Persuasion – Is Anne Jane?

First of all, I just want to say, this is my favorite of all the Jane Austen books we’ve read so far. It’s just so much more painful to imagine being Anne than any of the other heroines, because she actually had her chance with Captain Wentworth, and she let him go, and now that he’s back, his only criteria for a wife seems to be anyone but Anne! (41). The agony! It’s a bit easier to relate to a slightly older heroine, too. Her circumstances are much easier to sympathize with – I know times were different then, but heroines in their teens or early twenties don’t seem to me to be in much danger of being lonely for the rest of their lives, as Anne does. There seems to be a more grown up mood in this book, too. It feels like a book where the author has some lessons she’s learned, or opinions she wants to put out there. I know it was written when Jane Austen was older and I think she had become sick. Maybe I’m imagining it because of knowing this, but I get a sense of a sort of a wish to give a sad story a happy ending, just to cheer herself up, or a way of righting in her imagination some of the wrongs that happened in her own life.

Anne Elliot keeps reminding me of Jane Austen in ways. Her romance with Captain Wentworth when they were so young, and the family’s objection because of finances and youth sounds very like Jane’s, with Tom Lefroy.  Lady Russell, the kind older lady friend, who advises against the marriage, sounds a bit like Jane’s well-meaning Mrs.Lefroy. Anne’s description of how lonely it is to be left at home, looking at the same things day in day out, when the man gets to go away, see the world and forget the girl who loved him sounds like a real lament - “We certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forget us…We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us ... You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions” (155). Like Wentworth going to sea, Tom Lefroy went back to Ireland to pursue his career, and Jane was left behind. Both Anne and Jane had offers of marriage from someone else, and both turn them down. Both are obliged to stay with relations when called upon, and must rely on them for travel arrangements.  And both dislike Bath, for seemingly the same reasons. “She disliked Bath and did not think it agreed with her – and Bath was to be her home” (10), and Anne dreading “all the white glare of Bath and grieving to forgo all the influence so sweet and so sad of the autumnal months in the country”(23) sounds like Jane’s dread of moving there herself.

Some of Jane’s own opinions seem to make it onto the pages of Persuasion too, in Anne’s thoughts on reading private letters – “no one ought to be judged or to be known by such testimonies … no private correspondence could bear the eye of others” (135). We know Jane must have felt this way herself, because her sister Cassandra destroyed most of her letters, probably because she knew Jane felt this way. Another opinion that sounds very Jane-ish is Anne’s remark to Cptn. Harville that she wouldn’t take any authority from a book, because it’s only men who get to write them. “Yes, yes if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything” (156). Anne’s admiration for sailors and the navy sound just like Jane’s admiration of her own brothers and their profession, too. Maybe because she was getting sick around this time this could be a sort of a melancholy backward glance at her own life, and just to make herself happy she writes in the happy ending that she might have imagined for herself. (That might be a stretch, but I can sort of see it…)