most sturdy of Austen’s completed novels, one that has grown on me over the years. It is a work in which a wider world is more palpable. It is a mistake, however, to think that broader concerns were absent from Austen’s life. Her first birthday in 1776 coincided with a requirement that her father hold a special church service to pray that the American rebels would be defeated. Those prayers do not seem to have influenced the Almighty, or perhaps they did but not to oblige the English. You can never tell what prayers achieve.
Jane’s older brother, George, lived with significant intellectual disabilities and was unable to develop language skills. Jane, ten years younger, was able to communicate with him in sign language. It is curious that people with such disabilities are seldom if ever visible in her fiction.
A broader concern that does knock on the door of her fiction is the slave trade, as it does in the work of the Brontës (see Chapter 29), often disguised under the banner of economic interests in the Caribbean—an important aspect of the fortunes, for example, of both Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park (1814) and Mrs Smith in Persuasion. The slave trade is explicitly used as an image in Emma, where Jane Fairfax compares it with the business of hiring governesses and Mrs Elton declares herself an abolitionist. When Mr Elton is described as ‘spruce, black and smiling’, the word ‘black’ is also a byword for servitude, even slavery.
Persuasion is set in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and these make their presence felt in the story. Up until now, most of the characters in Austen have had a passive relationship with money. They either have it, inherit it or marry it. Or not. But in all events they are enslaved to it, a fact which Austen documents to the last shilling. In Persuasion, one of the central characters, Captain Wentworth, actually makes money. Moreover, he profits from war:
He had not made less than twenty thousand pounds by the war. Here was a fortune at once; besides which, there would be the chance of what might be done in any future war.
The plot also includes women who are familiar with warships:
‘I do assure you, ma’am,’ pursued Mrs Croft, ‘that nothing can exceed the accommodations of a man of war…When you come to a frigate, of course, you are more confined.’
Persuasion follows a love story that does not move in a simple linear direction. Eight years before the novel opens, Anne Elliot had followed the advice of others and rejected the hand of Captain Wentworth. She now regrets this. A turn of events brings Wentworth back into her circle and, little by little, the couple negotiate various obstacles and get back together. Austen is alive to the power of sexual attraction. People sometimes think otherwise, but Austen is subtle rather than coy, suggestive rather than prim.
There is one scene in Persuasion that makes this point beautifully. On a visit from the countryside to Lyme Regis, Anne is part of a group that happens to come across Mr Elliot, the cousin to whom her family estate is entailed. It might help the family situation if he and Anne were to marry. Anyway, before Mr Elliot’s identity is revealed, a fuse is lit:
When they came to the steps, leading upwards from the beach, a gentleman at the same moment preparing to come down, politely drew back, and stopped to give them way. They ascended and passed him; and as they passed, Anne’s face caught his eye, and he looked at her with a degree of earnest admiration, which she could not be insensible of. She was looking remarkably well…It was evident that the gentleman (completely a gentleman in manner) admired her exceedingly. Captain Wentworth looked round at her instantly in a way which shewed his noticing of it. He gave her a momentary glance—a glance of brightness.
Just follow the eyes in this vignette. Elliott looks at Anne. Wentworth does the same. ‘Earnest admiration’ and ‘admired her exceedingly’ are phrases loaded with desire. ‘A glance of brightness’ is the same, if not more so. The sexuality of this scene is intense. It sets up the rivalry that will control the rest of the novel and makes it clear that this rivalry is in some significant measure about sex. The restraint only adds to the charged nature of the encounter.
We are in danger of creating a world that is bored by sex. Sex is analysed and discussed and measured and judged to the point that it has become like a pair of pyjamas that have been too long in service. It lacks freshness and surprise. There are authorities who want to protect young people from all the nervousness and confusion, tentativeness and insecurity that made the discovery of sex a source of wonder and comedy for countless generations. In this context, it is hardly surprising that Jane Austen remains close to the top of every survey of readers’ all-time favourite books. She does more for the imagination that all the policies and procedures under the sun.