It is with some trepidation (pompous phrase) that I embark on another blog entry. That’s because I’m going to write about one of English literature’s most acclaimed – and written about – authors: Jane Austen. But to avoid treading where many others have trodden with yet another critical assessment, I will try simply to make a few personal comments … and then shut up. (I won’t bother offering any sort of plot summary, either.)
The novel I’ve been re-reading is Persuasion. I say ‘I’ve been …’ but that should really be ‘we’ve been …’, for unlike previous entries in this series it’s been a matter of two people taking turns in reading aloud, rather than one person (me) poring over a previously read book. Ever since the 2020 lockdown, Clever Wife and I have ended many an evening together by reading a few pages to each other – choosing from our bookshelves an eclectic variety of narratives, from Kidnapped to P.G. Wodehouse, from Beowulf to Alice in Wonderland. Our most recent choice has been Austen, where we were on familiar ground; very familiar in CW’s case, as she is an Austen enthusiast who has read all Austen novels several times.
I first read Persuasion in 1994, when I was living in Boston. Oddly, my recollection is that I read the novel in a fat complete-works-of-Austen paperback that is still on our shelves, with a cover picture of Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle in the BBCtv serialisation of Pride and Prejudice. But that can’t be right: Andrew Davies’s famous adaptation didn’t hit the screens until 1995 – so what edition was I reading? Jane Austen editions seem to come and go in this household; at one time we had three different editions of Mansfield Park, and there are still at least two Northanger Abbeys lurking in bookcases somewhere. Anyway, whatever edition I was reading, Persuasion immediately became my favourite among Austen’s novels, the one that seemed the most mature (I’m not sure I still think that, as there are some loose ends its construction, which might have been tidied up if Austen had survived to see it published; perhaps Mansfield Park is a better, more subtle novel).
Re-reading something after a lapse of nearly 30 years – although in between I’ve seen a television adaptation or two (see below) – obviously means new perspectives. In the later 1990s I started reading the Aubrey-Maturin novels of Patrick O’Brian, which of course centre on the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars. It was there that I learned of the financial importance, for naval captains and the crews under them, of capturing enemy ‘prizes’ to fund their voyages and subsequent lives on land. Which is a great help in understanding one of the main plot points of Persuasion, that Wentworth, rejected as a suitor by our heroine Anne Elliot seven years before the novel begins – persuaded to do so by the well-meaning Lady Russell, who had thought little of his prospects – has returned from the wars as a much more marriageable personage: promoted to captain, and enriched by a number of profitable encounters with French ships. Another small matter is the coincidence that Wentworth had under his command the ‘troublesome, hopeless’ son of the Musgroves who had been ‘sent to sea, because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore’ and (in one of Austen’s more unsentimental observations) was ‘scarcely at all regretted’ when he died. There are similar ‘hopeless’ novices to be found in the pages of O’Brian’s novels.
One other thing to say about this re-reading is simply my increasing familiarity with, to use a technical term, the free indirect style, in the use of which of Austen was one of the pioneers. There are plenty of examples where the narration is, as it were, taken over by Anne’s thoughts: after all, it is her situation and her values that Persuasion is about. Indeed, the plot requires that, like Anne, the reader should be unaware of Wentworth’s feelings until Chapter 23. Although there is an earlier revelation (Chapter 7) that he ‘had been most warmly attached to [Anne], and had never seen a woman since whom he thought her equal’, the following chapters seem aimed at discrediting that observation. Of course all this is put right in the end when we are told that events earlier in the novel, when Louisa Musgrove famously falls off the Cobb at Lyme, had led Wentworth to appreciate Anne’s ‘collected mind’ in contrast to Louisa’s ‘obstinacy of self-will’, and to ‘deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her [Anne] when thrown in his way’. But some ten chapters pass before we learn that’s what Wentworth was thinking.
The other aspect of all this re-reading is that we were taking turns: one night I was re-reading, the next I was being read to, and with only a few pages at a time it was easy to lose the thread (for me at least; wife was more familiar with the novel). I would sometimes hear myself asking rather stupid questions – where are we now, Uppercross or Kellynch? Which Charles is this? Is this Anne’s thoughts, or the narrator’s? Although Austen’s dialogue is a delight to read aloud, sometimes her long sentences were a problem. Here, for example, is an example – hard to make sense of even when read on the page; when confronted with it to read aloud, we stumbled:
She was persuaded that under every disadvantage of disapprobation at home, and every anxiety attending his profession, all their probable fears, delays, and disappointments, she should yet have been a happier woman in maintaining the engagement, than she had been in the sacrifice of it; and this, she fully believed, had the usual share, had even more than the usual share of all such solicitudes and suspense been theirs, without reference to the actual results of their case, which, as it happened, would have bestowed earlier prosperity than could be reasonably calculated on. (ch 4)
Finally, let’s give credit to the excellent 1995 BBCtv adaptation of Persuasion by Nick Dear, which we recently were able to see again. Directed by Roger Michell, it gave due weight to the naval background, had excellent actors – Amanda Root as Anne and Ciaran Hinds as Wentworth among others – and neither left out anything important or added anything irrelevant, as adaptors are sometimes tempted to do. Highly recommended. It’s a pity that Patrick O’Brian’s naval series is yet to be treated as sympathetically on the screen: after the 2003 film Master and Comander nothing further has emerged.
Old geezer re-reading 