In Our Time - Persuasion

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Jane Austen’s last complete novel, which was published just before Christmas in 1817, five months after her death. It is the story of Anne Elliot, now 27 and (so we are told), losing her bloom, and of her feelings for Captain Wentworth who she was engaged to, 8 years before – an engagement she broke off under pressure from her father and godmother. When Wentworth, by chance, comes back into Anne Elliot's life, he is still angry with her and neither she nor Austen's readers can know whether it is now too late for their thwarted love to have a second chance.The image above is from a 1995 BBC adaptation of the novel, with Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds WithKaren O’Brien Vice-Chancellor of Durham UniversityFiona Stafford Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of OxfordAndPaddy Bullard Associate Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of ReadingProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello, Persuasion, Jane Austen's last complete novel was published just before Christmas 1817, five months after her death. It's the story of Anne Elliott, now 27, and losing her bloom, we're told.

and have her feelings for the man she was engaged to eight years before, an engagement she broke off under family pressure. This first great love is Captain Wentworth, and when, by chance, he comes back into her life, still angry with her, she and we cannot know whether it's now too late for their love to have a second chance. With me to discuss persuasion of Fiona Stafford, Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, Patti Bullard, Associate Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Reading,

and Karen O'Brien, Vice-Chancellor of Durham University. Karen, one of Jane Austen's brothers, Henry, wrote a short biographical note of his sister in the first edition. Can you try the same? I will try a brief biographical notice. So, as you mentioned, Melvin, persuasion was published shortly after Jane Austen's death, and it was published jointly with an early novel called Northanger Abbey. Her elder brother Henry wrote a biographical preface for the first time revealing that Jane Austen was Jane Austen, because her previous five novels been published anonymously.

And he says a little bit about her life, the fact that she was the daughter of a vicar, that she grew up in rural Hampshire, that she led a quiet life, that she was unmarried. He claims that she was very devout and that she was very reluctant to claim her fame as a writer. This is not entirely true. She was very proud of her status as a professional writer,

but he paints her as an amiable, attractive, and rather inclusive character, but a deeply talented writer. And did she, do we evidence of her started writing when she was quite young and so on? She did. She was a brilliant teenage writer, extraordinarily witty. What do we have from her at that time? We have three volumes of fragments of parodies of contemporary fiction. We have early attempts at novels, including a novel that became known subsequently as Lady Susan.

We have a whole variety of writings that she stopped and started, as well as the insight that she did make early drafts of a novel called Eleanor and Marianne, that subsequently became Sense and Sensibility, and a novel called First Impressions, that subsequently became Pride and Prejudice, Alas, we don't have those manuscripts. Why did she not want to be known? Why would she insist on being anonymous for so long?

It was quite common practice of female novelists at the time. Some of them did put their names to novels, but many did not. And it was widely known by the time that she published persuasion, or published persuasion posthumously, that she was the author of some of those writings. But it was common practice, but she was nevertheless quite public. She was a visible social figure in London. She was approached by the Prince Regent to dedicate Emma to him.

So it was a conventional kind of animal. She was approached by the Prince Regent. She was approached by the Prince Regent's librarian to ask whether she would dedicate Emma to him as a way of glorifying his name, and she reluctantly agreed. It's a fairly simple plot. I outlined it. Does anything you want to add to my spare outline?

I think I'd like to say how the novel starts, because it starts on a very satirical note with Anne Elliott's father, Sir Walter Elliott, pouring over the baronetage, the book of his ancestry that proves that he got his title in the 17th century, and his whole world is about his pride. in his ancestry and in Kellynch Hall, which is their home. And then what subsequently happens is because he's so reckless with his expenditure, they have to let out Kellynch Hall.

And that really is what sets the plot in motion because they let out the hall to an Admiral, Admiral Croft, who has recently come back from the Napoleonic Wars. Remember that the novel is set in 1814 immediately after the Treaty of Paris, Napoleon's been exiled to Elbe, we're sometime before the Battle of Waterloo. And these naval officers are coming home. Admiral Croft rents out Kellynch Hall

and it's his brother-in-law Captain Wentworth who is the man to whom Anne had broken off her engagement some eight years before Captain Wentworth returns to their neighbourhood in Somersetshire and the plot goes from there Let's tell to you Fiona Why did Anne in the first place break off her engagement to Captain Wentworth

How much was this down to her? Well this has happened before the novel opens So we work it out from what is said eight years later. But she was 19 at the time. She'd lost her mother, age 14, and we get the sense of quite a vulnerable young person, who

has become very dependent on a kind of mother substitute called Lady Russell, who is a friend of her mother's, who very much disapproves of the match. And Anne's father, as well, Sir Walter Elliot, who is satirised at the beginning, as Karen just said, also disapproves. So she really

doesn't have anybody on her side and she's persuaded, even though she's deeply in love with him, to break off the engagement. And I think we have to remember that at this time, age 19, she really needs parental consent. She hasn't got any independent income of her own. Her father is not going to give her any money. And at that stage of the novel,

Captain Wentwith isn't a captain. He's a young lieutenant. He thinks he's going to do very well, and so it proves. But from Lady Russell's point of view, there's no guarantee that it will. So it's a highly risky marriage as far as she's concerned. And I think Anne is keen to please, and she sort of is persuaded by them.

But by the time the novel opens, she's already regretted it. Yeah, she's spent years and years regretting this decision. So that's when we meet her, really. But she acceded to the decision. She did, she did. And that's why Captain Wentworth is very angry. I mean, he went off, heartbroken. and is still angry with her when he returns to Somerset years later.

Can you describe a bit more detail how he blew back into her life? Yes, well, when Sir Walter has to rent out Kellynch Hall because of his extravagance, it's just after... So he goes out in order to rent it to get rid of his debts? Yes. And he goes to Bath and rent something likely less expensive, which doesn't, and so on. That's exactly it. And he can get quite a good income because Kellynch Hall is a fine house.

And because this coincides with the end of the war, there are quite a lot of naval officers who have done very well, including Admiral Croft. So he comes and rents Kellynch Hall and is just about acceptable as a tenant as far as the world is concerned. And Admiral Croft is married to Mrs. Croft, and she is the sister of Captain Wentworth. So it's a nice plot contrivance,

which means that Captain Wentworth comes to visit, and that's how he comes back into and into Anne's life. But he has no idea this is going to happen and she has no idea that that's going to happen. No, I mean Captain Wentworth, once he knows that his sister is at Kellynch Hall, will remember very well that he's visited there and that it's Anne's home. And he won't know whether he's going to meet Anne or not at that point, but he very soon discovers because when they move out, although Sir Walter moves with his favourite daughter Elizabeth and sister to Bath,

Anne goes to stay with her younger sister, who lives quite near Kellyn. She goes to up across to stay with her sister Mary, which means that she's in the area so that when Captain Wentworth comes to visit his sister, they're perfectly positioned to meet up. And during that time, Anne has been faithful, constant and put it on. Yes, that is a very good summary. And she's also turned down another proposal from Charles Musgrove, because she's still, he doesn't match up to Wentworth. That's the thing with that.

And having turned him down, she doesn't meet anyone else who comes anywhere near him. So it's a pretty sad backstory. Paddy, Paddy, Paddy, Bernard. Can we talk about the two forces that impact on Anne? One is her father, Sir Walter Elliot, Baroness. How does Austin present him? Novelists are supposed to show and not tell, aren't they?

But Austin tells us exactly what to think about Sir Walter. She says, vanity was the beginning and end of Sir Walter Elliott's character, vanity of person and vanity of situation. So vanity of person, he's a very handsome man, still a fine gentleman we're told at 54, and he knows it, and he judges absolutely everyone he encounters by the standards of his own good looks. Basically, vanity of situation, it's his inherited wealth,

Kellynch Hall, the large house, and the baronessie as well. The baronessy was the lowest rank of the inherited titles, although you wouldn't know it from the way that Sir Walter carries on. What this allows Austin to do is it sets her up for some really good jokes at the beginning of the novel, basically. It's quite a familiar joke, familiar from Stearns-Tristram Shandy. Basically, every situation that Sir Walter encounters, he's stuck on this hobby horse and has to talk about it

in terms of good looks and rank. So when it turns out that these naval gentlemen are going to come and rent his family home, all he can talk about is how being in the naval profession means that your complexion gets destroyed by travelling, and how annoyed he is that when he goes down to London, he has to give way to recently ennobled naval heroes, which he resents very much. So it's a funny gambit for Austin. She, you know, she starts with these very good jokes, but you do get the feeling with Sir Walter that he's a character who stepped out of a,

an 18th century novel, which is odd because we think of persuasion as her most 19th century novel because of the depth of psychological field. Let's go a bit more deeply into his reasons for despising the Navy, which was the toast of England at that time for the victory of Trafalgo a bit far back, but still there and the other victories. The Navy is set up by Austin as it's clearly set up as a sort of counterpoint and contrast with the Elliot family. There are lots of naval characters in the novel.

They form a sort of family ranking. There's Admiral Croft and Sophie Croft, his wife at the top, with the sort of parent figures. It's very important to count Mrs. Croft as one of the naval people. We're told we see her late on in the novel, in the middle of a knot of admirals talking with as much intelligence and animation as any of them, because, of course, she's been on board. She's sailed with Admiral Croft.

The other naval characters that we encounter include Wentworth, obviously, and then there's a gaggle of slightly more minor characters, Captain Harville and Captain Benick. And they form this warm-blooded, generous, amusing, welcoming, informal family, which contrasts very much with the insufferable coldness and formality of her real family. But he also dislikes the Navy because it promotes people with no distinguished background to distinguish officers like Admiral and thing like that. Yes, that's absolutely right.

it was very expensive to become an army officer in the way that Austin's elder brother, Henry did. You had to pay mess bills, you had to buy expensive uniforms, and you had to purchase a commission. Younger brothers could get into the Navy because it was relatively cheap. Austin knows all about this, because her two brothers who are nearest to her in age, two of her six brothers, Frank and Charles,

are naval officers themselves. So Frank retires many years after Austin's death There's Sir Francis Austin, senior admiral of the fleet. And her younger brother, Charles as well, while Austin was writing persuasion, Charles was shipwrecked in the Mediterranean of Smyrna, and he never got another command again. So the naval life she knew was hazardous and prone to disappointments. He despise the Navy because your complexion was ruined.

That's the most important thing, yes, absolutely. No amount of Gowlands lotion can solve that particular problem. So this was absolutely terrible. So that was where he started from. Karen, Karen of mine, what's she doing, Anne, when she's mulling over or enduring, those seven or eight years when she has split up and went for this? Because the intensity of it is almost disturbing. She's so intensely in love with him.

And she has to bear that every day, and you feel for it very keenly. We have the sense of a deeply withdrawn person with a very highly developed inner life who has been somewhat silenced within her own family, one of the most common words in the entire novel is nothing and it's a word that's associated with Anne as well as with other characters it's very interesting that the first time we actually hear her speaking directly in terms of direct speech she's talking about the Navy

so there's an ongoing obsession that's the first time we actually hear from man she sort of follows his career doesn't she? She follows his career through the naval list and she's very aware of what's become of Captain Wentworth but she has ceased to engage with her own family but in the process she's developed a degree of autonomy. So the young woman who, out of a sense of duty to her family and also a sense of regard for Wentworth himself,

gave up on the engagement, is someone who is very disinclined at this point in her life history to take any orders from anyone. And we see someone acting very independently throughout the novel with very little regard for what her father may think for rank, social niceties, anything else. So in the process of becoming withdrawn, she's become peculiarly autonomous

and she's developed a very intense in a life, but she's deeply reticent. So when Wentworth first appears, I think she senses his anger, his resentment, his feeling that she's been feeble, which is still palpable to her, and she very much avoids talking to him. But he keeps coming upon her in kind of sudden ways,

suddenly bursting into a room and resting a two-year-old child who's climbed onto her back and suddenly helping her into a carriage. So there's a sort of a physical responsiveness that she's also developed and an acute, almost overdeveloped auditory sense of this noisy world around her. All through the novel we hear about the buzz of noises around her in a kind of auditory landscape. And she's fighting for a kind of inner reserve

and inner self-preservation in a noisy realm. And she endures these two absolutely terrible sisters. She has this terrible older sister Elizabeth who is chip off the old block, who is just as snobbish as her father is, and a younger sister Mary who is married to Charles Marsgrove, this gentleman that she rejected. and Mary is less obnoxious but deeply self-pitying, self-important and obsessed with her own precedence.

And keeps handing over all responsibilities. Yes, that's right. Fiona, how does Jane Austen convey the idea to us that this is all too late? He's come back far too late. She's been away far too long. She's had to endure far too much. I think it's to do with the way Anne perceives herself and in relation to other characters and the way they perceive her too. I mean, when there are evening dances at the Musgroves,

the senior Musgroves, that's Charles's parents. The younger women, Louisa and Henrietta, they're always ready to dance. And Anne always chooses to be the pianist. She plays rather than dancing or rather than joining in. So there is that sense among her circle that she's somehow, her dancing days are over at the age of 27. So there's that sense that everything has happened and she's sort of missed out in some way

because she's had this romance and then nothing for eight and a half years. And now here she is in her late 20s, just prepared to sort of observe and act as an aunt as Karen says. But I think we also get that sense in the settings of the novel as well because it's unusual in the very specific November settings

and so there's a very kind of memorable scene where they go for a walk and Anne is, she's very preoccupied with the, the tawny leaves and the withered hedges and, you know, in her mind are all these quotations from poems. We don't actually get them, but we know that's what's going on in her mind, all about how spring and youth and hope are fled. So there's that sense of belatedness being magnified in the landscape as well. And then when they moved down to Lime Regis, that they have a very sort of important excursion to Lime Regis, they get there too late in the season.

It's November in a seaside town. Everybody else has gone. So that sense of belatedness is there in her situation, in her perception of herself, but also it's kind of magnified by the settings as well. Penny, the group travels to Lime Regis, why did you go and the big thing that happened there, could you tell us about that? Absolutely. There's no doubt that those two chapters at the end of Volume 1 set in Lime Regis of the fulcrum around which the narrative of persuasion turns. It's very, very romantic indeed. The setting of the town itself, which Austin describes very well, the Cobb, the famous, this famous medieval

jetty that goes out into the sea, and the countryside around it as well, which is particularly appreciated by Wentworth. And Austin describes it in language, which seems very closely related to the language of Coleridge in Kubla Khan, sort of deep romantic chasins and so forth. There are three absolutely crucial things that happen in Lange's. The first is that Anne meets the naval people. And I think the most important of the, naval officers she meets is Benick. Benick, like her, has been heartbroken. He was engaged to Captain Harville's sister, Fanny Harville, but she died, and he is a reader and a thinker. So it looks as though he's being set up as the ideal partner for Anne. But the really interesting thing that

happens is that they get to discuss poetry, which she enjoys very much. They discuss Swalter Scott and Byron. But what she takes away from it, is that she is much cleverer and much wiser and just generally a more substantial person. The other thing is that she has the sea air and her complexion comes back, her beauty comes back, and they're walking on the cob, and a tall-dark stranger sees her, there is a moment of attraction, basically. And the attraction doesn't matter. What matters is that Wentworth notices the man noticing her,

and it's the old Freudian maxim of desire being imitative. It seems to be that shared glance that re-sparked. his interest in it as well. Louisa Musgrove, who is, Wentworth is conducting a not very well-advised flirtation with her. He and she have

this sort of running theme to their friendship about determination. And so she firmly decides that she wants to be jumped off the cob. And she jumps a moment too soon. Wentworth doesn't quite get to her and she falls to the ground, lifeness. And it turns out that she has

a severe contusion, a concussion. a concussion. It's supposed to be... How does Anne reactivist? The one person who keeps her head is Anne and Wentworth notices it as well. And this is the final confirmation of her returning spirits

and her returning strength. Thank you. Karen, how does Austin use moments like this to explore her characters? Especially moving from one place to another. Well, as Puddy says this particular episode shows that Anne possesses the quality that Wentworth says he likes, which is strength of mind. This is a drama that's also

set within a geography and just after Lyme the second volume of the novel, it's a novel in two parts shifts to Bath. The Lyme geography is a liminal geography between the land and the sea. They go to Bath because where he led to Kellynch Hall, he goes to Bath because it's going to be cheaper. That's right. So Walter has rented

a flat in Camden Place. It's a rented place. He's rather proud of it, but it really is only quite a come down from Kellynch Hall. And after the incident where Louisa survives the accident, she moves from that liminal space between the sea and the land and lime to the much more constrained environment of Bath.

She's there for quite a long time, and during that time she gets to know her cousin, who is Sir Walter's heir presumptive, Sir William Elliot. He seems like quite an attractive character. He's the character who exchanged the meaningful glance with Anne in Lyme, but she learns eventually the truth about him, that he's really quite a conventional villain,

and he's generally a very unreliable character. Wentworth and the family party do come to Bath, and Wentworth's feelings for Anne are activated by his growing jealousy of Elliot. He sees the interest that Elliot has in marrying Anne and that in turn I think along with the perception of her as a not feeble character really reignites his growing passion for her and we have a series of encounters, some of them verbal,

some of them just those moments of coinciding at concerts and seeing each other in the street where he slowly comes back to that realization that he would like to reignite his relationship with her. Because from the beginning he, the bold young man has thought what a wimpish wretch is not to stand up against Lady Russell and marry him and get on with life. He has, and it's very late in the novel that he also acknowledges that he lacked firmness,

that when he won his first batch of prize money on a ship called the Laconia, he did come back on shore during the Napoleonic Wars, and if he'd come back to Anne at that point and asked her to marry him, she most certainly would have said yes. So I think eventually he recognises that he has some part to play and has exercised some feebleness in his own right. Her strength is, I think, in never blaming anybody. One might well in her position of blame Lady Russell,

for the persuasion after the marriage. She doesn't fester with resentment the way that he does. There's a kind of moral fortitude that he lacks. Yes, and she has it in tons. Fiona, can you tell us something about Captain Harville and why is important? Captain Harville is a friend of Captain Wentworth, and he is the reason that they all go down to Lyme Regis, because that's where Captain Harville has rented accommodation,

and we infer from details in the text that he is, he has a lot of less money than Captain Wentworth. He hasn't been so lucky with prizes. And he's also been seriously wounded and he has a disability. So he's now on half pay and he has his family and he's in this very small, unfashionable cottage in Lyme Regis. But when Anne and the party arrive in Lyme, he's very hospitable and so is his wife. They invite them in.

And it's a revelation to Anne really because she's used to her father and her elder sister and very grand ideas of entertainment. And this is a tiny cottage, but because the Harvils are so warm and welcoming, they just have everybody come in and it's very small. And she's so impressed, by the way, Captain Harville has fitted up his cottage and how busy he is. And there's a lovely line he drew and he varnished and he carpentered and he glued. He's busy sort of making shelves and he's keeping the cold out and really sort of creating

this incredibly sort of warm, welcoming. kind of ideal family, completely the opposite of the grandeur of Kellynch. And when Anne goes from Lyme to Bath, as Karen's just been describing, when she gets there, she's back in these immensely sort of formal. And she now sees as rather kind of artificial, and I think she sees it as superficial rooms that her father and her sister are inhabiting and their whole kind of life seems a bit empty compared with Captain Harville. And he's a very important character a little bit later on in the novel. Patty, when this story moves Prince William to Bath, what does that reveal?

We've had some of it there, but could you take that on? It's certainly a move from a romantic landscape that we have around Lyme to a much more formal landscape, isn't it? It's also interesting that, and just to go back very briefly to Kellynch Hall, of all the big houses in Austin's novels, Kellynch Hall is the one that we know least about. A lot of readers of Jane Austenville that they could do a guided tour of Pemberley from Brayette.

Pride and Prejudice or Donwell Abbey from Emma. Kellynch we know very, very little about. By the time we get to Bath, suddenly Austin is writing with great specificity and you can trace her roots and the roots of all the characters through the various streets. Everyone is in the right bit of Bath. So the Elliot's are in Camden Place, which is this lofty northern amphitheatre. Views not quite so good as a Royal Crescent, we're told, which seems absolutely right, top of the second division for the Elliotts.

Lady Dalrymple, who's a sort of toothless version of Lady Catherine de Bourg from Pride and Prejudice. She's in Laura Place, which is this fashionable area. Everything's specified. There's the climactic scene, of course, in the White Heart Inn, which is opposite the pump room. I've come to that later. But when they get to Bath, do they change their characters? And one of the interesting things about Bath is that there's this municipal ideology that's inherited from the 18th century when it was originally designed by John Wood and when Bow Nash was in charge of.

the assembly rooms. There was an idea that you went to Bath and the gradations of rank didn't matter quite so much that everything was ruled by etiquette and different ranks of people could mingle in the pump room and in other places. And this is very important for Austin because it means that she can introduce Anne into the sort of busy places that Karen was talking about. And there's a general circulation which absolutely transforms Anne. It means that all of that fortitude that she's gathered in solitude can actually be tested in a place of social jeopardy, I suppose. And once again, she finds that she has the strength to maneuver through that landscape. Yes, and she enjoys it and she's, as it were, if one can use this phrase in that

context, she's good at it. She's good at it, definitely. I would go as far as to say, there's a reversal of roles because in the first volume of the novel, it's Anne who's always embarrassed and reticent around Wentworth. He comes to Bath, and it's precisely the reverse. She's got a degree of social confidence. He's now starting to doubt himself and doubt whether he might have a serious rival in Mr. Elliot. And there's a very nice reversal of, there are scenes of him actually blushing and scenes of him being tongue-tied and jealous and leaving a concert precipitately. So there's a very neat mirroring of the first volume in the second volume. Does that surprise you that he's turned so quickly and so completely? He does everything quickly. Everything he does,

I mean, it's part of the incredible narrative pace, the elliptical style of the novel, that everything he does happens at enormous pace. So he suddenly appears, he suddenly comes into different rooms, he suddenly changes his feelings, he's a man of quite extraordinary decisiveness, and that's reflected in the very rapid staging. It's a tremendously condensed narrative all the way through, and that reflects the kind of decisiveness and pace around Captain Wentworth, the atmosphere around him. And Anne changes her pace considerably in Bath, doesn't she? She changes her pace, yes, she does, yes, and she becomes a much more confident character, but she's also gaining intelligence about the social world that she's in.

But she carries with her that sense of that expansive space of the Navy that she encountered in Lyme. And it's a very interesting sense of global expansiveness in the novel generally. We get this outlying geography that's the geography of the Empire and Napoleonic Wars and it's referenced constantly. But actually in persuasion it's an expansiveness that comes back into Anne as a sense of the possibility of a warm, affectionate life that she's lacked hitherto. What does Mrs Smith bring? She brings a sense of revisiting...

This is a very poor woman, disabled. Yes, she is, yes. Out of all the current stream, so she has to be sought out and brought in. She's a school friend, so I think she brings a point of connection with the life that Anne had before her mother died, back in the school days, but also around the time that her mother died. She brings a sense of camaraderie, a sense that Anne can reach across social boundaries because Mrs Smith is very much her social inferior and her father comments on her visiting Mrs. Smith in this very, undesirable address at which she resides,

but Anne has now got the courage of her social expansiveness that she's no longer concerned with hierarchy. But she also clearly brings the backstory around Elliot and understanding the background around the man who is to inherit Kellynch Hall. I think it's very striking as well with Mrs Smith because of her mobility issues. Anne has to go and visit her, doesn't she?

And I think that is one of the things we find in Bath that Anne is making the decisions about where she's going to go and she goes and visits people. and that's very different, isn't it? I agree, because I think a lot of this novel is about positively representing mobility and deracination. You know, moving from owned to rented accommodation, moving through space, is very positively represented in a way that you don't see in a lot of Jane Austen's previous novels. Do you want to take us to the key scene, really, or one of the key scenes?

Probably the key scene. It's in something called rather bluntly by Jane Austen, I think, White Hart. Which I believe was the name of a real... Even so it's pretty convenient. But it's very well chosen and obviously White Hart has... So she rings lots of bells with...

Can you just set the White Heart scene for us, please? Yes, well, Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove, who Anne knows from Upper Cross and of the parents of her brother-in-law Charles and Louisa and Henrietta, Louisa, who had her nasty accident at Lyme. They've come to Bath and Anne go to... to visit them, which gives her an opportunity to go into this inn. She was supposed to be going

to see Lady Russell, but she much prefers to go and see the Musgraves, which I think is significant. Why? Because it shows that she's getting more independent of Lady Russell, which is crucial in Bath, and she's not doing what her father and her sister would want her to do. She's going to see the people she's particularly fond of and while she's there Captain Wentworth and Captain Harville visiting

and they Captain Harville's come to Bath on business because he has a portrait of Captain Benick which was done for his sister who Captain Benning had been engaged to and now he's having to get it framed for another woman

and that starts a conversation between Captain Harville and Anne about male and female constancy. In another part of the pub. In another part of the pub, but in the same room, and Captain Wentworth is there apparently writing a letter to Benick

about this business that Captain Harville is engaged with. And Anne and Harville have one of the most important exchanges in the novel, which is about whether men or women are more constant in love. And she makes some very sort of striking remarks about this. And she is very sort of resolute and rational in her. her argument and all the time Captain Wentworth is listening she doesn't realise that he

is, he's writing a letter and seems to be very busy and not taking much notice of her but then he has apparently finished his letter Captain Harvin, Captain Wentworth Leave the Room. Can you just give a list of a few bullet points from this conversation because

it's the most crucial it's the conversation isn't it really and what is she saying that is striking and particularly striking is it turns out, very soon after it, a few minutes after it, Paul Wentworth. She is making a case for the constancy of women. Captain Harville says he could, you know, give lots and lots of examples from books about

female inconstancy. There's a long literary tradition of female inconstancy. And Anne won't have that. She says, oh, no, I won't have any examples from books. You know, men have always had the advantage of us in telling their own story. education has been there so much hard degree, the pen has been in their hands. And Captain Harville

is quite startled by this, but he is gradually persuaded by her arguments. And she's not saying that men don't feel anything. She eventually just says that all she claims for her own sex is of

loving longest. When existence and hope, hope are gone. And Captain Harville says, you know, well, when he thinks of his poor sister who is dead and Benick now being engaged to somebody else, he's silenced. And that's the end of the conversation. But we learn that it's having a tremendous effect on Compton Wetworth, who is overhearing this, because he then leaves the room and then about 30 seconds later rushes back pretending he's forgotten his gloves and gives Anne a

letter and it turns out that he's actually been really writing a letter to her when he seems to have been writing a letter to Benham. and then she opens the letter and she's reading it even though Mrs Musgrave is still in the room and it is this declaration of love and it's a very very startling moment in the novel

I think we may have sported the plot for everybody Paddy we perhaps hope this would happen I mean this yearning would happen but does Orson drip clues along the way that it will happen I think she does yes it's interesting hearing Funia described that scene because it reminds me

how cleverly Austin counterpoises it with an earlier scene, the walk by Winthrop where Anne is essentially concealed in a holly bush and overhears a conversation between Louisa Musgrove and Wentworth where Wentworth

he picks a hazelnut from a bush and says this hazelnut is the symbol of what I think human beings should be firm. It is as happy as a hazelnut can be in its completeness. And I think at that point,

Wentworth doesn't realise that he's actually describing Anne, who is listening concealed on the other side of the hedge. Is she concealed? When you tell the listeners, if she concealed because she's sneaking or she concealed because she's got there accidentally? Oh, she's concealed. No, no, she's always above board. She's almost too perfect, Anne. It's just coincidence that she happens to be sat under the bush. But there's no doubt that this is, that the scene at the White Heart is a sort of fulfillment of that prefiguration. And of course,

the roles are reversed yet again, as Karen was saying. And this time Anne is in the right situation. And it is simply one of the most touching scenes in all of English literature. I would agree that it is the most extraordinary scene. It's this simultaneous orchestration of someone writing, two people talking, noises everybody in this simultaneous present, intensified to the writing of this letter. It is doubly extraordinary because we actually have the cancelled final two chapters that Austin originally wrote, which were much more conventional, and was a reunion scene, a confession of love. And the fact that she came back a month or so later and rewrote that scene with this extraordinary use of the letter embedded within live dialogue that makes it just a marvel of her pro style and of her evolution as an artist.

And that's where they come together and we've stayed together. Can we just switch for a little moment? we haven't spent long with the less endearing characters there are plenty of those she does take an aim at some of them can you give the listeners I don't know the book some idea of what she says about some of the less endearing characters there are lots of less endearing characters I wouldn't say vicious but it's sharp

it is very sharp and satirical there are quite a number of them as ever with Austin they're very beautifully differentiated my least favourite character is her older sister Elizabeth who is the most sterile status obsessed uninteresting character, except that, as with Anne, Austin gives us a little bit of the flavour of her inner life.

And there's a point when Elizabeth, who is obsessed with social niceties, is wondering whether she should ask her sister and the Musgrove family to dinner, and then it's reasoning with herself internally that dinners are not the thing for people like this, let's just have an afternoon tea or a soire or something. And that ridiculous, preposterous, pompous internal reasoning

is given to us in that very satirical vein. So we get a particular insight into that character. So she's my least favourite. William Elliott is just a conventional villain. He's cautious on the surface and a blackguard underneath. But Elizabeth is an interesting kind of villain. Well, you've only mentioned, to mind, there aren't many characters, really. But you haven't choked up many of that.

Well, we could say a little bit more about her self-pitying hypochondriac's sister Mary, who, as we've noted, is a very indifferent sort of mother. So what's she looking for in a character? When she doesn't like them, why doesn't she like them? Is it something that they have in common that she doesn't like? Austin is always, always looking for warmth and affectionateness, and she's quite tolerant. There's an explicit paragraph where we're told that Anne tolerates people

who are a little bit spontaneous, might occasionally say the wrong thing, but actually that spontaneity is a fault in the right direction. So all through Austin's fiction, I think that familiar warmth, that bond between sisters, that openness to people from different backgrounds, it's a constant theme. It's embodied in what you might say is quite an uncritical way in the Navy in this novel, but the Navy symbolises a kind of brotherliness that she thinks is actually a blueprint for the English nation.

There's one baddie who's very interesting, written, slightly underwritten by Austin, I think, but Mrs Clay, Penelope Clay, who eventually ends up with William Elliott and she's another one of these sorts of, she's very cautious and constantly listening, and you get a tremendous sense of her intelligence, but she's definitely a badden as well.

and in the end, William Elliott has to insert himself into the Elliot family. It takes a spy to catch a spy, I think, is what happens there. But she's fascinating. But Austin doesn't really flesh her out. She has the potential to be like one of her great grotesques, like, I don't know, Mrs Elton from Emma or something like that. But she's never quite developed in the novel. Fiona, would you call it a radical novel, persuasion?

I would call it a radical novel, yes, in lots of ways. think the social critique is quite radical of inherited wealth and families and titles in this period. That is quite radical and the satire is very strong and the setting that against Captain Wentworth, who rises because of his own talents is basically the kind of structure of the novel. So it's radical in that sense. But I think it's also radical in its style. I think it's very experimental because it's her last completed. novel and it was published with that

biographical notice that Karen was talking about, I think people right from the beginning have thought of it as her last work and there's been a sort of sense that somehow maybe her powers were failing. But actually I think it's incredibly experimental. I think she's doing all sorts of things that she hasn't done in her

other novels, that kind of intense focus on Anne Elliott's suffering and the way there's this sort of backstory that dominates the whole novel. There's all kinds of things that I think are very experimental. The use of the letter that we've just been talking about, that's

so powerful because it comes in and it's almost as if Captain Wentworth is suddenly speaking directly to the reader. So there's no narrator, there's no filter. There's all sorts of devices like that that I think are very experimental and you really see

Austin trying all kinds of new things. Do you think that with many of the end now, do you think that the fact that that she was very ill and knew she was very and then died before the novel's purpose. Do you think that had an effect on her? It's not clear because she only really started to get symptoms

towards the end of the writing period. The writing period was a year between 1815 and 1816, and it was really only in that summer that she started to get symptoms. So I think we've got to be careful about any kind of extrapolation. I think nevertheless she's thinking about aging, about probably having passed the point where she herself is likely to marry, so I think that's not an unreasonable biographical extrapolation. Yeah.

What do you think about that, Patti? I think it's certainly interesting to think about persuasion as an example of late style more generally. What do you think about this presence of her being affected by her illness? Affected by her illness. Well, as Karen says, the symptoms of the illness really start manifesting themselves in the spring of 1816. And I think they were possibly compounded by a series of disasters in the family. I see. You know, Charles is shipwrecked.

Her banker brother Henry, with whom she's very... very, very close indeed, is declared bankrupt. So it's quite extraordinary that she kept her spirit up towards the end, I think. And there's possibly a real effort to do that. And of course, that is one of the topics of the novel as well. I think the fact that they end up in Bath as well, which was where people went because they were poorly. I think that is actually quite relevant.

And the fact that when in Bath, instead of being poorly, and blooms. I think there's a kind of defiance of illness in that end bit, which I think actually may well be to do with her own sort of sense of her illness. Final word? This is a wonderful novel, and it's an enormous pity that Jane Austen didn't live to develop artistically further. I don't think it's late style. I think the evidence from the next novel she was drafting Sanderson is that she would develop again in new and radical ways.

She'd get much more interested in the entrepreneurial and professional middle classes, that she had a new kind of vision of England and a new stylistic evolution to offer. it's not a late style. It's just an abrupt termination. Thank you very much. Thank you, Karen, Karen O'Brien, Fiona Stafford and Paddy Bullard, and our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram. Next week, the Great Stink in the hot summer of 1858, when the Thames in London was choked with warm, poisonous sewage, until the great engineer Joseph Battledgett came to the rescue. Thank you for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did you want to say that you haven't had time to say? Well, I wanted to come back on Karen's point about it being late style. I know. Well, there has to be something. I know that I knew that the Sanderson point is a very important one. Obviously, that's a sort of return to the Saturday.

You wanted to come back on what point? Late style. On late style. You have to disagree sometimes. It's true. It's true. I just didn't get the chance of disagree. I thought we covered an awful lot of ground.

I was really delighted to have gotten to style. And I was really glad that we did that final scene justice because it's such an incredible feat of writing, I think. Just love it. It's worth dwelling. Yeah. Anything else? You've got a bit of work to do, you know.

This podcast doesn't make itself. Okay. My thesis about it being late style, I mean, people often talk about Shakespeare's romance and problem plays as being the sort of great example of late style. And Edward Said talks about Shakespeare's return. a parable and fable in those plays and his pursuit of harmony. And I think you could argue that something similar is happening in persuasion.

And so many of the scenes have, they almost have this sort of symbolic chart. You don't think of Austin as a symbolist, but they seem to have a symbolic charge in excess of their narrative purpose. So the scene that Karen mentioned when Anne is in up across cottage and little Walter Musgrove climbs onto her back and she can't get him off. And he takes the child off and she suddenly feels this release. Release, yes, absolutely. And it's called Walter as well.

It's like the father gripping her neck. Absolutely, absolutely. And he comes in and releases her. And there is a symbolic child. Every tiny detail has a symbolic child. I think she's got Sinbad the sailor in the 2001 knights with the old man of the sea on his back that he can't get off somewhere in the back.

And that may sound absurd, but sure enough, at the end of the novel, She references Princess Scheherazard and heads coming off. So it's not completely, it's not completely implausible. But she was only 41, wasn't she? And she had been writing at a tremendous rate. You know, she publishes Pride and Prejudice, then she writes Mansfort, then she writes Emma,

then she writes Persagian. So there is this tremendous energy. So I think I'm more wrong with Karen on that. She's experimenting. And I think you're absolutely right. she's doing all kinds of things and persuasion that are different from what she's done before. But I'm a bit reluctant to think of it as late,

except by accident. After Persuasion did the sale of her books and her reputation take off? Quite slowly. She had some very significant champions. There had been a very good review of Emma by Walter Scott in 1816, and Thomas Bamington-McCauley was a brilliant champion of her work,

as was Margaret Oliphant, who wrote utterly Brilliant review, actually, of her cynical, satirical style. So she had her champions during the 19th century, and her novels were consolidated into a sort of box set in, I think, about the 1830, something like that. Yeah, 1833. But it's quite a slow burn throughout the 19th century. Ian Forster again, Pigsaw-Hawston is a great writer in the early 20th century. But the real take-off is the mid-20th century.

But they are comparing her with Shakespeare. I mean, the people who admire her and see her quality, are seeing absolute kind of grandeur in her work. So what's the grandeur in the style or in the subject? I suppose it's both really. Yeah, I think so. And I think the timelessness of the characters as well, that sort of sense of being able to create human nature

that will be recognisable in all ages, which indeed it is. You wanted to say something? Well, I was just going to add to what Karen said about the Victorian reception, which is very interesting. The Walter Scott Review and the Quarterly is continued by,

a man called Richard Waitley, who's Archbishop of Dublin. And he thinks that persuasion is his favourite of all the novels. And it's quite interesting to see that, you know, the next review that comes along is from G.E. Lewis, who thinks it's the worst of the novels. It seems to be a great divide.

And I wonder if that has something to do with it being paired with North Anger Abbey, that when you were in the 19th century, there was a slight sense that that volume was the leftover pieces slightly. It possibly creates, They work together very nicely. As far as we know, she chose that pairing because North Angraby had been knocking around unpublished for some years. There was a decision to publish them together.

She's very careful. There's a preface to North Angrabri where she explains that this is 13 years ago. So it's quite that's that sort of time lapse question as well that you get in persuasion. And obviously both novels have a very significant bath setting. So it's a good juxtaposition, actually. Yeah. And she retrieved the manuscript of what became North Angerabi while she was writing Persuels. Asian, didn't she, I think. So she had been rereading it, and I think that might have

influenced some of the, some of the bath scenes that probably brought it all very vividly back. Oh, yes, you, sorry, have to you, Penny. Sorry, Melvin. I was just going to say that it does certainly bring out something that we might have talked about in the podcast, which is the Quicksot theme that's very pronounced in North Anger Abbey, this idea that you can become obsessed by books and that it can change you psychologically. That there are sort of elements of that underground in persuasion as well, aren't there? I mean, it's clear that Anne has been sort of self-medicating on poetry during the intervening eight and a half years. And again, part of the thrust of the novel is her beginning to realize that that cultivation that she's

had is necessary but not sufficient to her happiness. That seems to be a point which corresponds, again, quite nicely with the quick sort theme in Northangar Abbey. One area of the novel we could bring out a bit more strongly is the chronological precision. It's very, very carefully located at the point where Napoleon has been defeated and sent Elba, but before he comes back for the hundred days, Austin is obviously writing after the Napoleon Wars, Napoleon Wars are fully over. The final couple of sentences of the novel allude to the fact that there may be a remobilisation. There wasn't in fact of the Navy, but there was a further chapter in the Napoleonic Wars. And so I think it's important to think about that very contemporary historical backdrop

and what history means to the lives of characters. We talked about Walter Scott having reviewed. Austin, Austin was very aware that Walter Scott had written his first historical novel Waverley in 1814. She said it was really quite indecent and unfair of him to be a novelist as well as a great poet. And actually thereafter, there's often this tendency in the 19th century to juxtapose Scott, the historical novelist with Jane Austen the Social Observer novelist. And I think it's just very interesting to think about

the role of the historical backdrop in this novel. There's that fantastic phrase when Wentworth and Anne are reunited and it's so different from the earlier rewrite of that chapter. She says, they returned again into the past. And the past is a space.

It's not a continuum. And there's just a very, very different sense of how personal and private lives relate to the great historical movements of time. In Walter Scott, it's one great tide that carries you forward. In Austin, it's something in some ways that you retreat from, and you create your own space outside of. Okay, unless there's anything urgent you'd like to add,

I see the producer disappearing, and therefore he's looking for... Here he is, Simon. Would anyone like to your coffee? Some tea would be lovely. Tea, please. Yeah, that'd be lovely, thank you. We can only drink tea after talking about Jane. in our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.

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