Jane Austen’s Persuasion: An Introduction

Vanessa Zoltan (0:01)

I have a hot take on Jane Austen's beloved last novel, Persuasion. It's a really hard book. I think it's her hardest book. That's right, I think it's harder than Mansfield Park.

It's chapter 3 before you hear the main character speak. If you're me, it's chapter 5 before you realized who the main character even is. It's Anne Elliot, by the way. There isn't even a ball.

The sentences are dense like thickets, and the structure is intentionally disjointed. There is a lot of talking about leases. But because you are in the hands of Jane Austen, you trust its difficulty is with purpose and will pay off. And so its difficulty is also its gift. You almost have to read it slowly.

Roxanne Eberle (1:03)

The other thing about it that I find so powerful is it's the novel I take the longest to read because I just find it so lovely to linger over those sentences and the descriptions.

Vanessa Zoltan (1:17)

That was Roxanne Eberle, retired professor of University of Georgia and Austen Scholar. That's what we will be doing in this series, lingering over sentences, reading one chapter at a time.

And underneath all of those complex, beautiful, changing the style of English writing forever sentences, here is what Princeton Austen Scholar, Claudia Johnson, has to say about Persuasion.

Claudia Johnson (1:47)

One of the things I love about it is that it's a novel about complainers. The novel is full of whiners.

Everybody in the novel is complaining about something, except perhaps Anne, who has so much to complain about.

Vanessa Zoltan (2:05)

I'm Vanessa Zoltan, and this is Hot and Bothered.

Persuasion is considered by many to be what Harold Bloom, the famous critic, says, a perfect novel. It was published in December of 1817, five months after Austen's death in July of that year. We'll be releasing an episode each week. And in those episodes, I will write essays summarizing the chapter. We're hoping some of you are gonna be reading along with us for the first time. So although we won't be avoiding spoilers in the episodes, I'm not gonna summarize the whole book here. Let me just say for now that the novel is a love story between Miss Anne Elliot, our main character, and Captain Frederick Wentworth. It's a reunited lovers story taking place during the peace of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814 before Napoleon escaped Elba and the war started right up again. Wentworth and Anne fell in love almost a decade ago. Wentworth proposed, but Anne was persuaded by her friends and family to say no. He wasn't rich or high-ranking enough for her. But Wentworth and Anne were madly in love and had total faith in his future success. As it says in the novel, it would be difficult to say which had seen the highest perfection in the other.

But no, Anne broke her own heart and sent him away. Now Wentworth is back from the Napoleonic Wars, and he is rich and high-ranking and still mad at Anne for saying no. He and Anne are thrown together in a close circle. Will they be able to find their way back to each other?

Here is Ray Greiner, editor of the Norton Critical edition of Persuasion. That's the version I'm reading and I'm really enjoying her notes.

Ray Greiner (4:36)

What I really find most interesting about the novel is that it is so clearly about the historical events and the period in which the plot is set. So there's a long-standing idea of Jane Austen's novels as avoiding history, as refusing to acknowledge global events, that her novels are cozy, that these are worlds in miniature.

And so what you get in an Austen novel is domesticity and so forth. And in this novel, that's just simply not the case.

Vanessa Zoltan (5:17)

Pride and Prejudice is obviously Austen's most famous work. We talked about Pride and Prejudice and more about Jane Austen's biography, The Little We Know About Her, in season four of Hot and Bothered, Live from Pemberley.

But the deep Austen fans will often say, I love Pride and Prejudice, but Persuasion is my favorite. There are lots of theories as to why.

Firstly, the kind of person who loves Austen will particularly love Anne Elliot. Where Lizzie is charming, Anne is good. She isn't the loudest in the room and she often goes unnoticed for her sacrifices and great character. But boy, oh boy, does she win in the end. Here is Professor Roxanne Eberle again.

Roxanne Eberle (6:10)

You have Austen playing with or running kind of narrative experiment with certain archetypes of the 19th century female protagonist. And I think with Emma, it's obviously the heiress. And then with Anne, it's the unmarried woman.