Hugh Thomson, engraving for chapter 23 of Persuasion, 1987: “He drew out a letter from beneath the scattered paper, positioned it earlier than Anne with eyes of glowing entreaty fastened on her for a time.” Public area.
Anne Elliot is twenty-seven. She’s been twenty-seven since 1817, the yr Jane Austen’s Persuasion was printed. I, in the meantime, was someplace round sixteen after I first learn the e book in my outdated childhood bed room, with its inexperienced partitions and arboreal wallpaper. I left the e book alone after that, for nearly twenty years, as a result of it made me too unhappy. However after I turned twenty-seven I felt Anne Elliot slide into place alongside me. And after I turned twenty-eight, I felt her fall behind me.
Persuasion begins after the tip of a love story: Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth had been briefly engaged eight years previous to the e book’s starting. Underneath stress from an older household good friend, Woman Russell, who didn’t view Wentworth as an acceptable social match, Anne jilted him. However the years move by, and the 2 are unexpectedly reunited. Anne has by no means stopped loving him; Wentworth, now a captain within the navy, has by no means forgiven her. “She had used him sick,” Wentworth broods to himself, “abandoned and disillusioned him; and worse, she had shewn a feebleness of character in doing so, which his personal determined, assured mood couldn’t endure.” He’s performed along with her, he tells himself after they see one another once more: “Her energy with him was gone for ever.”
In fact, he’s fallacious. Over the course of Persuasion, he falls again in love along with her (or perhaps simply admits he’s by no means stopped loving her) and he or she proves her steadfastness. They forgive one another—he for her weak spot and he or she for his hardness—and Wentworth will finally throw himself on Anne’s mercy in considered one of Austen’s most romantic scenes, proclaiming himself “half agony, half hope.” She takes him again, they marry, and all is fortunately ever after. Why did this story, which is so completely satisfied, make me so unhappy? Why did I overlook so many particulars of Persuasion’s story over time, however unfailingly keep in mind that Anne Elliot is twenty-seven? Once I was twenty-eight, I informed a good friend that I used to be in limbo between Anne and Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart, who’s twenty-nine. Now my Lily Bart yr, too, has come and gone.
***
References to age pepper Persuasion’s early pages—I couldn’t inform you the ages of another Austen characters off the highest of my head, however on this novel, they’re distinguished and unavoidable. Anne’s shallow older sister Elizabeth is twenty-nine. There’s their father, Sir William, who “had been remarkably good-looking in his youth; and, at fifty-four, was nonetheless a really superb man.” Austen makes the purpose that Elizabeth and Sir William look good for his or her respective ages very clear (whereas Anne seems prematurely outdated); however their youthful buoyancy signifies one thing insubstantial about their natures. Anne has aged as a result of she is acutely aware of her personal previous and her personal errors; her sister and her father’s lack of introspection makes them, compared, everlasting kids.
However why is she twenty-seven? Are we watching Anne Elliot be rescued from the cliff’s fringe of spinsterhood? Is that why she’s twenty-seven? It’s one reply, definitely: Anne’s supposed to look like somebody who’s too outdated to marry, whose life has handed her by due to her tragic mistake. She’s doomed to spinsterhood—till she receives sudden salvation within the e book’s remaining pages. This interpretation is propped up by the 2007 movie adaptation, during which somebody says that, at twenty-seven, he doubts she’ll ever marry. Readers right now merely should replace her age to maintain tempo with inflation, and name her forty. But on the danger of anachronism, I’ve by no means discovered this studying that attention-grabbing, and even (forgive me) persuasive. Anne Elliot’s being twenty-seven doesn’t loom over her like a sell-by date. And Elizabeth, who’s “good-looking as ever,” additionally doesn’t appear consumed with anxiousness over marriage.
Since they aren’t correctly alive, folks in books will be any age—they are often 5 hundred and two as simply as they are often twenty-seven. An age doesn’t simply repair a personality of their e book’s inside timeline; it establishes characters in relation to one another. In Nice Expectations, decrepit Miss Havisham is, nevertheless improbably, in her mid-thirties when Pip first meets her as a boy, but when we perceive her as someone who has willingly thrown her youth away, her age makes slightly extra sense. Juliet, in Romeo and Juliet, is 13, which places her firmly nonetheless beneath the management of her mom and father. Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke is nineteen, as is Jane Eyre, however their respective husbands are round forty-eight and forty. The near-thirty-year age hole between Dorothea and Mr. Casaubon is considered one of many indicators that they’re ill-matched in marriage; older, discouraged by his failures, Casaubon experiences her youthful enthusiasm virtually as mockery. Jane’s Mr. Rochester’s age, then again, marks him out as someone who’s sufficiently old to have injury and a darkish secret or two. The hole of their ages is a spot in expertise. An older lady would acknowledge Casaubon’s insecurity, for example, for what it’s—vindictive resentment that can’t be healed by adoration. Inexperienced Jane provides Rochester the prospect at a brand new life unstained by his previous errors. (Or, at the least, he thinks she does; issues don’t prove that approach.)
However sure ages—numbers—do loom, and thirty is one. In different novels, we see this benchmark and others—the marrying age—exerting their very own pressures on the plot. Lily Bart views the strategy of thirty with palpable worry and desperation. “I’ve been about too lengthy—persons are getting uninterested in me; they’re starting to say I must marry,” she feedback within the e book’s early pages. For Lily, that the clock is working down is evident. But when one feels the tick tick tick of the clock whereas studying Persuasion, it’s not as a result of its forged is working out of time. Anne just isn’t afraid of the long run. She’s afraid of the previous.
Extra important than Anne Elliot’s numerical age are the eight years that move between her jilting Wentworth and their reunion. Eight years is a very long time—greater than sufficient time to overlook an attachment, irrespective of how sincerely felt. “As soon as a lot to one another! Now nothing!” she laments to herself on the identical assembly the place Wentworth thinks about how she did him fallacious. “Now they had been as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they might by no means turn into acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.” Anne is acutely aware of the completely satisfied couple that they’d been and the ghostly completely satisfied couple they might have turn into. She is haunted by her actual previous and the unreal potential current.
In all of Austen’s novels, she commits herself—absolutely—to 2 incompatible truths. The primary is that individuals by no means change. The second, that they will and do. Austen appears skeptical of reform; she takes folks as they’re, and the way they’re often leaves so much to be desired. Her sequence of almost-salvageable cads—there’s virtually one in every novel—testifies to the ways in which the will to vary (or the looks of the will to vary) is way simpler to summon than precise change. However most of her romantic {couples} should forgive one another—generally for betrayals and misunderstandings that appear small potatoes (as is true, I believe, of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy); generally, as within the case of Anne and Wentworth, over way more critical issues. That forgiveness can be meaningless if it weren’t accompanied by actual reformation on of character.
Persuasion, as a novel, will depend on each Anne and Wentworth altering and remaining unchanged. When Wentworth says to Anne, “You didn’t use to love playing cards; however time makes many modifications,” she responds “I’m not but a lot modified.” Then she stops herself, “fearing she hardly knew what misconstruction.” She desires Wentworth to know she hasn’t modified, however she additionally wants him to know she has modified and won’t break religion with him once more. She must know he hasn’t modified, however to forgive her, he might want to change.
Or has Anne modified? After she and Wentworth are firmly reunited, she tells him that she’s not satisfied she did the fallacious factor by deferring to the recommendation of her elders, even when that recommendation was fallacious. “If I had performed in any other case,” she feedback, “I ought to have suffered extra in persevering with the engagement than I did even in giving it up, as a result of I ought to have suffered in my conscience.” Which could simply imply that she was nineteen then, and that now, greater than eight years later, she is now not a toddler who ought to abide by the desires of her betters. Each her dutifulness then and her selections now, she says to Wentworth, accurately characterize who she is, the individual that Wentworth has cherished regardless of himself all this very long time. She regrets what she did. However she would in all probability do the identical factor once more, if she had been nineteen once more. Fortunately for her, we’re all nineteen solely as soon as, at most.
***
Anne Elliot is twenty-seven. Once I was thirty, sitting with a good friend in a loud West Village bar, she mentioned, I like Persuasion. It’s Austen’s novel about late-in-life love. With out pondering, I replied: Anne Elliot is twenty-seven. What? my good friend requested.
It’s true, I insisted. She’s twenty-seven.
Fuck you, she mentioned. (As I recall.)
Once I first learn Middlemarch, I used to be youthful than Dorothea; now I’m nearly midway between her age and Mr. Casaubon’s. Someday I’ll decide the e book up once more and uncover that Casaubon, too, is within the rearview mirror. In a single sense, protecting monitor of ages on this style is only a literary parlor sport. I don’t have to be nineteen to get swept up in Dorothea’s ardour or be in my late forties to know Casaubon’s paranoia. However in one other sense, it’s only one reflection of what it means to dwell alongside books, studying and rereading them. Once I see Dorothea, I see not simply the character however the variations of myself that responded to her. In these books, inevitably, I discover ghosts of myself; I see the place I used to be fallacious; I achieve sympathy for some figures and lose it for others. (I used to be, for example, way more sympathetic to Casaubon again after I was nearer to Dorothea’s age.) This apply could be “unhealthy studying,” nevertheless it’s how I learn nonetheless.
What offers Persuasion its “late-in-life” feeling is remorse—which is represented, partly, by way of age. When Wentworth, partaking in a short-lived flirtation with one other lady, Louisa Musgrove, chooses to reward her character, he compares her to “an exquisite shiny nut, which, blessed with authentic power, has outlived all of the storms of autumn. Not a puncture, not a weak spot any the place.” Whereas the standard he intends to reward is her firmness of character, what he actually praises right here is her lack of private historical past. Certainly, a nut that by no means falls from the tree, which is rarely break up open, is a nut that dies earlier than it lives. Wentworth errors having by no means been put to the check for having by no means failed.
In considered one of Austen’s extra vicious little jokes, Louisa will later soar off a excessive place anticipating Wentworth to catch her. He doesn’t. Even the unpunctured nut will get kicked off the department finally. Remorse is a sense we solely actually expertise as we become old and uncover our personal capability not solely to make errors however to do hurt. Wentworth, for example, has a lot to remorse in his therapy of Louisa, whose coronary heart he trifles with and whose physique he fails to catch. It comes out all proper in the long run, however that’s simply luck, not the product of conscientious atonement.
I as soon as went to a stage adaptation of Persuasion with an ex-boyfriend. A harmful factor to do, you may assume, however I recall no heavy subtext within the air from both of us. We had actually, lastly, eventually settled into being associates. Within the play, tailored from the novel by Sarah Rose Kearns, Anne is continually replaying her final dialog with Wentworth earlier than they parted. Kearns locations this dialog on Anne’s birthday: thus Anne, when left to her personal ideas, lives out a seemingly limitless loop of completely satisfied birthdays that develop increasingly deranged because the present continues. On daily basis brings Anne additional away from the issues she will be able to’t unsay and the alternatives she will be able to’t unmake. Her very distance from her regrets leaves her caught deeper and deeper prior to now.
Right here, Wentworth actually does find yourself saving Anne—not from a future as an outdated maid however from her incapability to interrupt out of this cycle of self-reproach. Age isn’t only a quantity and a organic reality, although it’s each of these issues. Age additionally represents how far we’ve come from the issues that appeared like they might final endlessly—and that, in lingering alongside us, do final endlessly as reminiscences and as scars, even when we want they wouldn’t. We lose every part to the devouring previous finally. However we hold all of it, too.
The eight years Anne and Wentworth have spent aside are an actual and irrevocable loss, one the novel makes certain we keenly really feel. However had they stayed collectively, they might have had a lot to forgive each other for anyway. Like within the outdated screwball comedies the place folks divorce to allow them to remarry, what reveals their like to be sturdy and unbreakable is that after they broke it. Anne’s fidelity is revealed by her betrayal, Wentworth’s devotion by his coldness. They each needed to fall from their bushes and develop so they might meet once more—not as totally different folks, however as exactly who they at all times had been.
My ex-boyfriend and I went out after the present to speak in regards to the adaptation and get a drink. We had an excellent dialog and went our separate methods. Then we obtained again collectively. (That’s the facility of artwork.) Time is at all times turning the current into the previous. However once in a while, whenever you least count on it, it brings again one thing you’d left behind. What occurs after that—whether or not you make good in your second likelihood or reprise your outdated errors in a stupider key—is the remainder of the story.
B. D. McClay is an essayist and critic. She has written for Lapham’s Quarterly, The New Yorker, The New York Instances Journal, and different publications.
