Persuasion

"I’m really interested in a love that starts in the past, or at the start of the book, and then we track it. Persuasion is wonderful in that sense: we meet Anne Elliott when she is 27 years old, having had this big love eight years before. She was persuaded by her dead mother’s best friend not to marry him: he wasn’t quite up to snuff, he wasn’t of her class and education, that sort of thing. She was young, she let herself be persuaded. Eight years later, her family are having money troubles. They’ve rented out their house. They are land rich, but everything-else poor. Her father is a vain, narcissistic character. Anne and her sister move back into the neighbourhood, and she encountered Wentworth again after eight years. It’s clear straight away that she still has the exact same feelings for him, but she has no idea about how he feels, although she suspects that he hates her. It starts there. I really love this book. It’s one of her later books—the last novel she published before she died. It’s very interior. There’s an interior voice working in a way that she didn’t have in her other books. And so it feels emotionally very satisfying. We know what they are both feeling, and it’s a powerful attraction that works on all levels. I think that’s very true. You know, in Austen’s time, that was the female preoccupation. Her destiny depended on it. There was no employment to be had, no possibility of self-sufficiency. That was it, so if you wanted to have food and to have children, and to be able to feed those children, falling in love with a very poor man was an extraordinary risk. You have to understand the kind of pressures that were on them: they had to find someone to provide for them, because they could not provide for themselves. I mean, there were governesses and teachers—there were a few options. But that choice was all-encompassing, and probably more important than maybe it is for us today."

"Persuasion is really the best of the Jane Austen books. As many people have pointed out, it’s different in tone from any of the others. It makes you realise that Austen was writing in the early 19th century, right along with people like Wordsworth and Coleridge , and that she was capable of having and expressing the same kinds of feeling. It’s a real love story, all the way through. You really feel it’s a romantic story – both with a small r and a big R – in which you’re rooting for the lovers to get together from beginning to end. It’s not a surprise, as it is in Emma , when the romance works out. It’s not a matter of a witty heroine being captured, as in Pride and Prejudice. It’s a woman who is practically invisible at the beginning, almost literally invisible, nobody notices her, who turns into a vivid person at the end, as a result of resuscitated love. I reread it quite recently and was very moved by it. It’s a genuinely moving Jane Austen novel, in a way the others aren’t. Because it’s really concentrating on love. It’s not concentrating on anything else – it’s not about wit, it’s not comic, it has very little comedy. There’s an occasional comment by the narrator which has an ironic twist that one is used to in Jane Austen books. But most of it is absolutely straight. In Sense and Sensibility, there is a moment when Marianne is carrying on about the beauties of the countryside and Elinor says to her: ‘It’s not everyone who has your passion for dead leaves, Marianne.’ But in Persuasion , the protagonist, Anne Elliot, wanders around the countryside in the autumn and thinks about the beauties of autumn, and it’s taken absolutely seriously. The reader is enabled to feel the beauty of autumn and participate with her in that sense of things. There’s a lot of talk about poetry in Persuasion , and the mood is almost poetic. I think for most scholars it’s poised between Persuasion and Emma . Earlier, I thought Emma was the best, but I recently decided I think Persuasion is the best. I think most scholars would settle on one or the other."

"Persuasion is an unusually brilliant novel, just in terms of its style of narration. Out of all of the novels Austen published in her short life, this one feels most to me like a real love story. It tells a story set years after an initial period that’s looked back on retrospectively, in which the protagonist, Anne Elliot, turned down a marriage proposal from Frederick Wentworth, a man who genuinely loved her. A close family member had advised her not to marry him on the grounds that his social class was not up to snuff. It was a difficult decision at the time; she genuinely loved him. What’s more, the advice to wait for a more suitable suitor led to disappointment: Anne received no more marriage proposals. The novel describes a new encounter between these two characters and the set of misunderstandings that they have to go through before they unite at the end of the novel. Pride and Prejudice may be more widely regarded as Austen’s most romantic novel. Of all Austen’s romantic heroes, Mr. Darcy is the one whose mold is most often followed. In the modern Regency romances we often have a gruff, superior-seeming man, a very handsome and very rich man, who turns out to appreciate the heroine’s hidden qualities. That dynamic, which Austen deployed in Pride and Prejudice , has always struck me as having too much wish-fulfillment to ring true. “Out of all of the novels Austen published in her short life, this one feels most to me like a real love story” Whereas in Persuasion , we are in a world that has a huge amount of emotional nuance, a world where bad decisions are foregrounded as things that a character might have to weather to find their best possible partner. Persuasion teaches us that love can be the end of a long road paved with regrets."