Persuasion (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

evident dissatisfaction with the original, more abbreviated conclusion of the novel belies Henry James’s dismissive view of her writing methods as merely “instinctive.”
    Soon after her death, Austen’s work entered the debate about what the novel ought to do: Should it imitate social reality, improve morals and convey high thoughts of the philosophical mind, or represent the claims of passion? One contemporary critic noted that just as novels are rarely “improving” enough for readers, the moral of Persuasion, that “young people should always marry according to their own inclinations and upon their own judgement,” was indicative of a low moral tendency in contemporary novel-writing. Sentimental fiction as a woman’s genre was supposed to confine passion within the bounds of strict morality.
    Later in the century Charlotte Brontë, like Wordsworth before her, found Austen “shrewd and observant” rather than “profound,” and remarked that “the Passions are perfectly unknown to her.” Brontë, having been accused of immoralism herself, does not ask for moral function, but for passion and philosophy. She describes Austen’s work as “a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses” (letter of January 12, 1848; see Wise and Syming ton, eds., The Brontes: Their Friendships, Lives, and Correspondence). She accuses Austen of unfemininity: ‘Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete, and rather insensible ( not senseless) woman” (letter of April 12, 1850). But the influential critic George Henry Lewes admired her realism, which he called “daring from its humble truthfulness,” and an American critic writing in 1849 cited her as a ”model of perfection in a new and very difficult species of writing ... [with] no surprising adventures, ... no artfully involved plot, no scenes deeply pathetic or extravagantly humorous.” By the end of the century Austen was identified with Scott’s view of her, as embodying a realism that copies nature and imitates the commonplace yet imparts moral wisdom, “universal truths,” and is instructive where romance inflames.
     
    Persuasion is forever being called “mature,” implying that Jane Austen had at last arrived at some culminating wisdom in her lifelong struggle for it. It is also frequently described as “autumnal,” emphasizing its status as her last completed work before dying. As far back as 1862, a reviewer labeled it her “tender and sad” novel. In fact, Persuasion begins with loss, both personal and economic, and slowly reverses the trajectory.
    Though Persuasion, like other Jane Austen novels, is about the maturing through trial of a young woman, the novel does not begin with its central character, Anne Elliot. Instead the first pages are devoted to her father and his obsessive vanity about his lineage as baronet, from which follows his contempt for those he considers beneath him. Like many of Austen’s fictional fathers, Sir Walter is detached, ineffectual, and self-serving (the good fathers in Austen’s novels tend to die before the novel opens, as in Sense and Sensibility), but unlike Elizabeth Bennet’s father in Pride and Prejudice, he is also shockingly stupid. He has one trait uniquely his own in contrast to Austen’s other clueless patriarchs: He is said to value his beauty only slightly less than he values his social rank. Austen slyly classifies Sir Walter as feminine in his erotics of self: “Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did” (p. 4). Personal vanity is linked to a kind of romantic love for himself that precludes his feeling much affection for his family: “He considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of