Jane Austen’s Power of “Persuasion”: The Grace of a Love Letter

Post #7 in the blog series “I Read Dead People” on faith in great literature. This week I will focus on two earlier 19^th c. women writers, partly because I thought it was time for some women to enter the conversation (!) and partly because these two female authors in particular show such a different range in the spectrum of “Romanticism,” or the movement used to describe this period.

Author’s Name: Jane Austen (though she originally used the nom de plume “A Lady”)

Dates:    1775-1817

Country of Origin:   England 

Genres: famous for her novels featuring gentle social satire and romance; she also wrote juvenilia and her letters are a great read, especially on the plight of women at the time

Brief Religious Heritage or Association:  Her parents were members of substantial gentry families, hence Jane’s intimate understanding of those circles (middle to upper class folks, but the classes beginning to fluctuate with the times). Her father served as a rector in the Anglican Church. After she and her sister almost died from typhus when away at boarding school in Oxford, they returned home and Jane was largely schooled by her father and brothers. Her writing was supported from a young age, and she had full access to her father’s extensive library – a rarity for a girl at the time.

Random Fact from the Author’s Life:  At a time when it was considered socially inappropriate for women to write, Jane hid her writing under her blotter when unexpected company interrupted her work. She was proposed to twice but never married, dying a spinster at age 42.

Focus Text(s) for Discussion Here: Her last novel, Persuasion, which she completed in 1816 (untitled). Her brother named it and published it posthumously in late 1817, with a formal publication date of 1818.

Suggested Edition of this Text/Biographies/Resources: I like the Norton Critical Edition (ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks), for its authoritative text, solid context and helpful criticism. An early biography of Jane Austen by nephew J. E. Austen-Leigh is a fascinating read for history buffs: A Memoir of Jane Austen, London, 1870. C. S. Lewis buffs might enjoy his “A Note on Jane Austen” in Essays in Criticism 4 (1954): 359-71. One of my personal favourite cultural reads on women and writing in the 19thc century is the classic The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen.

How this Text has Challenged, Inspired, Fed my Faith Walk

Persuasion remains my favourite of Jane Austen’s novels. This often surprises my students – at first. Persuasion has often been considered by critics as the more serious of her novels, slower-paced with a heroine who can seem dull, even aloof. But I have soft spot for it, and I suspect anyone else who has been too greatly influenced by the opinion of others, and has subsequently regretted a decision, will agree.

Perhaps it’s because when I read it, I sense the ailing author behind the pages, the woman who knows she is dying of Addison’s disease and who, while adamant that a woman need not be married to be happy, still yearns for relationship in the way that marriage – and I intend it as a Biblical metaphor here, and not simply a “world expectation and social construct” – involves being utterly accepted, unconditionally (and eternally) loved, and truly known.

Paying attention to detail in Austen’s works is where the real reward is found.  Austen famously compared her own writing to “the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour.” At first, her novels may seem provincial, the characters and setting relatively small in scope, but her acumen in observing human relations with a keen and witty eye is unbeatable. Her last novel is no exception; the restraint of the heroine belies a passionate heart. I would agree with editor Patricia Meyer Spacks that the heroine, Anne Elliot, while behaving “like the very model of a well-bred spinster, she nonetheless vibrates with passion and preserves a will of her own.” (x-xi)

By her day’s measure (that is Regency England), 27 year old Anne is fast approaching becoming an old maid. Having “lost her bloom,” she would have been almost a decade past her coming out and ideal marriage age in the superficial social life of the English town of Bath.  She lives with her vain father, Sir Walter Elliot, her older sister Elizabeth (equally vain), and her younger, socially awkward sister Mary. With her mother deceased, Anne has grown close to family friend Lady Russell, who has become like a godmother to her.

Seven years earlier, Anne and a handsome young naval office called Frederick Wentworth had fallen in love. Engaged to be married, they were blissfully happy. Sir Walter and Elizabeth, however, were dissatisfied with her choice. The young man owned neither rank nor wealth, and so, in addition to their disdain, Anne is eventually persuaded by Lady Russell to break the match. Wentworth leaves to pursue his naval career and nurse a broken heart, disenchanted by what he perceives as Anne’s lack of courage and, perhaps, true devotion to him. Anne regrets the decision deeply, and only grows sadder about the loss as the years roll by.

The two former lovers are reunited when the Elliots rent their family estate to Wentworth’s sister and brother-in-law, the Crofts. When Wentworth inevitably comes to visit, they discover he is now Captain Wentworth, a wealthy captain with a distinguished career in the Royal Navy. All the younger, more “marriageable” ladies, of course, are after such a fine catch (if you pardon the sea pun here), but of course this is painfully difficult for the older Anne to witness. No one else has ever compared to Wentworth for Anne, and she bears this memory with faithfulness.

For the sake of blog brevity here, I will skip ahead to their (alas, hooray!) renewed declaration of love for each other, after some strategic suspense insertions and other plot weavings by Austen. Let us fast forward to an intimate parlor gathering where Anne has been in a deep conversation with Wentworth’s friend Captain Harville over who is the more loyal sex, men or women.

Captain Harville claims that he has all of literature on his side, in terms of the inconstancy of women. “But perhaps you will say,” he concedes to Anne, “these were all written by men.”

“Perhaps I shall,” she replies. “Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove any thing.”

A telling statement, for a women novelist, nonetheless.

Anne goes on to make a thoughtful case for both sexes’ constancy in love, but her perspective on women strikes us as particularly moving:

“I should deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by women,” she tells Harville. “No, I believe you capable of every thing great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as – if I may be allowed the expression, so  long as you have an object. I mean, while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence of when hope is gone.”

Captain Wentworth, who is in the same room but supposedly preoccupied with writing a letter and out of earshot, has, in fact, overheard the entire conversation. It only serves to tip him over the edge in his resolve to convey his undying love for Anne, fortified now more than ever by her own implicit statement of loyalty in love, as well as by yet another example of her good character.

To her surprise, he leaves Anne with a letter – well, not just any letter … for, as Austen as narrator puts it, “Such a letter was not to be soon recovered from” …

!

I will leave you to read the letter in its entirety in Chapter 23. It is far too scrumptious for me to boil down and serve up pathetically shriveled here.

(If you are married, or about to be, you may wish to consider reading it aloud to your beloved … if you are single, you may find it even more relevant in the hope and beauty it conveys about our highest forms of language, so inspired by love. Regardless, it’s relevant to all of us. How can anything containing the line “You pierce my soul” not be?).

Happily, the lovers are reunited, and follow in the footsteps of the other committed and loving couple in the novel, the Crofts, who provide a sharp contrast to many of the other superficial socialites, and poor matches, in the story.

In the confirmation and celebration of two people who have remained steadfastly in love, and in, specifically, a heroine who has come to trust her own judgment and her own heart, a dying author shows us three very important things:

1. Without God, regret is what you settle for: Grace gives us a second chance. When another loves us, the slate can indeed be washed clean. This doesn’t always mean we can’t wish we did something differently, but grace takes away the sting of the mistake and instead transforms it into good. I’m reminded of the lyrics from the U2 song here, entitled, aptly “Grace.” Bono sings, “Grace, the name of a girl. Also the name of a thought that changed the world …” The refrain reminds us, “Grace makes beauty out of ugly things.”

Interestingly, Austen chooses symbolic names for the two women who prove the most sensible, loyal and yet passionate in love, Anne and Sophia Croft. Sophia becomes a mentor to Anne and helps her discover her true footing in the world and her confidence to love and serve. Aptly, the name “Sophia” comes from the Greek meaning “wisdom.”

And the name “Anne”? It derives from the Hebrew for grace.

A coincidence, yet again, for a clergyman’s daughter – a woman with a talent for social satire and yet a heart for the truthfulness of God – writing into the end of her life?

In the Bible, Anna is the aged Jewish prophetess who finally beholds the infant Jesus at the temple. We don’t know much else about her except that she has been widowed seven years. Seven – interesting, given Anne Elliot’s and Captain Wentworth’s seven year deferment, a time of fallowness outwardly, perhaps, but a time within of deep harvesting and growth …

Seven years … recalling how long Jacob had to work in the fields to gain the hand of his beloved Rachel.

Twice fold.

Faithfulness and grace go hand in hand, so that no hands are left for bitterness, sadness, remorse, or worse.
2. There is no room for hypocrisy in true repentance: When regret doesn’t haunt us, when grace truly does “set us free,” we see how it brings us closer to God and so, closer to our true selves. For many of us, faith takes a long time to fully swallow … when we truly accept it, and forgive ourselves in the process, we are laid bare and yet perfectly accepted, from all sides and on all fronts – regardless of our earthly gender. Put another way in eternal symbolism, we become the Bride in the safety and love of our ever constant Groom.

3. Faithfulness never goes out of style: God’s enduring faithfulness becomes the template by which we should love one another and ourselves, after loving God first. As Scripture tells us. God knew us from the beginning of creation, from when we were stitched together in the womb, down to every hair on our heads. We will each receive the stone with our true names engraved thereon in our resurrected lives with Him – a secret, private, precious name – our true names – that only God and each person alone will know.

How many lives have been changed by a letter? Certainly, each of ours, when it comes to understanding the Gospel as God’s Word. When it comes to conceiving of His insertion into our space and time and suffering and infallibility through His living Word, His son, Jesus Christ.

Jesus – the very human, very living, very breathing, love letter – to each of us, Jew or Gentile, organic or grafted branch. It does not matter, as long as we believe in the One He has sent. “Dear” written on one hand in blood, in love, our true name written such on His other.

For, as Austen’s literally dying words never cease to remind me, when we accept the letter – these missives into the world in its various forms – like a breathless fiancé, we answer: 

Yes!

QUESTION TO PONDER: Where in your life have you allowed everyone or everything other than God to determine your choices? Are there places you harbor within where you haven’t allowed God’s grace to fully seep in and heal you? How have you responded to His very personal love letter?