But Jane Austen’s active, hopeful spirit found comfort where it could. As she had done for the neglected Mansfield Park, she made a collection of the opinions of her family and friends on Emma. It must have been wonderfully cheering to think that, “Mr. Jeffrey [of the Edinburgh Review] was kept up by it three nights”, while her brother Charles liked it better “even than my favourite Pride and Prejudice”. Frank, too, had an encouraging comment. He “liked it extremely, observing that though there might be more wit in Pride and Prejudice — and a higher morality in Mansfield Park — yet altogether, on account of its peculiar air of nature throughout, he preferred it to either.” The naval brothers always turned up trumps. And Mr. Haden reappeared briefly to be “quite delighted with it”, and admire the character of Emma.
The four men were in a minority, however. The general view was probably expressed by the Leigh Perrots who “saw many beauties in it, but could not think it equal to Pride and Prejudice — Darcy and Elizabeth had spoilt them for anything else.” There was an interesting division of opinion between Anna Lefroy and her husband. He “did not like the heroine so well as any of the others”, while she “preferred Emma to all the heroines”. And then there was Mr. Sherer, the Vicar of Godmersham, who was displeased with Jane Austen’s pictures of clergymen. It is fascinating how self-revealing people’s comments on Jane Austen’s books tend to be. But it must have been discouraging for her to have the general voice declare Emma inferior to Pride and Prejudice. It is hard on an author to have published her most obviously attractive book so early in her career. As for Sense and Sensibility: nobody mentioned it.
In the end, Jane Austen changed her mind about Northanger Abbey, writing to Fanny next spring that, “Miss Catherine is put upon the shelf for the present, and I do not know that she will ever come out — but I have a something ready for publication, which may perhaps appear about a twelvemonth hence. It is short, about the length of Catherine.” In fact, Persuasion, though at the time she and Cassandra were discussing the merits of The Elliots for its title. It is entirely understandable that at this point Jane Austen should prefer the mellow, autumnal Persuasion to the light-hearted Northanger Abbey, and it is simply one of life’s ironies that Henry should have brought the two of them out together, in one set of four volumes, the year after her death.
While she was finishing Persuasion, Aunt Jane’s double life continued. She wrote to Caroline Austen on July 15th, 1816, thanking her for yet another literary work. “I have been very much entertained by your story ... it made me laugh heartily, and I am particularly glad to find you so much alive upon any topic of such absurdity, as the usual description of a heroine’s father.” Three days later, she wrote “finis” to Persuasion, but, says James Edward Austen-Leigh in his Memoir:
Her performance did not satisfy her. She thought it tame and flat, and was desirous of producing something better. This weighed upon her mind, the more so probably on account of the weak state of her health; so that one night she retired to rest in very low spirits. But such depression was little in accordance with her nature, and was soon shaken off. The next morning she awoke to more cheerful views and brighter inspirations: the sense of power revived; and imagination resumed its course. She cancelled the condemned chapter, and wrote two others, entirely different, in its stead.
By some miracle, the original chapter was preserved, so that this is the one instance where we have both Jane Austen’s first and second thoughts. It makes one wish, more than anything else could, that she had not been so sweeping in her destruction. What, one can only wonder, did she find wrong with the first version? It contains one of her most direct and charming proposal scenes. Where the final version has Wentworth propose by letter, the cancelled passage does it in a short, swift conversation in which Anne denies the rumour that she is engaged to Mr. Elliot. This ends with “a silent, but a very powerful dialogue — on his side, supplication, on hers acceptance — Still, a little nearer — and a hand taken and pressed — and ‘Anne, my own dear Anne’ — bursting forth in the fullness of exquisite feeling — and all suspense and indecision were over.”
It is sad to have lost this, even in the interests of Jane Austen’s moving and significant comparison of the feelings of men and women, as discussed by Anne Elliot and Captain Harville and overheard by Wentworth. Perhaps, if she had had time and strength, she might have contrived to combine what was best in both versions. As it stands, her final version is clearly still in need of revision. At the end of Chapter Eleven, Anne makes a long speech in defence of her own line of conduct ending, “A strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman’s portion”, and Captain Wentworth’s answer, in which he refuses to forgive Lady Russell “yet”, is an almost complete non-sequitur.
Because Persuasion is at once the most feeling and, in tone, the saddest of Jane Austen’s books, critics tend to treat it as autobiographical. This, they say, is the story of that lost love of hers, given a happy ending. If it is, she has certainly taken good care to disguise it. Anne Elliot, like Fanny Price, is totally unlike her creator. She is quiet, shy, reserved — and persuadable. There is little wit or liveliness about her, and, perhaps most significant of all, she tires easily. When she goes for a walk with the Musgrove sisters, she has to thank Captain Wentworth’s surprising solicitude for a lift home in his sister’s carriage. And, in the cancelled chapters, she celebrates her happiness by a sleepless night and pays “for the overplus of bliss, by headache and fatigue”.
This is not the Jane Austen we have learned to know, any more than Persuasion is her story, and it seems to me an insult to such an artist even to entertain the suggestion that for her last finished novel she should have turned to autobiography. The young Jane, who had the courage to change her mind overnight, and reject the advances of Harris Bigg Wither, would never have let herself be persuaded out of her own happiness. It is as absurd as to imagine Elizabeth Bennet yielding to the bullying of Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
If Jane did put something of herself into Persuasion, it seems to me most likely that it was in the character of Lady Russell. She had spent a good deal of thought and care, not long before, on her niece Fanny’s love affair with John Plumtre, and had obviously been deeply aware of the responsibility of an adviser in such a situation. She, in fact, had refused to act the part of Lady Russell. “You frighten me out of my wits by your reference.” But this exchange may well have started her thinking about such a position, and the kind of woman who might plunge in with advice where angels feared to tread. Lady Russell and Lady Catherine de Bourgh may not be sisters, but they might easily be cousins.
In his George Meredith and English Comedy, V. S. Pritchett has a challenging aside in which he describes Jane Austen as a war novelist, pointing out that the facts of the long war are basic to all her books. She knew all about the shortage of men, the high cost of living, and, most particularly, about the vital part played by the Navy. Starting Persuasion in 1815, with Waterloo won, she seems, consciously or otherwise, to have designed it as her tribute to the brutes and heroes who had made survival possible for the British Isles. From the first moment when Anne Elliot speaks up for the Navy, “who have done so much for us”, and then goes on to reveal surprising knowledge of naval affairs in her summary of Admiral Croft’s career, the alert reader will recognise that in this book the moral theme is rather different from that of Jane Austen’s earlier work.
It is, at first sight, a weakness of the book that Anne Elliot has nothing to learn. When the story opens, she has long recognised the mistake she made when she yielded to persuasion and sent Captain Wentworth away. Throughout the book, she behaves perfectly, as she always has; so much so as almost to justify her creator’s comment in a letter to Fanny, “You may perhaps like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me.” Fanny had always liked the “pictures of perfection” that made her aunt “sick and wicked”. Indeed, in my opinion, one of the advantages of Jane Austen’s first, as opposed to her final, version of the conclusion is that it
omits Anne’s self-justificatory speech: “I must believe that I was right, much as I suffered from it.” As this did not save the book from being attacked, by critics in training for the Victorian era, for advocating rash marriages, one can only regret that Jane Austen cancelled Anne’s original answer to Wentworth’s jealousy over Mr. Elliot: “When I yielded [on the first occasion, eight years before] I thought it was to duty — But no duty could be called in aid here — In marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred, and all duty violated.” To the end, Jane Austen would go on condemning the marriage of convenience, however convenient it might seem.
But the fact that Anne and Wentworth have both, actually, recognised their mistake long before the story opens does weaken the book. Here is no conflict, only anxiety lest Wentworth may have entangled himself too far with absurd Louisa Musgrove. Here, too, significant perhaps of the author’s impaired health, is a failure of the comic spirit. There are no comic characters to be compared with those in Emma, and indeed Jane Austen has been accused of one of her greatest failures in her handling of Mrs. Musgrove’s “large, fat sighings” over the fate of her scapegrace son.
For me, this particular accusation is cancelled out by another; the suggestion that Jane Austen ignores the fate of the ordinary seaman who was, in fact, the reluctant backbone of the British Navy. One might have thought that the Portsmouth scenes in Mansfield Park were answer enough to this, but it is surely an instance of Jane Austen’s artistry that she should have taken care, in Persuasion, where every other naval character is on the side of the angels (even if Captain Benwick havers a bit about which angel) to introduce poor Dick Musgrove, who had been “sent to sea, because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore”, and whose family had had “the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year”. It sounds a heartless enough passage, and has been often attacked, but if you consider Persuasion as a book on the navy, it serves, quite obviously, a useful function. It is out of this material, Jane Austen is telling us, that the Captain Wentworths and Admiral Crofts fashioned the weapon that would defeat Napoleon. And, just in case the reader, involved in the moving reconciliation, at last, between Wentworth and Anne, should have forgotten the moral theme of the book, Jane Austen concludes with it. Anne “gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance.”
When Jane Austen told Fanny, in the spring of 1817, that she had “a something ready for publication, which may perhaps appear about a twelvemonth hence,” she probably meant that Persuasion was nearly, but not entirely finished to her satisfaction. A last revision before publication would, no doubt, have taken care of the major awkwardness of the book, the behaviour of Mrs. Smith. Anne loved her, and we are clearly expected to, but how can we, when she behaves with the self-centred hypocrisy Jane Austen hated almost as much as anything. Thinking that Anne has decided to marry William Elliot, she says nothing about his true character, but hopes, instead, that Anne will persuade him to sort out her own tangled affairs for her. It is more than she deserves that Wentworth ultimately does so. Clearly, Jane Austen was aware, at some level, of this weakness in Mrs. Smith’s character, for she gives her the kind of frozen metaphor she had criticised in her niece Anna’s work. There is not much to choose between Anna’s “vortex of dissipation” and Mrs. Smith’s “Oh! he is black at heart, hollow and black!”
One must, however, recognise that Persuasion shows a small, important change in Jane Austen’s style. There is more landscape and more emotion, and indeed, the two tend to go together. There is the famous description. of Lyme and Charmouth, and of the Lyme party who “soon found themselves on the sea shore, and lingering only, as all must linger and gaze on a first return to the sea, who ever deserve to look on it at all”. And, even in the straight narrative, figurative language is creeping in. “Prettier musings of high-wrought love and eternal constancy, could never have passed along the streets of Bath, than Anne was sporting with from Camden-place to Westgate-buildings. It was almost enough to spread purification and perfume all the way.”
Persuasion is not, inevitably, as highly wrought a book as Emma, but it is easier to enjoy, and it is immensely interesting in that it shows Jane Austen trying a new balance between the surface romantic plot and the underlying moral theme. If, in some ways, Persuasion harks back to the early successes, where the romantic story was the dominant motif, it also looks forward, most significantly, to Sanditon, where, one suspects, the moral theme was to be the dominant. Was Persuasion, with its autumnal, melancholy note, Jane Austen’s farewell to romance? If she had been able to finish Sanditon, would it not have been an entirely new departure?
With Persuasion finished, Jane Austen may have felt that her state of health demanded a holiday. The only other work that was probably written in 1816 is the comic Plan of a Novel, in which the established author put together and made mock of all the various suggestions kind friends had made for her future works. Mr. Clarke, the Prince Regent’s librarian, contributed largely to it, but so to quite an extent did Jane Austen’s own family. Fanny Knight apparently had insisted that a heroine must be of “faultless character ... accomplished ... all perfection” and, despite such adventures as being carried away by the anti-hero and often reduced to work for her bread and worn down to a skeleton and now and then starved to death, she must “throughout the whole work, be in the most elegant society and living in high style”. “The name of the work not,” concluded Jane Austen, “to be Emma — but of the same sort as S. & S. and P. & P.”
It is quite possible that, aside from her unsatisfactory state of health, Jane Austen was simply too busy, in the late summer and autumn of 1816, to consider starting a new book. Henry’s affairs were to the fore as usual. He had recovered, resilient as always, from bankruptcy, and decided to become a clergyman. It may be owing to the influence of his favourite sister, who had written Fanny that perhaps they ought all to be Evangelicals, that he, in fact, was known in later life for the pronounced Evangelical tone of his preaching.
Meanwhile, James’s Mary was still unwell, and Cassandra had taken her and her daughter Caroline to try the waters at Cheltenham, while her son Edward stayed at Chawton. “Edward is a great pleasure to me,” Jane wrote to Cassandra, and, “Henry ... wishes to come to us as soon as we can receive him — is decided for Orders.” Charles, too, wanted to come to stay bringing his sister-in-law and his little girls. Both naval brothers were on shore now, and Frank and his family were living at Alton, where Frank’s wife was pregnant again, and, “seldom either looks or appears quite well — Little embryo is troublesome I suppose.” Jane and Edward had dined with them and walked the two miles home from Alton by moonlight, which does not sound as if she was very unwell, but she goes on to say, “Thank you, my back has given me scarcely any pain for many days — I have an idea [she anticipates modern psychologists] that agitation does it as much harm as fatigue, and that I was ill at the time of your going, from the very circumstance of your going.”
In fact, Jane was missing Cassandra badly. “When you have once left Cheltenham, I shall grudge every half day wasted on the road.” Martha Lloyd was at Chawton, but just the same Jane needed Cassandra practically as well as emotionally. Their nephew Edward had just left, and she admitted that she was not sorry for it. “I wanted a few days quiet, and exemption from the thought and contrivances which any sort of company gives —I often wonder how you can find time for what you do, in addition to the cares of the house — and how good Mrs. West[14] could have written such books and collected so many hard words with her family cares, is still more a matter of astonishment! Composition seems to me impossible, with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb.”
Jane Austen may have found mutton and rhubarb unconducive to authorship, but she was thinking about her next book just the same, and had evidently discussed it with Cassandra. In t
his same letter she has an interesting passage about their old friend Miss Sharpe, from whom she had had a letter. “Quite one of her letters — she has been again obliged to exert herself — more than ever — in a more distressing, more harassed state — and has met with another excellent old physician and his wife, with every virtue under heaven, who takes to her and cures her from pure love and benevolence — Dr. and Mrs. Storer are their Mrs. and Miss Palmer — for they are at Bridlington.” The Palmers were to become Parkers, and Bridlington Sanditon, but both reference and style suggest the unfinished work that was to be begun, as usual, in January, and named Sanditon by Henry after its author’s death.
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Did Cassandra see an alarming change in her sister when she got back from Cheltenham that autumn? Sir Zachary Cope has described Addison’s disease as proceeding slowly (and in those days inexorably), without any great pain, and with intermissions of apparently improved health. It is quite possible that neither Jane Austen herself, nor the people who were constantly with her, had yet recognised any serious cause for alarm, but Cassandra, coming back after an absence of some length, would not be so easily deceived. The fact that there are no more letters from Jane to her suggests that from now on ailing or pregnant sisters-in-law would have to take care of themselves. Cassandra would stay with Jane.
The family as a whole do not seem to have been unduly anxious, and it would have been in character for Jane Austen to make as little fuss about herself as possible. Family visiting went on as usual. Writing cheerfully to James’s son Edward in December, Jane admitted, in passing, that she was not strong enough to walk to Wyards, though she insisted, “I am otherwise very well.” Both Henry and Charles were staying with them. Charles was now much better in “health, spirits and appearance”. The shipwreck had doubtless told on him too. Henry “writes very superior sermons. You and I must try to get hold of one or two, and put them into our novels — it would be a fine help to a volume.” Edward was writing now, and Jane had already told Cassandra that his novel was “extremely clever; written with great ease and spirit ... and in a style, I think, to be popular”. Jane had heard from Edward’s mother that he had mislaid two and a half chapters. “It is well that I have not been at Steventon lately,” she wrote him, “and therefore cannot be suspected of purloining them — two strong twigs and a half towards a nest of my own, would have been something — I do not think however that any theft of that sort would be really very useful to me. What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited sketches, full of variety and glow? — How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour.”
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 23