Persuasion by Jane AustenMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I reread it because it’s one of Jane Austen’s novels that I remember least. It has some good classic Austen material: the characters are wryly observed, the resolution of the romance is dramatic. But mostly I was struck by how lame I found Anne. I really just wanted to shake her and start yelling. You don’t get any points for being quietly virtuous!!
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anne is wonderful! she’s literally one of austen’s best heroines morally
maybe not the most sparkling but definitely not the least, either (fanny price??)
haha sorry, obviously your opinion is valid too, I just really like this book…
oh yeah, definitely Fanny Price is worse, we can all agree on that.
I think my problem with Anne is not exactly that she’s not “sparkling” but that she doesn’t have any backbone. I was especially enraged by her speech at the end, where one might expect her to realize something like “maybe my elders are fallible and I shouldn’t listen to them 100% of the time,” and instead she comes up with “I have now, as far as such a sentiment is allowable in human nature, nothing to reproach myself with; and if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman’s portion.”
Just like, being self-sacrificing isn’t inherently good; in fact, it’s inherently bad because it involves someone suffering, and is only worth it if you’re creating more value with your sacrifice than you’re destroying. But sacrificing yourself to please your family that sucks is just stupid, and it bugs me that she maintained up until the end of the book that it was the right thing to do.
i don’t actually see it as about self-sacrifice, but as about… idk, taking the outside view? learning from older people you trust?
like, she doesn’t listen to just any elders; she doesn’t trust her father’s opinion the way she does lady russell’s. but lady russell is someone whose judgement she agrees with on many other things. the ability to listen to people who think similarly to you & value similar things (which she clearly sees lady russell as) and learn from their opinions is good!
also like… she was very young! we (well, presumably, idk, maybe you’re super into youth rights) question it when anna gets engaged to a man she just met in frozen (i just saw that movie); is this that different? anne and wentworth had only known each other for a couple months iirc. which is plenty long enough to form an engagement at that time, but… they’re young, and young people do all sorts of stupid things when they think they’re in love, so why should anne be any different, if she tries to look at it objectively? for girls who get married at 19 to someone they passionately love, when their most trusted older friend is against it, and his profession is uncertain and her father threatens to cut them off, what would you guess is the ratio of happy marriages to bad marriages?
the book sets it up so as to give a kind of conflicted message about whether she should have listened or not: on the one hand, there’s the interlude with louisa, where louisa is too willful and gets hurt because of it. on the other hand, the narrative speaks for willfulness in anne’s love story, because lady russell’s fears turn out to be unfounded.
would your opinion on this change if the events in the book actually turned out differently? what if wentworth had died at sea? what if he’d returned alive but impoverished? (we see the epilogue of a similar story where it went badly in mansfield park, with fanny’s mom, and she doesn’t seem happy at all. but maybe anne is a different kind of person, or maybe wentworth is so inherently talented it was inevitable that he’d succeed)
this is not to say that i agree with lady russell, but that i can see why anne listened to her, and why she doesn’t regret it.
(wentworth is DEFINITELY at fault for not coming back as soon as he reasonably could, but i do understand that too)
hmmmm
I guess her speech sounded to me like it was more about some ideal of virtue than about the outside view: eg the mention of “duty,” the fact that her counterfactuals are not “he might have died at sea” or “he might have been poor” but “I should have suffered in my conscience” (if she’d ignored Lady Russell)
buuuuut I definitely like your reading better!
or I guess maybe the trad thing to say would be that separating these out doesn’t make any sense, and that the entire point of these social structures and rules is to draw on outside-view wisdom to keep young people from making mistakes
anyway, you’ve convinced me, I now feel somewhat more positively toward Anne and this book