William Deresiewicz Read online

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  “home epic,” but Persuasion is Austen’s. It is an epic of the present told from the perspective of Penelope. The Homeric allusion is not adventitious. Persuasion actually contains a Penelope—Mrs. Clay—not to signal that the novel rewrites Homer in any direct, Virgilian way, but to alert us to the fact that it takes Homeric materials and reorders them for its own purposes. We have a Penelope, and we have a different woman who plays the role of Penelope, and we have a warrior and sailor who returns to her from across the sea after many years of absence and uncertainty to resume their life of love and domesticity. But the roles of the principals are in some ways reversed: it is she who has changed beyond recognition, he who is beset by suitors. Still, their relationship is marked by homonoia, like-mindedness, that intuitive mutual understanding that is in Homer the mark of a good marriage, for Anne instinctively knows what is going through Wentworth’s mind at any number of moments. Other Homeric virtues are represented by Captain Harville, with whom Wentworth divides the role of Odysseus. It is he, as we noted above, who embodies the Odyssey’s great value of xenia, hospitality, and it is he, with his “ingenious contrivances and nice arrangements,” including “some few articles of a rare species of wood, excellently worked up,” who inherits Odysseus’s skill as a craftsman and imagination as a domestic architect (119120). In fact, Austen’s sailors unite the same two qualities that make Odysseus the hero of Homer’s epic of homecoming, those celebrated in the novel’s last sentence: “domestic virtues” and martial valor (254). Indeed, as sea-fighters—warriors and wanderers at once—they unite the heroism of the Iliad and the Odyssey. They are the men who saved the nation, Austen clearly believes, and it is her aim in Persuasion, to the extent that her form permits, to be the bard of their glory, to get their story down on paper—like Scott that of old Scotland’s—before it passes from memory. For already the nation was forgetting: “And who is Admiral Croft?” was Sir Walter’s cold suspicious inquiry … “He is rear admiral of the white. He was in the Trafalgar action.” (51)44 This is one of the reasons for the novel’s allusions to Byron and Scott. Austen’s form does not permit her to recount the Navy’s exploits directly, but she can point her readers to contemporaneous writers who have described comparable scenes of valor. The poetic material, like Wentworth’s insouciant references to his dangers and triumphs, gestures toward the other half of the novel’s story, the one that has taken place on another, wider stage and that Austen wishes to

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  install as an ever-looming presence in our minds. And then there is the testimony of Anne, the “last minstrel” through whose voice Austen sings: You have difficulties, and privations, and dangers enough to struggle with. You are always laboring and toiling, exposed to every risk and hardship. Your home, country, friends, all quitted. Neither time, nor health, nor life, to call your own. (237) Domestic virtues and martial valor: the sailors unite in their person the novel’s two intertwined strands, the national story and the personal story. Just as Anne’s salvation comes from the sea, so does Britain’s—both during the war and after. The officers released onto land in the summer of 1814 fertilize social as well as individual rebirths. Anne’s reaction upon seeing Wentworth’s note held out before her is a “revolution” (239). At the small scale, so at the large. This is the historical transition Austen is describing, the movement from an old order to a new: from a society led by the nobility to one led by the professions.45 Like Scott, Austen believed that the decline of the hereditary aristocracy made way for a natural aristocracy to rise.46 The one group stands on nothing but its own sense of entitlement, the other on “toil” and “labour,” as Mrs. Clay’s inventory of the professions suggests (50). The novel takes its own inventory, Austen contriving to exhibit in its pages not only a gaggle of naval officers, but precisely one each of army officers, lawyers, clergymen, surgeons, and professional nurses. The contrast with the nobility is drawn all through the work: the Baronetage versus the Navy list; the “tax” of worldly prominence paid by “consequence” versus “the tax of quick alarm” (47, 254); the fact that the Crofts are fitter stewards of Kellynch than are the Elliots. Anne enunciates this last assessment—“she could not but in conscience feel that they were gone who deserved not to stay, and that Kellynch-hall had passed into better hands than its owners” (141)—and of course, the statement is emblematic. Like Howards End, in Lionel Trilling’s well-known phrase, Persuasion asks the question, “Who shall inherit England?“47 But for all that Austen celebrates the new professional spirit and the emerging society of careers open to talent, where a young man with “nothing but himself to recommend him” (55) can rise in the world, that question does not receive so clear or so hopeful an answer. Indeed, in the narrower sense, the person who will inherit Kellynch is William Walter Elliot, and possibly also, as his wife, Mrs. Clay. The same world that gives opportunities to stalwart professionals also gives them to smiling hypocrites. Nor are the two groups as distinct as we would wish. Mr. Shepherd, “a civil, cautious

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  lawyer” and father of Mrs. Clay (42), makes use of Sir Walter’s two most valued adjectives, but with a twist: “Many a noble fortune has been made during the war,” he says (47), and soon reports of Admiral Croft, that he has “acquired a handsome fortune” (50). Nobility and handsomeness now belong only to money. But aside from drawing a subtle but pointed contrast with Sir Walter, who likes to pretend that the cash economy does not even exist, Mr. Shepherd’s words remind us that being a naval officer is also about making money, especially for the officers themselves. In fact, Wentworth describes his career in precisely those terms. It is in introducing the Musgroves, parents and children, that Austen speaks of “the Old English style” and “the new,” but what she says about the family— and again, emblematically, about their houses—is that they are “in a state of alteration, perhaps of improvement” (67). Austen is profoundly ambivalent about England’s future—given what would come next, in Sanditon, one might even say more pessimistic than not. Like Scott, she observed historical change without rooting for it.48 England’s future is Anne and Wentworth, but it is also William Walter Eliot and Mrs. Clay. Critics have been too eager to see Persuasion as prophetic of the decades to follow, even of the entire rest of the century.49 But Austen could only begin to intimate what was coming. All she could be certain of was that the old England of the country estates—her England, the England of her first five novels—was giving way to something very new. Or was it? We asked why, if Austen is telling a story of death and revival, she ends the novel in late winter rather than spring. Now we must ask why, if she is telling the story of the postwar transition and the emergence of a new society, she sets the novel in the period between Napoleon’s abdication and return rather than beginning it after Waterloo. In order to answer this question, we must imagine the shock and horror that return must have aroused. Bonaparte: the great enemy, the great scourge, the great devil, the man who had brought to the Continent fifteen years of war and had once stood on the point of invading England, the specter that would haunt the English imagination for generations to come, was now suddenly, appallingly, risen from the grave.50 Death itself had come back from the dead—literally so, for the thousands who would be killed at Waterloo in one final bloodbath. Imagine Hitler having pulled off the same feat—captured in 1945, let us say, rather than dead, and escaped a year later to lead a rerisen Third Reich back into war— and we have some sense of what that crisis must have been. A war that had to end twice, an ending that turned out to be no ending at all—a false resurrection, a lying spring. It was this, remember, not the war’s first end, that fired Austen’s imagination—it was Waterloo that she was

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  reading about so compulsively as she began work on Persuasion. And it was this uncanny procession of events, finally, that provided the novel’s master pattern. For while every one of the novel’s many “downs” is eventually answered by a corresponding “up
,” every loss by a recovery, it is also true that in the most important instances that recovery is either never full or never permanent.51 That is another reason the novel never reaches its promised spring.52 No end is final, and some never arrive at all. Again, the Regency: a beginning that was no beginning, for an end that was no end—forward motion held in check. The novel’s very last paragraph tells us that Mrs. Smith experiences merely an “improvement of income, with some improvement of health,” never becoming again the well-off, healthy woman she once was (253). Whether Sir Walter pays off his debts and returns to Kellynch is left an open question. Captain Harville remains disabled; Louisa’s fall has robbed her forever of her liveliness and good cheer. The novel’s abundance of nurses is suggestive, as is the fact that Louisa is nursed by the same woman who had nursed her as a baby. We are all convalescents, the implication is— nursed once as children, we will be nursed again on our deathbed. As for bereavement itself, memory, the same faculty that allows Anne and Wentworth to return to their love, will keep bringing the bereaved, as Mrs. Musgrove knows, back to their loss. And as for homelessness, though it is true that Anne and Wentworth find a metaphorical home in each other, it is quite striking, given how careful Austen normally is to settle her heroines in specific and appropriate dwellings, that she never even hints as to where these two will finally live. Indeed, given the characters’ earlier discussion about the suitability of ships as homes, she clearly means to tell us that their home will remain, precisely, unsettled, a home that is no home—that like Cain, Anne and Wentworth will settle in the land of Wandering.53 And the novel’s final reference to “the tax of quick alarm,” the ever-present possibility of a future war—aside from being an enormous and bitter irony given what we have seen about the story’s chronological structure—reminds us of a further and even sadder irony to which the novel’s profusion of widows should already have pointed us (254). Anne and Wentworth have found each other again, but some day, sooner or later, war or no war, they will also lose each other again. One of them is going to die first, leaving the other a widow in a sense not merely metaphoric. Whatever Austen may have said about the “immortality” of that glorious hour of reunion, nothing human really lasts forever. That Austen herself was soon to be bereft of life she may have realized by the time she came to the novel’s end, and is the final irony that history wrote into her story.

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  Notes

  chapter 1 : Introduction

  1. J. E. AustenLeigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen (1870), in Jane Austen, Persuasion (London: Penguin, 1965), p. 374. 2. According to the memorandum made by Cassandra Austen after her sister’s death, as the Penguin editor points out (Persuasion, p. 399 n. 40), the manuscript of Susan/Northanger Abbey was completed in 1799. 3. Norman Page notes that “as early as 1870 we find the more rigorous critic distinguishing between the earlier trilogy … and the later” (“Orders of Merit,” in Jane Austen Today, ed. Joel Weinsheimer [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975], p. 99). Page is referring not to AustenLeigh’s Memoir, but to Richard Simpson’s celebrated review of the same year. Echoing the language of the Memoir, the publication of which occasioned the review, Simpson remarks that “[m]any readers must have felt tempted to consider the latter trilogy a kind of reproduction of the former, in the light of a mature knowledge … In the former set the art is simpler, less concealed, more easily discovered: in the latter, both passion and humour are rather more developed” (in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B.C. Southam [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968], pp. 253254). Among other critics who mention the distinction, see George Whalley, “Jane Austen: Poet,” in Jane Austen’s Achievement, ed. Juliet McMaster (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 127; Alastair M. Duckworth, who calls Pride and Prejudice the “culmination of her early mode” (The Improvement of the Estate [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971], p. x); and Avrom Fleishman, who remarks that “whereas Elizabeth Bennet ends a century, Fanny Price begins one” (A Reading of Mansfield Park [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967], p. 73). The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997]) further consolidates this taxonomy by covering the novels under two entries, one for each “trilogy.” While these and many similar references are scattered about the critical literature, however, in no case does the difference between the two trilogies or modes or phases receive more than a few sentences of discussion. (I summarize those brief discussions at the start of chapter 2.) In fact, as Page points out, criticism is far more apt to see Austen’s corpus as “[a] small, compact, homogenous body of work, capable of being discussed as an entity, in which the recurrence of themes and character types is somehow more significant than the structural and tonal contrasts between novels” (p. 93). And indeed, to a first approximation, Austen’s halfdozen novels do all look and sound more or less the same— marriage stories told in a finely ironic style. Thus, the typical study of her work consists of six chapters, one for each novel, each discussing its respective novel in reference to the same general theme or ideological question. This approach has produced a great deal of

  valuable criticism, to be sure, but because it cuts each of the novels to the same measure, it tends to minimize differences among them, forestalling questions of periodization or categorization together with any account of systematic growth or change. 4. Biographical details taken from Deirdre Le Faye, “Chronology of Jane Austen’s Life,” in Cambridge Companion, pp. 111. The account I have sketched implies a particular position on the most vexed question about Jane Austen’s life, that of the apparent hiatus in her literary production. Did she indeed essentially stop writing between 1799 and 1809—no revisions, no new projects except the abandoned Watsons in 1805 or thereabouts—and if so, why? I discuss the issue of revisions more fully below, but I take the majority view that the theories of continuous revision put forward by Q. D. Leavis and others are exceeded in their ingenuity only by their incredibility. (See Q. D. Leavis, “A Critical Theory of Jane Austen’s Writing,” Collected Essays, 3 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], I:61146.) As to why so immensely energetic and gifted a writer, one who moreover seemed to take such pleasure in the act of composition, should have abandoned her literary habits so thoroughly for so long, one can only conjecture. Surely the failure of Susan to see print, as well as of First Impressions even to get a reading from a publisher, must have been very discouraging. These disappointments, together with the fact that her writing had been so intimately bound up with her place as a girl and young woman in a particular family circle, might have convinced her, after the breakup of that circle, to put her literary pursuits behind her, as an enthusiasm of youth. As for The Watsons, I think Virginia Woolf was mistaken in believing that “the stiffness and the bareness of the first chapters prove that she was one of those writers who lay their facts out rather baldly in the first version and then go back and back and back and cover them with flesh and atmosphere” (Virginia Woolf, “Jane Austen,” The Common Reader [New York: Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, 1984], pp. 137138). Sanditon suggests otherwise, that the feebleness of The Watsons proves rather that Austen was experiencing a dearth of energy and inspiration at that point in her career, midway through the great hiatus. For while The Watsons peters out, Sanditon breaks off in mid-stride. 5. According to Marilyn Butler, “Romantics” as a name for Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats emerged in the 1860s (Scott, of course, has long ago ceased to be regarded as a major Romantic poet), while analytic discussions of “Romanticism” did not begin until the twentieth century (Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries [New York: Oxford University Press, 1981], p. 1). For a discussion of more recent shifts in the Romantic canon, see Harriet Kramer Linkin, “The Current Canon in British Romantics Studies,” College English 53 (1991): 548570. 6. The best evidence of the extent to which these poets were known by educated middleclass readers, as well as of what the makers of middleclass taste t
hought of their work, comes from the literary reviews. That Austen was such a reader—that she read avidly and widely in poetry, fiction, and other genres, and that her reading was impeccably up-to-date—both her novels and letters abundantly attest. (See Margaret Anne Doody, “Jane Austen’s Reading,” in The Jane Austen Companion, ed. J. David Grey [New York: Macmillan, 1986], pp. 347363.) The reviews, which had proliferated from the mideighteenth century, had by 1800 long since become the medium by which middleclass British readers kept themselves informed about the latest literary developments.

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  Chapter 1: Introduction

  Indeed, the reviews reached a new height of sophistication and importance at just this time, with the inauguration in 1802 of Francis Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review. (See Marilyn Butler, “Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Reviews,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], pp. 120147.) Lyrical Ballads was reviewed widely from its first publication (Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, p. 62). For a partial list of reviews, see John E. Jordan, “The Novelty of Lyrical Ballads,” in Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 344345; Jordan also mentions several reviews of Wordsworth’s 1807 Poems in Two Volumes. For excerpts from a number of these reviews, see Romantic Bards and British Reviewers, ed. John O. Hayden (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), pp. 338. Jordan reviews the critical environment and critical reception more generally in Why the Lyrical Ballads? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 5383, elsewhere noting that “much of the verse of the time, including Wordsworth’s, achieved a wide circulation in magazines … there were between 1798 and 1802 twenty-three reprintings of fifteen different poems from the Lyrical Ballads” (Why the Lyrical Ballads?, p. 113). One review of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads that was particularly likely to have caught Austen’s eye appeared in the Monthly Review; its author was Dr. Charles Burney, father of Fanny Burney, one of Austen’s favorite novelists and most important influences (Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976], p. 160). In 1807, in the course of his attack on Poems in Two Volumes, Jeffrey noted that “[t]he Lyrical Ballads were unquestionably popular; and, we have no hesitation in saying, deservedly popular” (Romantic Bards and British Reviewers, p. 11). Indeed by then, if not earlier, Jeffrey’s own campaign against Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth, and the Lake Poets had made those poets notorious (Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries, p. 63). In 1808, the anonymous Simpliciad satirized Wordsworth as the founder of the “Simple School” (Jordan, “Novelty of Lyrical Ballads,” pp. 8486). In 1809, Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge yielded place only to Scott at the head of Byron’s dishonor roll in English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers. At the same time, however— as Byron’s ranking suggests—Wordsworth and his fellow avant-gardists were steadily moving from notoriety to centrality. According to René Wellek, by late in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the Johnsonian narrative of English poetry as a steady development to Dryden and Pope was being rewritten to make the Augustan period a dark age, with the return to feeling and nature seen as having begun with James Thomson in The Seasons (1746) and Wordsworth recognized as the head of a great new school (“The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History,” in Romanticism: Points of View, ed. Robert Gleckner and Gerald Enscoe [2nd ed.; Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962], pp. 196197). Southey articulated such judgments as early as 1807, Leigh Hunt in 1814, and Hazlitt definitively crystallized the new critical orthodoxy in his Lectures on English Poets in 1818. That Southey himself was made Poet Laureate in 1813 constituted additional confirmation of the Lakists’ centrality. 7. Le Faye, “Chronology of Jane Austen’s Life,” p. 5. 8. Studies of Austen’s relationship to her predecessors and contemporaries include