William Deresiewicz

by Unknown

  194

  Chapter 5: Persuasion

  36. See Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), p. 48. As Lukács remarks, this intertwining of the personal and the national continues to be central to Scott’s design in the novels: “certain crises in the personal destiny of a number of human beings coincide and interweave within the determining context of an historical crisis … the split of the nation into warring parties always runs through the centre of the closest human relationships.” 37. Litz sees the novel as involving a shift to modernity in terms of its delineation of character, from the “stable self” to one marked by “dynamic growth and unpredictable change” (” `A Development of Self’: Characters and Personalities in Jane Austen’s Fiction,” in Jane Austen’s Achievement, pp. 7576). For a dissenting view, see Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body, pp. 157158, who disputes the idea that the novel registers a social transformation, pointing out that the Elliots will return to Kellynch in seven years. Among others who discuss the function of history in the novel, Wiesenfarth argues that “history provides the realistic context in which Jane Austen works out the myths,” like Narcissus and Cinderella, that structure the novel’s action (“Persuasion: History and Myth,” p. 167). Speaking of Mansfield Park, Leo Bersani writes that “[i]n 1814, English society is on the threshold of major changes” (A Future for Astyanax [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], p. 75), while Tanner, writing of the same novel, calls the years 18111813 “a period of great stability just about to give way to a time of unimagined changes” (Jane Austen, p. 144). 38. Strictly speaking, Queen Anne (like Mary II, who was, of course, a mere figurehead) also belonged to the House of Stuart, but she ruled, like William III, by grace of the Revolutionary settlement. Indeed, the fact that she was a Stuart strengthens the parallel between the Elliots and the Tudor-Stuart line, each family including an Elizabeth and a Mary who represent the old order and an Anne who represents the new. 39. Modert notes this discrepancy (“Chronology Within the Novels,” p. 58). 40. Two final pieces of coded information, unrelated to the foregoing analysis, that may appear in the passage. Anne is born August 9, the day after Austen started writing the novel. Lady Elliot’s maiden name of Stevenson is extremely close to Steventon, the village where Austen was born and raised. As Lady Elliot embodied the home that Anne has lost, so did Steventon surely play something like the same role in Austen’s psychic life. 41. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, p. 51. 42. See Lukács, Historical Novel, pp. 5153. 43. For a different view of the influence of Scott’s early novels, see Millgate, “Prudential Lovers and Lost Souls,” who argues that in the three that were published by the time Austen had finished Persuasion—Waverley, Guy Mannering, and The Antiquary, the last two of which are set more or less in the present—Scott looks more like a novelist of Scottish manners than of his nation’s history. 44. One can understand why the navy in particular might have started being forgotten even during the war’s later stages, displaced in the national consciousness by the army. As for after the war, Byron, writing Don Juan I in the summer of 1818, notes just such a displacement:

  Chapter 5: Persuasion

  195

  Nelson was once Britannia’s god of War, And still should be so, but the tide is turned; There’s no more to be said of Trafalgar, ‘Tis with our hero quietly inurned; Because the army’s grown more popular, At which the naval people are concerned; Besides, the Prince is all for the land-service, Forgetting Duncan, Nelson, Howe, and Jervis. (stanza iv) 45. Tanner sees the naval officers as forming “a potentially new model of an alternative society or community” (Jane Austen, p. 228). 46. Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), p. 77. Litz speaks of a “new natural aristocracy of the navy” (“Persuasion: Forms of Estrangement,” p. 231). 47. Lionel Trilling, E.M. Forster (New York: New Directions, 1965), p. 118. Brown sees the question as applying to all of Austen’s novels (Jane Austen’s Novels, p. 146). 48. Fleishman, English Historical Novel, p. 49. 49. Brown claims, for example, that “the ambiguous, autumnal mood of Persuasion comes … from a full consciousness of the fate of marriage in the century to come” (Jane Austen’s Novels, p. 150). 50. Muir calls his chapter on the period between Napoleon’s abdication and return “The Year of Revelry” and quotes Samuel Romilly, writing in his diary at the news of that return, “The name of Bonaparte is one `—at which the world turns pale’ ” (Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, p. 345). 51. As Mooneyham says, loss in the novel is a permanent condition, never fully overcome (Romance, Language, and Education, p. 147). For a different view, see Auerbach, who sees loss as leading to recovery and enrichment (Romantic Imprisonment, p. 38). 52. It is a remarkable meteorological coincidence (or perhaps rather another source of inspiration) that in 1816, the year Austen finished the novel (in August), spring in England was severely delayed. In what became known as “the year without a summer,” frost lingered on the heaths until July (Tom Bissel, “A Comet’s Tale: On the Science of Apocalypse,” Harper’s Feb. 2003: 35). 53. As Mooneyham puts it, their home becomes “free-floating” (Romance, Language, and Education, p. 159).

  196

  Chapter 5: Persuasion

  Bibliography

  Abrams, M. H., ed. English Romantic Poets. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. ––. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1971. ––. “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.” In Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, eds., From Sensibility to Romanticism, pp. 527560. New York: Oxford, 1965. Anderson, Misty G. ” `The Different Sorts of Friendship’: Desire in Mansfield Park.” In Devoney Looser, ed., Jane Austen and the Discourses of Feminism, pp. 167183. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Andrews, P. B. S. “The Date of Pride and Prejudice.” Notes and Queries 213 (1968): 338342. Aristotle. Introduction to Aristotle. Richard McKeon, ed. New York: Modern Library, 1947. Auerbach, Nina. “Jane Austen and the Romantic Imprisonment.” In David Monaghan, ed., Jane Austen in a Social Context, pp. 927. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981. ––. “Jane Austen’s Dangerous Charm: Feeling as One Ought About Fanny Price.” In Janet Todd, ed., Jane Austen: New Perspectives, pp. 208223. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983. ––. Romantic Imprisonment. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Austen, Jane. Emma. London: Penguin, 1996. ––. Lady Susan/The Watsons/Sanditon. London: Penguin, 1974. ––. Mansfield Park. London: Penguin, 1996. ––. Northanger Abbey. London: Penguin, 1995. ––. Sense and Sensibility. London: Penguin, 1995. ––. Persuasion. London: Penguin, 1965. ––. Pride and Prejudice. London: Penguin, 1996. Austen, Jane, and Charlotte Brontë. The Juvenilia of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. London: Penguin, 1986. AustenLeigh, J. E. A Memoir of Jane Austen. In Jane Austen, Persuasion, pp. 273391. London: Penguin, 1965. Banfield, Ann. “The Influence of Place: Jane Austen and the Novel of Social Consciousness.” In David Monaghan, ed., Jane Austen in a Social Context, pp. 2848. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981. Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London: Routledge, 1991. Berg, Maxine, and Helen Clifford, eds. Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 16501850. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.

  Bersani, Leo. A Future for Astyanax. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Bissel, Tom. “A Comet’s Tale: On the Science of Apocalypse.” Harper’s Feb. 2003: 3347. Bloom, Allan. Love and Friendship. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Bloom, Harold, ed. Jane Austen. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. ––, ed. Jane Austen’s Emma. New York: Chelsea House, 1987 ––, ed. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. ––. The Ringers in the Tower. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. ––. The Visionary Company. Rev. ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971. Bradbrook, Frank W. Jane Austen and Her Predecessors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Bradley, A. C. “Jane Austen.” A Miscellany, pp. 3272. London: Macmillan, 1929. Brain, Robert. Friends a
nd Lovers. New York: Basic Books, 1976. Brissenden, R. F. “Mansfield Park: Freedom and the Family.” In John Halperin, ed., Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, pp. 156171. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Brown, Julia Prewitt. Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. Brown, Marshall. “Romanticism and the Enlightenment.” In Stuart Curran, ed., The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, pp. 2547. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Brownstein, Rachel M. “Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice.” In Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, pp. 3257. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Burrows, J. F. Computation Into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels and an Experiment in Method. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987. Butler, Marilyn. “Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Reviews.” In Stuart Curran, ed., The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, pp. 120147. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ––. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. ––. “Jane Austen’s Sense of the Volume.” In David Monaghan, ed., Jane Austen in a Social Context, pp. 4965. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981. ––. Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Byron, George Gordon, Lord. The Poetical Works of Lord Byron. Reprint 1972. London: John Murray, 1905. Castle, Terry. “Sister-Sister.” London Review of Books 3 Aug., 1995, pp. 36. Chapman, R. W. The Novels of Jane Austen. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923. Chartier, Roger, ed. A History of Private Life, vol. 3. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. Cicero. Two Essays on Old Age and Friendship. Trans. E. S. Shuckburgh. London: Macmillan, 1927. Clark, Lorrie. “Transfiguring the Romantic Sublime in Persuasion.” In Juliet McMaster and Bruce Stovel, eds., Jane Austen’s Business, pp. 3041. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. Clayton, Jay. Romantic Vision and the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

  198

  Bibliography

  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994. Copeland, Edward, and Juliet McMaster, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Cottom, Daniel. The Civilized Imagination. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Crain, Caleb. American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Crompton, Louis. Byron and Greek Love. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Curran, Stuart, ed. The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Davies, J. M. Q. “Emma as Charade and the Education of the Reader.” In David Monaghan, ed., Emma, pp. 7788. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1992. Deresiewicz, William. “Community and Cognition in Pride and Prejudice.” English Literary History 64 (1997): 503535. ––. “Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Transformation of Community.” Raritan 20 (Fall 2000): 71105. Doody, Margaret Anne. “Jane Austen’s Reading.” In J. David Grey, ed., The Jane Austen Companion, pp. 347363. New York: Macmillan, 1986. ––. “The Short Fiction.” In Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, pp. 8499. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Duckworth, Alastair M. The Improvement of the Estate. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971. ––. ” `Spillikins, Paper Ships, Riddles, Conundrums, and Cards’: Games in Jane Austen’s Life and Fiction.” In John Halperin, ed., Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, pp. 279297. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Eagleton, Terry. Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Zizek, and Others. London: Verso, 2003. Evans, Mary. Jane Austen and the State. London: Tavestock Publications, 1987. Ewen, Frederick. The Prestige of Schiller in England. New York: Columbia University Press, 1932. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men. New York: Morrow, 1981. Fergus, Jan. Jane Austen: A Literary Life. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1991. Ferguson, Frances. Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Fleishman, Avrom. The English Historical Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971. ––. A Reading of Mansfield Park. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967. Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” In Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, pp. 214219. New York: Macmillan, 1963.

  Bibliography

  199

  ––. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. [No city]: HarperCollins, 1962. Fry, Paul H. A Defense of Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. ––. “Georgic Comedy: The Fictive Territory of Emma.” In David Monaghan, ed., Emma, pp. 165185. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1992. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Galperin, William. The Historical Austen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. ––. “What Happens When Jane Austen and Frances Burney Enter the Romantic Canon?” In Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner, eds., Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, pp. 376391. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Gillooly, Eileen. Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and NineteenthCentury British Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Gilpin, William. Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South Wales, etc., Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; Made in the Summer of the Year 1770. 2nd ed. London, 1789. Gleckner, Robert. Byron and the Ruins of Paradise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. ––, ed. Critical Essays on Lord Byron. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1991. Gleckner, Robert, and Gerald Enscoe, eds. Romanticism: Points of View. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962. Goldsmith, Oliver. The Vicar of Wakefield. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Grey, J. David, ed. The Jane Austen Companion. New York: Macmillan, 1986. Grove, Robin. “Austen’s Ambiguous Conclusions.” In Harold Bloom, ed., Jane Austen, pp. 179190. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Hagan, John. “The Closure of Emma.” In Harold Bloom, ed., Jane Austen’s Emma, pp. 1935. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Haggerty, George E. Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later Eighteenth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Halperin, John, ed. Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. ––. The Life of Jane Austen. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1984. ––. “The Worlds of Emma: Jane Austen and Cowper.” In John Halperin, ed., Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, pp. 197206. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Handler, Richard, and Daniel Segal. Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture. 2nd ed. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. Harding, D. W. “Introduction” to A Memoir of Jane Austen. In Jane Austen, Persuasion, pp. 267270. London: Penguin, 1965. Hardy, Barbara. “The Objects in Mansfield Park.” In John Halperin, ed., Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, pp. 180196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. ––. “Properties and Possessions in Jane Austen’s Novels.” In Juliet McMaster, ed., Jane Austen’s Achievement, pp. 79105. London: Macmillan, 1976.

  200

  Bibliography

  Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. London: Penguin, 1998. Harmsel, Henrietta Ten. Jane Austen: A Study in Fictional Conventions. The Hague: Mouton, 1964. Harris, Jocelyn. “Jane Austen and the Burden of the (Male) Past: The Case Reexamined.” In Devoney Looser, ed., Jane Austen and the Discourses of Feminism, pp. 87100. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. ––. Jane Austen’s Art of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Hartman, Geoffrey. “Nature and the Humanization of Self in Wordsworth.” In M. H. Abrams, ed. English Romantic Poets, pp. 123132. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. ––. “Wordsworth, Inscription, and Romantic Nature Poetry.” In Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, eds., From Sensibility to Romanticism, pp. 389413. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. ––. Wordsworth’s Poetry: 17871814. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964. Hayden, John O., ed. Romantic Bards and British Reviewers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. Heydt-Stevenson, Jill. “Liberty, Connection, and Tyranny: The Novels of Jane Austen and the Aesthetic Movement of the Picturesque.” In Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner, ed., Lessons of Romanticism: A Critic
al Companion, pp. 261279. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Hilles, Frederick W., and Harold Bloom. From Sensibility to Romanticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Hudson, Glenda A. “Consolidated Communities: Masculine and Feminine Values in Jane Austen’s Fiction.” In Devoney Looser, ed., Jane Austen and the Discourses of Feminism, pp. 101114. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. ––. Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen’s Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1992. Hunt, John Dixon. “The Picturesque.” In J. David Grey, ed., The Jane Austen Companion, pp. 326329. New York: Macmillan, 1986. Jacobus, Mary. Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Johnson, Claudia L. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790’s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. ––. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Johnson, Samuel. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. 16 vols. W. J. Bate, ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. Jordan, John E. “The Novelty of Lyrical Ballads.” In Jonathan Wordsworth, ed., Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies, pp. 340358. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970. –-. Why the Lyrical Ballads? Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Kelly, Gary. “Romantic Fiction.” In Stuart Curran, ed., The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, pp. 196215. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Kestner, Joseph. “Jane Austen: The Tradition of the English Romantic Novel, 18001832.” Wordsworth Circle 7 (1976): 297311.