Persuasion by Jane Austen
Review by Anar M., Youth Reviewer
“Persuasion” isn’t Jane Austen’s most famous novel — it probably isn’t even in the top five — but it’s nonetheless an interesting book.
As in several of Austen’s novels, the title is the issue which the book deals with: at nineteen, Anne Elliot, the second daughter of the widowed baronet Sir Walter Elliot, falls in love with Captain Frederick Wentworth but is persuaded by her family to break off the engagement due to his poverty and relatively low station.
The book takes place eight years later. Anne, still unmarried, wishes she’d acted differently. Sir Walter, being short of ready money and too proud to reduce his expensive style of living, is forced to move to Bath and rent out his estate, Kellynch Hall. The renters are Admiral Croft and his wife, who is Captain Wentworth’s sister. Although Mrs. Croft is unaware of Anne’s temporary engagement with her brother, she inevitably brings Anne and Captain Wentworth back into each other’s company. Wentworth is, understandably, angry at Anne for breaking things off at her family’s behest; he flirts with another woman, Louisa Musgrove.
The theme of persuasion reappears in a conversation between Louisa and Wentworth which Anne overhears: the two discuss the value of being able to make up one’s mind and not be persuaded to change it by others. Later, however, the message is reversed — Louisa insists on jumping down a stairwell despite Wentworth’s protests about the danger, and she slips and hits her head, leaving her bedridden for months. (Perhaps persuasion isn’t so bad.) When Anne and Wentworth eventually sort themselves out and realise that they are, in fact, still in love, Anne says that although she wishes she’d never broken off the engagement in the first place, she didn’t regret having been persuaded by her loved ones. It’s an interesting analysis of the pros and cons of persuasion, although it came off as a bit moralising to me. Austen has high standards for her protagonists’ morals as a general rule, but in “Persuasion”, it gets to be a bit too heavy-handed, in my opinion.
Austen is also clearly a product of her time in this book. Although Sir Walter is mocked for his excessive pride in his station and for caring too much about the opinion of society, Austen clearly believes that a little bit of classist sentiment is a good thing. When Mrs. Clay, a lower-class woman who left her husband, hopes to seduce Sir Walter and marry him for his station, Austen makes clear that the family would be degraded by such a marriage and that this would be a bad thing. Anne (and Austen) condemn her father for leaving his country estate to live in Bath because he is abandoning his duties to the estate.
But Austen is, as ever, the master of the well-crafted internal life. Despite all my complaints, “Persuasion” is entertaining and immersive; reading it, we feel all of Anne’s pain as well as her joy. I enjoyed reading it.
Find “Persuasion” at the Kitchener Public Library!