Persuasion (Illustrated)

"This is a beautiful Jane Austen novel. It’s the only one where her heroine is a tiny bit older, which means she’s in her late twenties. It’s a novel about a second chance at love. Our heroine, Anne, is unmarried, ignored by her family, and taken for granted. When she was younger, she had a brief, fleeting romance with a Captain Wentworth, but a family friend persuaded her not to marry him. The novel takes very seriously the idea of persuasion. What does it mean to be swayed by the people around you? How do you develop your own sense of self? And—as is explored also in Jane Eyre —how do you develop your own sense of sureness about your choices? The plot launches when Anne gets a second chance to interact with Captain Wentworth. The novel includes what I believe is the most romantic love letter ever written (even though it’s fictional), when Captain Wentworth is trying to figure out whether Anne loves him back. Weirdly, towards the end of the book, Austen is equivocal about it. She seems to imply that Anne may have been right, at the time, to take the advice that was given to her, but now she knows her own mind. I think what Austen takes seriously is characters knowing their own minds, and she does that in Pride and Prejudice and many of her other novels. She lets her characters, particularly the women, change their minds for very specific reasons that combine intellectual motivations and passion motivations, and neither one of those seems to be less important or overly feminized; they’re just profound ways in which we navigate the world. All of the other illustrators look 20th century. They look of their moment. This illustrator, Joan Hassall, is a really anachronistic artist. She came up at the same time as Clare Leighton, but all her work looks like it’s from the 19th century. She fell in love with Thomas Bewick, who created a famous history of British birds in which he illustrated every bird down to the most perfect detail. Of Hassall’s illustrations for Persuasion, there are a couple of full-page ones, but most of them are very small. They’re shuffled in with the text, as if she wants the reader to consume the text and the image at the same time. She papered the outside of the book with special patterns from 18th and 19th century textiles. The first of this series of books came out in 1957, and it seems as though she wants you to hold one of them and feel that you’re actually holding something from the 19th century, that maybe you’re holding something that Austen could have had a part in. By the 1950s and 1960s, the first TV adaptations of Austen novels were coming out, and there were movie adaptations as well. When people don’t need illustrations in the same way that they used to, what are they there for? What kind of decoration and direction can they give you? Even though Hassall illustrated all of Austen’s novels, I chose Persuasion because I think this novel is extraordinary, and because she lets you peek around corners with Anne in a way that I think is really beautiful. There’s an image of Anne eavesdropping on people through some bushes. It’s such a tiny moment, and Hassall is very good at taking tiny little moments like that and expanding them visually."