In perfect time, I’ve finished reading my selection for Challenge #1, “A book published posthumously.” I had some other books I was contemplating, until I was reminded that two of Jane Austen’s novels were only published posthumously. Then I realized it had to be one of them. (I will admit that I selected Persuasion over Northanger Abbey because a look at the table of contents showed that Persuasion had seven fewer chapters. And since I really wanted to be able to start on February-appropriate reading come the first, that was a good thing.)
This cover image is not representative of what I read, though: one of the first things I bought for my first Kindle when I got it was a collected works of Jane Austen. (Also a collected works of Shakespeare, and a massive collection of ancient plays and epics. (Because who wouldn’t want seven or eight excruciatingly stilted 19th century translations of the Odyssey, most of them using Roman names?)) None of the collected works covers on Goodreads matched the one I had, and after actually looking at the cover, I decided I was better off not showing it anyway. (Seriously, it shows a woman in a bright red dress with a scandalously low neckline. She looks like someone who would be a bar wench in a particularly salacious adaptation of The Three Musketeers, not someone at all appropriate to English drawing room dramas.) It would have been appropriate to use the cover of the 1909 version whose illustrations were included in an exceptionally low-res manner, but Goodreads didn’t have that, either. (Not exactly surprising…)
Aaaaanyway, before I get to the review, two things. First, a basic idea of the plot: our protagonist is one Miss Anne Elliot, still unmarried at 27. She and her older sister Elizabeth (who couldn’t be less like Elizabeth Bennet if she tried!) are both unwed because of failed arrangements in the past; in Elizabeth’s case, nothing was ever firm, and he just withdrew from her society, whereas Anne was actually engaged to Frederick Wentworth, and was persuaded to break the engagement, as he (a mere naval Lieutenant) was beneath her station. Because, you see, her father, Sir Walter Elliot, is a baronet and excessively proud of his title…even if he no longer has any money to go with it. To compound their unmarried state, their younger sister, Mary, not only has a husband, but two little brats — I mean, boys — to take care of. When the Elliot family finances sink to the point that the best way to keep them from going bankrupt is for them to move from their family manor to Bath and take in a lodger in the manor house in the meantime, Anne doesn’t go to Bath right away with her father and sister (having bad associations with the place), but instead stays with her sister and then with her great friend, Lady Russell, who had been a close friend of her late mother. The lodger in the manor house is one Admiral Croft and his wife, who happens to be the sister of Anne’s former fiance, who is now Captain Wentworth, having made not only his career but also his fortune in the Napoleonic wars. I’m sure you can guess where it goes from there, but the path it takes from point A to point B was not at all what I was expecting.
But before I can talk about that, there’s the other thing that needs to come before the review. And that is a brief explanation of my history with Jane Austen. Because it’s rather odd. You see, I count Pride and Prejudice as one of my favorite novels of all times, but I’ve only read it a couple of times, and this is the first time I’ve read any other Austen. (Though I’ve purposely avoided reading Sense and Sensibility because I love the movie so much, and I’m afraid that if I read the book then I won’t like the movie anymore.)
So, why have I only read it a few times if I love it so much? I think part of the reason is Jane Eyre‘s fault. Because, like Pride and Prejudice, I loved it when I read it for English class in high school. But then I went back and re-read Jane Eyre in college, and realized that I actually didn’t like it very much. A few parts were great, but the rest of it actually left me cold, at best. So I think I was afraid to re-read Pride and Prejudice, lest the same thing happened. Then my mother forced me to watch a Bollywood movie loosely inspired by it, which I probably would have been okay with, if it hadn’t borrowed all the character names. Especially because their Darcy was an obnoxious little prat with zero resemblance to the divine Mr. Darcy of the novel. So I had to read it again as an antidote.
And the good news was that I loved it just as much, maybe even more, since I was in a more mature position and able to grasp all the ways the novel’s structure flew in the face of what we’re told a novel should be and do. And yet as I neared the ending, I just…stopped. I lingered for at least a week with only a few chapters left, because I didn’t want to read them. I told myself it was just that I didn’t want it to be over. But after I finally did finish it, I recognized that it was something a bit different. Part of it was that my new perspective on the book saw that Elizabeth really wasn’t good enough for Mr. Darcy, and he shouldn’t be settling for her. But mostly it was that there was something about the “and they all got married and lived happily ever after” ending that didn’t sit right with me. (Yes, I realize that’s not accurate at all, but there’s very much the sense of “everyone who should end happily does.” And while I do agree with Miss Prism that the good should end happily because that is what fiction means, it does grate when it’s too facile.) After the fact — by several years, in fact — my reaction to that ending helped me come to understand my own sexuality (or rather my lack thereof), but that doesn’t change that it made me a bit leery to read any other Austen novels. Especially since Sense and Sensibility, if the movie is at all accurate about the basic plot, has very much the same “happy endings all around” type of ending, so if all her novels were going to be like that, well…that was more than enough to make me shy away a bit.
I’m glad to say that Persuasion was very different from P&P and S&S. (Sorry, got tired of writing them both out.) I mean, not different in the sense of no longer being a tale of the lower end of the upper crust of Regency England, focused on a strong female lead, with a focus on the issues that society expected upper class ladies of the period to focus on: society and the quest to be married. But the first thing you notice that’s different in Persuasion is that Anne doesn’t have the comforting nest of sisters around her, nor a warm and doting parent. Her father is a vain fool with no eye for anything but his mirrors and the registry of the nobility, where he can read about himself. Her older sister is not much different from their father, and the younger sister is one of the most real characters I’ve ever encountered: we all know a Mary Musgrove, somewhere or other. She’s determined to be the center of attention and wants to outdo everyone else, including at being self-sacrificing, which is somewhat counter-intuitive, but so true of that sort of person. (For example, one of her sisters-in-law, Louisa Musgrove, is hurt at one point, and Anne offers to stay behind and help take care of her, but Mary insists on being the one to do it.) She has an opinion — and usually a complaint — about just about everyone she knows, but her opinions vary wildly as time passes, and sometimes she insists she saw or knew things she absolutely didn’t. (Actually, she really reminds me of my mother.) So Anne is largely an isolated figure, adrift in a sea of selfish airheads, as her few friends seem to spend massive amounts of time out of her reach. As a consequence, the novel is a bit more of a character study of Anne Elliot than a traditional novel. Even Captain Wentworth has surprisingly little presence as a character, rather than the concept of the happiness that Anne had and lost.
Luckily, Anne is a character who can carry that much attention, and you don’t really spend much time regretting that you aren’t getting to know anyone else, because it’s fine just sticking with Anne. (In fact, you quickly wish to be spending less time with her sisters…) She’s very much still in love with Captain Wentworth, and has no interest in marrying any other man (despite a few lapses), but by the time the novel starts, she’s been dedicated to being constant so long that she seems to have forgotten that she’s unmarried by choice, not by the circumstance of other men not being interested in her, and when Captain Wentworth first shows up again, Anne takes his reaction to her to mean that he thinks she has been horribly altered by time, utterly having lost her “bloom” in the eight years they’ve been apart. All around, Anne is quite convinced that all others around her hold her in no esteem whatsoever, viewing her as utterly worthless. In her father and older sister’s case, this is accurate, and definitely where she got that idea from, but as to everyone else…well, at first we don’t really know. Eventually, of course, we find that she is held in high regard by almost everyone except her father and sister. Which, honestly, was a little disappointing to me: up until that time, I felt deeply connected to Anne, because I know how it feels to be certain that the few people who know you at all either don’t think of you when you aren’t right in front of their faces or actively dislike you. (Though in my case, it’s not due to a neglectful family.)
I had highlighted a few passages so I could quote and talk about them, but…it’s half an hour to midnight, and I’m exhausted. (I think I got a total of maybe four hours’ sleep last night…) Maybe I’ll post about them sometime in March.
We're All Mad Here! 
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