So Far Yet So Near

You do not have to be a paid-up member of the Janeite club to find yourself returning repeatedly to her novels. The urge to idolize Jane Austen is understandable but (in the spirit of the author herself) careful observation from a distance may serve us better. What is remarkable about her writing is not merely the vividness of her creations but the skill with which she inclines us to enter worlds whose manners and morals are in so many respects alien to our own. I cannot be the only reader who has found himself nodding in agreement with actions and expressions of opinion which would cause ructions in today’s world. Which is no more than to say that she is a past master at getting us to suspend our disbelief – or, to put it another way, to persuade us that her world is somehow ours.

As it happens, of the six completed novels Persuasion (1818) is the one to which I return most often, an autumnal work by comparison with the spring-like Pride and Prejudice. It was her last novel, finished only with great difficulty during her final illness and not published till after her death. In Anne Elliot Jane Austen found a vehicle for darker tones while also displaying her characteristic wit and most biting social satire. The plot of Persuasion is a variation on her familiar theme of love surmounting obstacles and distractions in a world governed by elaborate social constraints. Her plots are like the dances which feature so often in her novels – opportunities for contact between the sexes under carefully circumscribed conditions. Jane Austen’s exquisite choreography ensures that the formula is anything but purely formulaic. Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth had fallen in love when she was 19, eight years before the action of the novel takes place. However, Anne had been persuaded to break off the attachment by Lady Russell, an old friend of the family who, after the death of Anne’s mother, had become Anne’s mentor and substitute mother. Lady Russell did not take to Wentworth, besides which he was a young naval officer whom she believed had insufficient means to provide for Anne. Anne and Frederick, now Captain Wentworth and rich from his success in taking prizes at sea, encounter each other again when his sister and her husband rent Kellynch Hall, the Elliot family home which they have been forced to leave because of Sir Walter Elliot’s spendthrift ways. Sir Walter moves to Bath, but Anne stays for several months with another branch of her family near Kellynch Hall, giving rise to inevitable meetings with Captain Wentworth. Along the obstacle-strewn way to the denouement the locations change in ways which are material to the plot. In fact the locations are almost characters in themselves. First is Kellynch Hall. Until he quits the Hall, Anne’s father Sir Walter presides over his country seat in his snobbish self-regarding way, seconded by his eldest daughter Elizabeth who joins with her father in slighting Anne at every opportunity. Anne takes after her deceased mother, who is described as having been a ‘superior character’. Close by the Hall is the village of Uppercross, home to the Musgrove family, into which Anne’s younger sister has married. Here the setting is familial, domestic, inward- looking. And it is to Uppercross that Anne repairs for several months after her father and older sister have gone to Bath. In Uppercross Anne is in her element, valued as a person of sense and sensitivity, indeed the moral centre of the family. By this time Captain Wentworth is living at Kellynch Hall with his sister and her husband, Admiral Croft, and it is during this period that an over- night visit to Lyme takes place that includes all at Uppercross as well as Captain Wentworth. In Lyme love seemingly flourishes between Captain Wentworth and Anne’s Musgrove cousin, Louisa, a result of unguarded behaviour on Wentworth’s part. The consequent confusion takes time – and more twists of the plot – to be resolved. Meanwhile, as Anne and Wentworth themselves circle each other warily, somewhat out of step, a sense of their earlier closeness is never far from the surface. To add spice to the mix, a chance encounter takes place on the Cobb in Lyme with a long-estranged cousin, Walter Elliot, who also happens to be the heir to Kellynch Hall in the absence of any male heirs to Sir Walter. Cousin Walter admires Anne without knowing who she is. Captain Wentworth notices the admiring glance, which plants a little seed of jealousy. When the scene of the novel moves to Bath, that seed becomes a full-grown plant. In short, we are to under- stand that Wentworth still loves Anne. Bath, where Jane Austen herself spent some not so happy years, is destined to be the place where the dance works itself out. The spa city is above all a place to be seen; its conventions, however much geared to enjoyment, are rigid and stylized. Everyone has their place and notices when this or that person seeks recognition above their station or indeed company below their level, as Anne does when she visits an old schoolfriend, Mrs Smith. Anne pointedly violates the rule that everyone should know their place – though despite her father’s dismay at her connection with Mrs Smith, she hardly strays excessively from Bath’s social conventions. Mrs Smith is an educated woman down on her luck who requires only the intervention of a friend to recover her rightful position, which in the end she does. Besides, Anne’s connection with Mrs Smith is the means by which many of the mysteries and confusions of the plot are resolved, enabling Anne and Captain Wentworth finally to re-establish the deep bond they had formed eight years before. The superficially attractive cousin Walter Elliot, meanwhile, is revealed by Mrs Smith to be a conniving blackguard, somewhat along the lines of Wickham in Pride and Prejudice. Thus the plot. What of the people in it? The range of characters and the social settings are familiar from other Jane Austen novels. Anne Elliot is perhaps the least flawed of all her heroines. She has less spirit than Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse but more depth and self-knowledge. Repeatedly she has the ear of other characters. At Uppercross she is everyone’s confidante, from her often irritable and irritating younger sister to her sister’s husband and his parents. At Lyme she comforts Captain Benwick whose fiancée has died some months before; Anne discusses poetry with him (Byron and Scott) but recommends that in his sorrow he should ‘allow a larger proportion of prose in his daily study’. She is sought out by Admiral and Mrs Croft as a thoughtful and engaging companion. Anne has a maturity born of sadness at the break with Wentworth all those years before, perhaps echoing the broken romance Jane Austen herself had experienced as a young woman. Her understanding of loss lies at the heart of this novel. By contrast, Anne’s father Sir Walter is vain, snobbish and self- important and as such the focus for much of the humour in the book. We meet him at the very beginning, perusing the page of the Baronetage which describes his own family, lost in a self-regarding reverie. Jane Austen mercilessly exposes his pomposity for the benefit of the reader, as she does with Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice, with the result that the reader eagerly anticipates his every appearance, knowing there is always fun to be had. Indeed appearance is everything to Sir Walter, whether of his own person, the people he consorts with or the houses he occupies. His initial objection to letting Kellynch Hall to an admiral is not only that the Navy was ‘a means of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction’ but that life at sea destroys ‘a man’s vigour and youth most horribly’, producing men ‘with faces the colour of mahogany . . . all lines and wrinkles . . .’ On meeting Admiral Croft, however, Sir Walter is mollified, declaring him to be ‘the best-looking sailor he had ever met with, and went so far as to say, that, if his own man might have had the arranging of his hair, he should not be ashamed of being seen with him anywhere’. Needless to say, for all Sir Walter’s eagle-eyed observation of skin tone and hair styling he is blind to the qualities and virtues of Anne, albeit becoming reconciled in the end to her marriage with Captain Wentworth since the naval captain is both handsome and rich. Captain Wentworth is less proud and more amiable than Darcy, more dashing than Knightley, and he epitomizes the best qualities of the Navy – a sense of duty, loyalty to friends and boundless self- confidence. Jane Austen’s brother Francis, who eventually became an Admiral of the Fleet, was evidently the model for Wentworth. The myriad other characters circulate around the main figures in ways which reinforce one’s sense of a society essentially stable, pleased with itself and resistant to fundamental change. The appearance of realism in Jane Austen’s creations is deceptive. She has one foot firmly in the eighteenth century where, for all the variation and individuality possible in the hands of a skilled writer, characters are still to some extent types, bundles of qualities rather than integrated personalities in the modern psychological sense. Of Anne Elliot’s brother-in-law we are told that, compared to his wife (Anne’s younger sister), Charles was ‘in sense and temper . . . undoubtedly superior – but not of powers, or conversation or grace . . .’ Jane Austen’s eighteenth-century roots are evident in the prose itself. Her favourite writers were after all Samuel Richardson and Dr Johnson. She was well read in history as well as novels and poetry. Read the first page of Persuasion, where we discover Sir Walter poring over the Baronetage, and you find yourself in the company of Edward Gibbon’s long periods and balanced phrases:

there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect . . . there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt, as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century . . .

Jane Austen’s world may have been intensely private, but her language was resolutely public, addressed to an audience assumed to be as enlightened and rational as she was. If one ever doubted that rationality was important to her, consider the charge of Wentworth’s sister, Sophia Croft, against one of the male characters that he speaks ‘as if women were all fine ladies instead of rational creatures’. Jane Austen’s preoccupation with social conventions lends itself to satire in which human traits are exaggerated for the purpose of exposing them to criticism and ridicule. She does not pull her punches. She roundly condemns behaviour of which she does not approve, and she can be harsh and even cruel in her portraits. Sir Walter is a cardboard cut-out, albeit vividly portrayed, who amply serves his purpose by providing a negative yardstick against which the qualities of Anne, Captain Wentworth and other more rounded characters can be measured. Young Walter Elliot is all pleasing surface, but beneath it is a devious soul who manages to come close to deceiving even Anne. There is, however, something more subtle going on which reveals much about Jane Austen’s own attitudes. The faults of which Sir Walter Elliot and his eldest daughter stand accused are not just vanity and snobbishness. Their attachment to a young widow called Mrs Clay, who is socially far beneath them, undermines the social conventions they claim to be upholding. They also compromise family values in that they prefer Mrs Clay to Anne. There is not much love in their world; the conventions by which they live are empty shells. There is also more to Anne than meets the eye. In Jane Austen’s world right thinking is often best exemplified by individuals who regard the conventions of their societies with deep scepticism. Yet the capacity to see through the artificiality of social conventions always operates within limits which are set by acceptance of a necessary social order. For Sir Walter social order is a set of empty conventions, while for Anne social order is based on feeling and sense, indeed on love. This is the importance of romance in Jane Austen, which is not merely about how the hero and heroine meet and marry but about how society’s values are most effectively reaffirmed. This is what lifts her plots far beyond the category of ‘the romance’; she effortlessly translates a conventional love story into a portrait of society and a nuanced explanation of what gives it strength and stability. That its dimensions are carefully circumscribed – a limitation acknowledged by Jane Austen herself – is offset by the fact that she knew it intimately. Thanks to her persuasive powers, that world remains an open book to the twenty-first-century reader.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 83 © Richard Crockatt 2024