Embracing Jane Austen’s Second Chances
SEVERAL SPRINGS AGO I made a long overdue pilgrimage to Winchester Cathedral. Inside the main door I asked a guide for directions to Jane Austen’s grave. As she pointed across the church, she apologized for the lack of flowers. They were not permitted during Lent. “But during the rest of the year,” she assured me, “you can find her grave by the flowers. People are always bringing Jane bouquets.” Austen moved to Winchester in May 1817 to be closer to the surgeon who was going to cure her and spent the last weeks of her short life there. She dictated her final poem on July 15 and died on July 18, 1817; she was forty-one years old. She is buried in the north aisle of the nave and her grave has not one but two markers. The older one, the stone slab in the floor, contains no mention of her work but praises “[t]he benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper, and the extraordinary endowments of her mind.” Nearby, a bronze plaque on the wall praises her novels. Reading these touching inscriptions, I thought how typical the guide’s remark was of the affection that Austen, and her work, inspire. People who love her novels also cherish her and her uneventful life: Dear Jane. She is buried not far from a casket said to contain the bones of King Canute, the great eleventh-century Viking king who helped to convert England to Christianity.
There are no kings in Austen’s work. Her six novels, as she herself was among the first to comment, revolve around a limited set of concerns, are set in small communities, and are comedic rather than tragic. Her plots are mostly predictable, although she is certainly capable of surprises (see Louisa’s famous fall from the Cobb in Lyme, or Emma’s rudeness to Miss Bates). As for her characters, she has, like Flannery O’Connor, certain types to which she steadfastly returns: the foolish parent, the misguided daughter, the social climber, the easily overlooked estimable young woman, the reserved man of integrity. These flat characters show up in book after book, and for the most part, although they contribute to the events of the narrative, remain unchanged by them. Only her major characters—the heroine and the hero—are transformed by the last page.
I first encountered Austen’s work at the age of fourteen, when I read Pride and Prejudice for school. At the time, I lived in a community that Austen herself, in some parallel universe, might have relished as subject matter: the boys’ boarding school in Scotland where my father taught and where first my mother, and then my stepmother, was the nurse. The school was situated in the valley of Glenalmond, ten slow miles from the nearest town. We knew what it was like to deal with the same small number of people week after week, year after year; to have a keen sense of hierarchy: first came the headmaster, then his deputy, then the bursar, then the housemasters. All of them came before my father, who was only a regular master, but he could look down on the groundsmen. We also knew what it was like to have occasional visitors who called that hierarchy into question.
But seeing the world around me mirrored, however obliquely, was not part of the original appeal of Pride and Prejudice. I read to escape my environment, and made no connection between Austen’s social milieu and my own (although I would have welcomed one of her balls happening nearby). Nor could I have explained at that time—I had yet to read E. M. Forster’s analysis in Aspects of the Novel—exactly why her characters gave me such pleasure. Compared with those in, say, Wuthering Heights, they are painfully sedate. No one promises to love anyone from beyond the grave. No suitor threatens to break every bone in another’s body. But there was this feeling of something moving beneath the surface of Austen’s calm prose that made me, even as I finished the book, want to turn back to the opening page.
Decades later, I still find myself struggling to understand what makes her novels so alluring, and what I can learn from her work. I gained new insight when I decided to follow, humbly, in her footsteps and write a romance titled Banishing Verona. I had finally published Eva Moves the Furniture, a novel based on my mother’s life, and I was anxious to return to purely imaginary territory. I also liked the idea of writing in a form that had recognizable rules and that offered the possibility of a happy ending. Among the rules governing romances, I would suggest the following:
1. The lovers are unlikely in some obvious way.
2. They meet early and are then separated—either physically or emotionally—for most of the narrative.
3. There must be significant obstacles—dragons and demons—to be overcome.
4. Changes of setting, even from drawing room to street, are vital for revealing the characters and moving the narrative forward.
5. Many minor characters will assist the lovers on their journey.
6. A subplot, or two, is required to keep the lovers apart, to allow time to pass, to act as a foil to the main plot, and to entertain the reader.
Crucially, the reader must come to feel that this romance is not merely a matter of personal preference between two people, but that a whole world order is in question until the two find each other. In offering these criteria, I do not mean to suggest that Austen herself consciously devised or followed such guidelines, only that they emerge from her body of work—part of the web she weaves to ensnare her readers—and have been followed by many other authors in the two centuries since her death.
In speaking of Austen’s lovers, I use the verb “find” deliberately. Although her characters go on the most modest of journeys—never more than an hour or two on foot or a few hours by carriage—we end up feeling that they have covered a long distance in her short novels. They travel from a place where the self and others are poorly known—mendacity is mistaken for integrity; attraction for antipathy—to a place where the self is seen and understood. (Austen herself made this journey, perhaps more than once. At the age of twenty-seven, she accepted Harris Bigg-Wither’s proposal one evening, celebrated the news with family and friends, and the following morning told her suitor that she had changed her mind.) The couple does not so much decide upon as discover each other and, in the course of their discovery, something profound is revealed. Austen knew Shakespeare well and must surely have appreciated that archetypal romance, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which the lovers wander into the forest, are separated, reconfigured, and finally reunited.
But she herself does not go in for forests, any more than for kings. She is committed to her version of realism, and nowhere, I would argue, is that commitment more obvious than in her last novel, Persuasion, which was published posthumously. In lesser romances, the flaws of the protagonist vanish and the virtues are exaggerated, but here Austen achieves a compelling love story that comes out of a hard-won negotiation with the rules of her world. Again I think of the Brontës, in whose work love conquers all and good looks and/or virtue make up for lack of social standing or income. Persuasion offers no such sweeping passions but rather two characters no longer in the first ardor of youth—Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth—grappling with their own flaws and those of their society.
In balancing the demands of realism with those of romance, Austen must do battle with her readers. Just as we will complete a character’s appearance—we give Mr. Cashmore his eyes, Mrs. Turpin her wardrobe—so we also long to complete their lives by making sure that they live happily ever after. From the reader’s point of view, it is a truth universally acknowledged that if a single man and a single woman are in the same story, they are going to end up together. This ardent matchmaking has, as Austen seems to have known all along, and I painfully discovered, several repercussions for the writer. In their eagerness to unite characters, readers tend to be oblivious to such quotidian concerns as class, money, family, and, to a surprising degree, appearance. Readers of Jane Eyre invariably side with small, poor, plain Jane and dislike the woman cast as her possible rival: the wealthy Blanche with her magnificent shoulders. I was both making use of, and making fun of, these biases in my novel Banishing Verona when I made my twenty-nine-year-old hero look like a Raphael angel and my thirty-seven-year-old heroine resemble the famous bust of Beethoven. (Verona’s advanced age was a little nod to Anne Elliot.) I knew that, almost irrespective of the difficulties with which I burdened my characters, readers would be expecting this unlikely couple to end up together. The question was how to manage those expectations, and delay realizing them, without causing either boredom or frustration.
Here Austen sets a wonderful example in both plot and prose. At fourteen I was too young to recognize that, while I thought I was reading Pride and Prejudice to see who married whom, I was really reading for the unswerving music of Austen’s sentences, which, from first to last, carry the reader effortlessly along. In this, and in all her novels, she creates narrators who conjure up her characters so knowingly and so intelligently that we are beguiled even by the most snobbish and the most foolish. Her work single-handedly contradicts Henry James’s famous description of novels as “large, loose, baggy monsters” and Randall Jarrell’s much quoted: “The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.”
Selfishly, when I began to write my own fiction, I was glad to learn that Pride and Prejudice had not sprung full-blown onto the page, but was the product of hard work, deep thought, and revision. An early version under the title “First Impressions” was rejected by a publisher in 1797. Not until 1813, after she had published Sense and Sensibility (also the product of much revision), did Austen publish Pride and Prejudice to great acclaim. In the case of Persuasion, she finished the novel, wrote “Finis” on the last page, and then, over the next few weeks, rewrote the ending to give us the now-cherished proposal scene between Anne and Wentworth.
Paragraph by paragraph, I do not think that Persuasion offers quite the lustrous pleasure of her earlier work. The novel is more complicated in tone, less steady in voice, and sometimes a bit plodding. I would feel like a heretic saying this if Virginia Woolf did not make almost the same claim. “There is,” Woolf writes in The Common Reader, “a peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness in Persuasion. The dullness is that which so often marks the transition stage between two periods. The writer is a little bored. She has grown too familiar with the ways of her world . . . But, while we feel that Jane Austen has done this before, and done it better, we also feel that she is trying to do something which she has never yet attempted . . . She is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed.” Perhaps this is why I find rereading the novel such a perplexing experience. I fret over sentences; I get cross when I see the wheels turning, or the same note hit too often, or a character behaving badly in familiar ways. And yet, when I reach the last page, I discover that the novel, from first to last, is once again complete and shimmering in my imagination. Persuasion is one of those rare works that becomes much more than the sum of its sentences. If the reader helps to create the text, then the author also helps to create the reader, and in her last novel Austen creates readers who are more intelligent, more compassionate, and more empathetic than most of us are in real life.
Her poor health—she was already in the grip of what would turn out to be her last illness—may have contributed to these lapses. But I like to think that Woolf’s analysis is correct; many of the novel’s shortcomings stem from Austen’s desire to sail into uncharted waters. Persuasion begins not with the arrival of an eligible man but with his return. The main event in the world of an Austen novel—the proposal—has already occurred. Seven years ago Anne accepted Wentworth only to break off their engagement, thus making them a perfect example of an unlikely couple. The two are separated by their history, by Wentworth’s anger and by Anne’s perception, shared by those around her, that, at twenty-seven, she is too old for love. Austen is both keeping and reinventing the rules of the form she has mastered so well.
She manages Wentworth’s reappearance, and her plot in general, with her usual keen understanding of the importance of money. The novel opens with Anne’s father, Sir Walter, at last being persuaded to rent out the family seat, Kellynch Hall, in order to pay off his debts. His tenant turns out to be none other than Admiral Croft, the brother-in-law of Anne’s long-ago suitor. We learn how, after “a short period of exquisite felicity,” Anne ended the engagement largely at the urging of her mother’s friend Lady Russell. Wentworth was poor; his prospects were uncertain; his temperament was headstrong. The reader may be outraged by these considerations and Lady Russell—watching Anne remain single year after year—has come to regret her own advice, but Anne herself has a more complicated view. Even if Lady Russell was wrong, she, as a motherless girl of nineteen, was right to do what her older friend urged. “I should,” she tells Wentworth at the end of the novel, “have suffered more in continuing in the engagement than I did even in giving it up.” When Wentworth first proposes, he has nothing to recommend him but himself, and that is not enough for Lady Russell, or, perhaps, for Austen. By the time he proposes again at the end of the novel, he has a good fortune, good connections, and a good career. Love needs the things of this world.
The opening pages of the novel also introduce another important theme: the relationship between life and books. The only book, we are told, that Sir Walter enjoys reading, under any and all circumstances, is the Baronetage. He has already edited his own entry to make it more accurate, and he wishes he could make further changes involving his older daughter, the almost equally vain and foolish Elizabeth. Persuasion is often said to be about second chances, but to my mind it is more about revision. What use are second chances if we don’t learn to see and act differently? Our star-crossed lovers, Anne and Captain Wentworth, find themselves in each other’s company less than a quarter of the way through the novel, but initially Wentworth seems to see Anne in much the same way as her father and sisters do: “only Anne,” a counterpart to his “nothing but himself.”
The renting of Kellynch Hall forces almost all the main characters to move to new settings. While Sir Walter and Elizabeth go to Bath and Admiral and Mrs. Croft move into Kellynch Hall, Anne makes the small but significant journey to Uppercross to help her younger sister, Mary, who is married to Charles Musgrove. A few weeks later Wentworth visits the Crofts and begins to pay attention to Charles’s sisters: the lively Henrietta and Louisa. I note with admiration the masterstroke of giving Anne two rivals, multiplying the dragons she must slay and obscuring Wentworth’s feelings.
In The Art of Fiction John Gardner argues that there are only two great plots: the stranger comes to town, or the hero goes on a journey. In Persuasion Austen skillfully employs both. Having forced Anne to leave home once, she now sends her on a second journey. Along with Mary, Charles, Charles’s sisters, and Captain Wentworth, she dispatches her to the seaside town of Lyme. “The young people,” she tells us in a surprisingly modern idiom, “were all wild to see Lyme.” (In my novel, lacking both Austen’s constraints and her finesse, I dispatched my characters to America.)
The new setting reveals new aspects of the characters we already know, and ushers in a second group of the minor characters that Austen deploys so skillfully throughout the novel. The climax of the visit to Lyme is Louisa’s fall from the Cobb, the seawall. Captain Wentworth has been heard, by both Anne and Louisa, praising firmness of character; one should never, he claims, change one’s mind. Now Louisa, determined to prove her firmness, insists on being jumped down the stairs from the Cobb by Wentworth not once but twice. On the second occasion she jumps too soon, he fails to catch her, and she falls lifeless to the pavement. While everyone else, including Wentworth, is undone by Louisa’s accident, Anne rises to the occasion; she sends for a surgeon, and directs the others to carry Louisa to the inn. Reading this vivid scene, I think of Aristotle’s claim that character is action. Now, at last, Anne has a chance to act.
Subplots, always important in a romance, are particularly so in Persuasion because we are all pretending to ignore the main plot: the possible reunion of Anne and Wentworth. The visit to Lyme introduces two suspenseful and useful subplots. A fellow guest at the inn where Anne and the others are staying turns out to be Sir Walter’s heir. Years ago Mr. Elliot spurned Sir Walter’s overtures, but now he shows a marked interest in Anne. The twenty-seven-year-old Miss Elliot is suddenly attracting admirers! Another subplot concerns Captain Benwick, who was engaged to the sister of Wentworth’s friend Captain Harville. (The novel brims with naval officers.) But his fiancée died while he was at sea; Benwick is staying in Lyme with the Harvilles, apparently in deep mourning. His presence allows Austen to question the nature of fidelity in love and to continue to explore the connection between life and reading; each will prove vital in the proposal scene. Meanwhile Captain and Mrs. Harville reinforce what Admiral and Mrs. Croft have already demonstrated: naval officers make for unusually good husbands.
Everyone in the novel is worried about Louisa—as they should be—but I, as a reader, am not. So skillfully has Austen rearranged the world order that the life of a young woman is of less importance than what happens between the two thwarted lovers. Besides, I am in a world more comedic than tragic; I know that Louisa’s fall is the far frontier of violence in an Austen novel. My lack of concern in no way diminishes the effect of these wonderful pages and of all that they reveal about the characters.
I will not explore in detail Austen’s skillful management of the second half of the novel, when most of the characters move to yet another new setting—the town of Bath—but I do want to remark on her introducing an additional subplot in the form of Anne’s old school friend, Mrs. Smith, whom widowhood has left with nothing but herself. Like Mr. Elliot and Captain Benwick, Mrs. Smith enters the novel naturally and allows us to, once again, appreciate Anne’s virtues. But her real job is to let us know what lies behind Mr. Elliot’s sudden interest in Sir Walter and Anne. Austen pays a surprising amount of attention to this part of the plot. While Anne and Wentworth’s past is dealt with in a brisk three pages and the many events of the visit to Lyme are compressed into nineteen, she now, close to the end of the novel, devotes an entire chapter—sixteen pages—to a single conversation between Anne and Mrs. Smith.
And what a roller coaster the conversation is. It takes place on the morning after the momentous concert at which Anne has realized that Wentworth still, again, cares for her. Mrs. Smith asks for details of the evening. She is convinced that Anne is all but engaged to Mr. Elliot and at first refuses to accept her denials. “It is a thing of course among us, that every man is refused—till he offers . . . Let me plead for my—present friend I cannot call him, but for my former friend. Where can you look for a more suitable match? Where could you expect a more gentlemanlike, agreeable man? Let me recommend Mr. Elliot.” In her anxiety to refuse the recommendation Anne at last lets slip that her interests lie elsewhere. Only then does Mrs. Smith reveal that, although he was her husband’s closest friend, Mr. Elliot has failed her in her widowhood, and that his first marriage was made solely for money. Having become wealthy, he is now vitally interested in inheriting the baronetcy, hence his renewed attentions to Sir Walter.
Anne is glad to have her friend’s confidence, distressed to learn about her difficulties, and understandably bewildered by her initial praise of Mr. Elliot. When she inquires about this last, Mrs. Smith replies, “My dear . . . there was nothing to be done. I considered your marrying him as certain, though he might not yet have made the offer, and I could no more speak the truth of him, than if he had been your husband.” Surely it is no accident that in the next paragraph Anne’s thoughts turn to her other unreliable “advisor.” Lady Russell, enthralled by Mr. Elliot’s good manners, would like nothing more than to see Anne marry him and “It was just possible that she might have been persuaded . . . !” No wonder Anne determines that she “never should, in any circumstance of tolerable similarity, give such advice.” In all of this Austen is following yet another major rule of the romance novel: mistakes are made, misunderstandings occur, reputation and reality are confused.
Now, at last, the way is clear for the lovers to find each other. In the first version of the proposal that she wrote, the one followed by “Finis,” Austen brought Anne and Captain Wentworth together and allowed them, almost immediately, to reach an understanding. In the revision—the ending as we know it—she writes a much more complicated scene in which, rather than leave the two lovers alone, she has them address each other in the presence of, and through, various intermediaries. Two days after the concert Anne arrives at the Musgroves’ lodgings to find, at one end of the drawing room, Mrs. Musgrove and Mrs. Croft discussing the folly of long engagements. Meanwhile at the other end Captain Harville is talking to Captain Wentworth. As Anne approaches, Wentworth sits down at a nearby table to write a letter. Harville summons her to the window. There he shows her a portrait of Captain Benwick that had originally been painted for his sister. Now Benwick has, tactlessly, commissioned him to get it reset for his new fiancée. Wentworth, he tells Anne, is writing about the business.
Benwick’s sudden swerve from mourning to new romance leads to a debate between Anne and Harville as to which gender is most constant in affection; they each argue, in passionate detail, for their own. Harville claims that men’s feelings are, like their physiques, more robust; Anne, using the same analogy, claims that those of women are more tender. But given the danger, toil, and privations that men endure, she goes on, it is just as well that they are not also burdened with womanly feelings. All the while, as they go back and forth, Wentworth is sitting nearby, writing. When at last he and Harville set out on their errand, he manages to get the letter into Anne’s hands. It turns out to have nothing to do with Benwick’s portrait and everything to do with his feelings for her.
At last, in the streets of Bath, the two lovers find each other and are able to talk freely. Wentworth confesses that he had been angry with Anne, and had tried to attach himself to Louisa. But “[a]t Lyme he had received lessons of more than one sort. The passing admiration of Mr. Elliot had at least roused him, and the scenes on the Cobb, and at Captain Harville’s, had fixed her superiority.” Then, to his dismay, he had discovered that others considered him an engaged man. He fled Lyme, hoping to weaken both his relationship with Louisa and other people’s perceptions of it. What narrow escapes the lovers have had. And now they have found each other.
Persuasion does, as Woolf said, show Austen doing things she has done before, but it also shows her moving into new territory, “discovering that the world is larger, more mysterious and more romantic than she had supposed.” The most dramatic shift is not in Anne’s age or her situation but in the freedom with which Austen gives voice to her tumultuous feelings. From the moment Captain Wentworth reappears, she is aware of him, and the reader is privy to that awareness with wonderful immediacy. But only after months of misunderstandings, when they at last attend the concert I have already mentioned, do Anne and Wentworth finally talk. In the aftermath of their conversation Austen writes:
Anne saw nothing, thought nothing of the brilliancy of the room. Her happiness was from within. Her eyes were bright, and her cheeks glowed; but she knew nothing about it. She was thinking only of the last half hour, and as they passed to their seats, her mind took a hasty range over it . . . His opinion of Louisa Musgrove’s inferiority, an opinion which he had seemed solicitous to give, his wonder at Captain Benwick, his feelings as to a first, strong attachment; sentences begun which he could not finish, his half averted eyes and more than half expressive glance,—all, all declared that he had a heart returning to her at least; that anger, resentment, avoidance, were no more; and that they were succeeded, not merely by friendship and regard, but by the tenderness of the past. Yes, some share of the tenderness of the past. She could not contemplate the changes as implying less. He must love her.
The paragraph shows Anne both thinking and feeling her way to those last four wonderful words. She is not someone who changes her mind on a whim. Here we see her assembling the evidence, proving to herself that what she has hoped for, ever since Wentworth reappeared, is in fact the case. A few pages later a second insight is revealed with equal force. “Jealousy of Mr. Elliot! It was the only intelligible motive. Captain Wentworth jealous of her affection! Could she have believed it a week ago,—three hours ago! For a moment the gratification was exquisite.” The writing in these scenes—the sentence fragments, the jagged, conflicting emotions, the sensation of almost too many feelings crowding into a single moment—paved the way for the accomplishments of George Eliot, Henry James, Woolf herself, and many others, in portraying the inner lives of their characters.
The rules of romance novels offer particular freedom to a writer, but the form is also beset with dangers. While readers almost invariably engage in ardent matchmaking, they are also quick to judge heterosexual love as slight, or unworthy, subject matter. In Aspects of the Novel Forster ponders why novelists spend what he judges to be an unnatural amount of time on love. He suspects this stems from the unduly sensitive state of mind the novelist enters when in the throes of composition. I myself think that the appeal of romance has much more to do with the possibilities for bad behavior. As for readers’ contradictory responses, I attribute them to several factors. One that seems particularly relevant to Persuasion is the apparently random nature of love, both in its early stages and its later outcome. Austen embraces that randomness on behalf of her minor characters—Louisa falls off the Cobb, out of one relationship and into another—but her hero and heroine are held to more stringent standards. Readers have been hoping for most of the novel that Anne and Captain Wentworth will be reunited, but what makes this ending so satisfying is not merely our partisan feelings, but our sense that these characters have, over the course of the novel, slain various dragons—Louisa! Mr. Elliot!—and remained true to themselves while honoring the strict mores of the period. Captain Wentworth, who earlier seemed ready to settle for any obliging young woman, now recognizes that only Anne’s superior nature can answer his needs. Bravely—and this takes as much courage as embarking on a stormy voyage—he risks a second rejection. As for Anne, she has become a woman who recognizes both the truth of her own affections and the inescapable foolishness of the father and sister she must leave behind in order to claim her place in the world. There is nothing random about their union.
In his conversation with Anne, Captain Harville argues that women are the inconstant sex, fickle in their affections and soon forgetting. Anne protests: “We certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined; and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion.” As they continue to debate, Harville says he has never “opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy . . . But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.” “Perhaps I shall,” says Anne, “. . . I will not allow books to prove anything.” This is a subject, she continues, on which we may have opinions but no proof.
I can offer no absolute proof as to how Austen convinces us in this wonderful scene that Anne’s and Wentworth’s lives hang in the balance, but I hazard the opinion that she practices a kind of synecdoche; the part, romance, stands in for the whole, their social and spiritual beings. Her characters have gone on a pilgrimage and are now able to offer each other nothing but themselves in the best sense of that phrase, which is to say the selves that comprise both their accomplishments and the part of them that will endure even if these accomplishments are stripped away. Together Anne and Wentworth are ready to follow the excellent example of Admiral and Mrs. Croft and face whatever dangers the world holds, by land and sea.
And as readers, we too practice a kind of synecdoche. We put aside the part of ourselves that pretends to want literature to uphold values different from those we have in life, that censures novels for, mostly, not bringing news of war, famine, and revolution. And we accept, even embrace, the delicate and tremulous part of ourselves that yearns for the great good fortune of intimate connection and understanding. I read Austen first as a teenager, then in the company of a long romance, later still as a single woman, and now as a married woman. And in each of these incarnations I have understood that Austen is speaking to me, and about me, and about that deep need we all have to be recognized and to have the world we live in—be it Bath or Baltimore, London or the Lower East Side—make sense.