"I will not allow books to prove anything": What Jane Austen's characters read (and why), part 5
The Reader by Marguerite Gérard and Jean Honoré Fragonard, c. 1786. Image source: The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
In her book What Jane Austen's Characters Read (and Why) (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Persuasions editor Susan Allen Ford examines the reading preferences of Austen's characters as a key to understanding them more deeply. In this post series I am looking at each of Austen's canonical novels to see what this perspective can tell us in particular about her heroines. The previous installment, "Meaning to read more", looked at Emma Woodhouse's desultory reading in Emma. This final installment examines perhaps the most devoted reader in all of Austen's novels, Persuasion's Anne Elliot.
Learning romance: Anne Elliot, Scott, and Byron
In a famous description early in Persuasion, we are told that Anne Elliot "had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning" (Vol. I/III, Ch. IV). But we are not told, at least not immediately, how it is that she learned romance.
Bitter experience was surely one teacher: at 19, Anne had been persuaded to retract her acceptance of 23-year-old naval commander Frederick Wentworth by an older friend who occupies "the place of a parent" in her regard, Lady Russell:
Anne Elliot, with all her claims of birth, beauty, and mind, to throw herself away at nineteen; involve herself at nineteen in an engagement with a young man, who had nothing but himself to recommend him, and no hopes of attaining affluence, but in the chances of a most uncertain profession, and no connexions to secure even his farther rise in the profession, would be, indeed, a throwing away, which she grieved to think of! Anne Elliot, so young; known to so few, to be snatched off by a stranger without alliance or fortune; or rather sunk by him into a state of most wearing, anxious, youth-killing dependence! It must not be, if by any fair interference of friendship, any representations from one who had almost a mother’s love, and mother’s rights, it would be prevented. (Vol. I/III, Ch. IV)
Anne is now 27. In the eight years since she was convinced to withdraw her acceptance of Commander Wentworth she has received just one other offer of marriage, from Charles Musgrove. She refused him, and he married instead her younger sister Mary. Charles is amiable and well-off, but nothing like the naval hero who is described as being
full of life and ardour. . .such confidence, powerful in its own warmth, and bewitching in the wit which often expressed it. . .[a] sanguine temper, and fearlessness of mind. . .He was brilliant, he was headstrong. (Vol. I/III, Ch. IV)
Meanwhile, Wentworth has been promoted to captain and has become rich through the prize money he has received by capturing enemy ships in desperate battle. Lady Russell's fears have proved to be misplaced, and "Anne, at seven-and-twenty, thought very differently from what she had been made to think at nineteen . . .How eloquent could Anne Elliot have been! how eloquent, at least, were her wishes on the side of early warm attachment, and a cheerful confidence in futurity, against that over-anxious caution which seems to insult exertion and distrust Providence!" (Vol. I/III, Ch. IV)
Title page of the first edition of Northanger Abbey: and Persuasion: by the author of "Pride and Prejudice;" "Mansfield-Park," &c., 1818 (December 1817). Image source: HathiTrust.org.
"Impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony"
But in learning romance Anne has had other teachers, or at least has found reinforcement for her original feelings, in two of the greatest poets of the age: Walter Scott and George Gordon, Lord Byron.
We know that she is deeply familiar with their works because of a friendship she strikes up with a former shipmate of Captain Wentworth's, Captain Benwick. He had a long engagement with Fanny Harville, the sister of another naval colleague, which ended when she died before he could return to shore with the promotion and prize money that would have enabled him to marry her.
Captain Wentworth believed it impossible for man to be more attached to woman than poor Benwick had been to Fanny Harville, or to be more deeply afflicted under the dreadful change. He considered his disposition as of the sort which must suffer heavily, uniting very strong feelings with quiet, serious, and retiring manners, and a decided taste for reading, and sedentary pursuits. (Vol. I/III, Ch. XI)
Benwick now lives with Fanny's brother Captain Harville and his family in Lyme. When Anne meets them while visiting Lyme with a party that includes the Musgroves and Wentworth,
it fell to Anne’s lot to be placed rather apart with Captain Benwick; and a very good impulse of her nature obliged her to begin an acquaintance with him. He was shy, and disposed to abstraction; but the engaging mildness of her countenance, and gentleness of her manners, soon had their effect; and Anne was well repaid the first trouble of exertion. . .For, though shy, he did not seem reserved; it had rather the appearance of feelings glad to burst their usual restraints; and having talked of poetry, the richness of the present age, and gone through a brief comparison of opinion as to the first-rate poets, trying to ascertain whether Marmion or The Lady of the Lake were to be preferred, and how ranked the Giaour and The Bride of Abydos; and moreover, how the Giaour was to be pronounced, he showed himself so intimately acquainted with all the tenderest songs of the one poet, and all the impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony of the other. . . (Vol. I/III, Ch. XI)
Clearly, Anne is also intimately acquainted with these Romantic poems, which all share a common theme: they are about constancy in love.
Title page of Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field by Walter Scott, 1808. Image source: HathiTrust.org
In Walter Scott's Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (1808), set in the time of the conflict between Henry VIII and James IV, Lord Marmion lusts after both the person and the lands of the beautiful Clara de Clare. Inconveniently for him, she loves and is betrothed to the knight Ralph De Wilton. Marmion forges documents implicating his rival in treason, and De Wilton is exiled. The way is now open for Marmion to marry Clara. However, rather than abandon her disgraced lover and submit to Marmion's desires, Clara flees to the protection of a convent. De Wilton returns, proves his innocence, fights heroically at the Battle of Flodden (where the guilty Marmion dies), and is finally united with Clara in marriage.
Title page of The Lady of the Lake: A Poem by Walter Scott, 1810. Image source: HathiTrust.org
Scott's The Lady of the Lake (1810) is set in the mid-1500s, during the reign of James V. Three men, the king (traveling in the Highlands in disguise as the knight Fitz-James), the rebel chieftain Roderick Dhu, and the exiled member of another clan, Malcolm Graeme, vie for the love of Ellen, the daughter of the exiled (but loyal) chieftain James Douglas. Although both Roderick and Fitz-James declare their ardent passion for her, Ellen remains steadfast in her love of Malcolm. Ultimately the rebels are defeated, Roderick dies, and Malcolm is imprisoned. Ellen goes to plead with King James for Malcolm's freedom, and discovers that the monarch she is petitioning is the man she has known as Fitz-James. He condemns Malcolm to be chained—by the bonds of matrimony with his true love.
Title page of The Giaour, A Fragment of a Turkish Tale by Lord Byron, 1813. Image source: HathiTrust.org
At the outset of his career Byron was "the poet of love and constancy" (quoted in Ford, p. 218). In The Giaour (The Infidel, 1813), Leila, a woman in the harem of Hassan, becomes enamored of the Giaour, the Christian hero. When Hassan discovers Leila's betrayal, he has her sewn into a sack and thrown into the sea. To revenge Leila's death, the Giaour kills Hassan, and then retreats to a monastery, where he "spends the rest of his life in monastic solitude, agonizing over the loss of Leila" (p. 215).
Title page of The Bride of Abydos. A Turkish Tale by Lord Byron, 1813. Image source: HathiTrust.org
Bryon's The Bride of Abydos (1813) features a love story between a couple raised as half-siblings, perhaps inspired by Byron's own affair with his half-sister Augusta Byron Leigh. The hero Selim, the supposed son of Pasha Giaffir, has been mistreated by him throughout his upbringing. Selim declares his love for the Pasha's daughter Zuleika, and she reciprocates his feelings. But their marriage is forbidden by the Pasha, who, it turns out, is a usurper: he killed his own brother to seize the throne. Selim is actually the true heir and the Pasha's nephew, making Zuleika his first cousin. When Selim rebels, the Pasha attacks and kills him. And when Zuleika hears of Selim's fate, she dies of sorrow rather than live without him.
Tellingly, all of the Romantic epics Anne and Captain Benwick discuss were published after 1806, the year Anne was parted from Wentworth by the force of Lady Russell's persuasion. The poems have provided her with stirring examples of steadfast fidelity persisting beyond separation and even death.
But we also know that Anne has not lived exclusively on the rich diet of Romantic poetry's heightened emotions. In their conversation on Scott and Byron, Captain Benwick
repeated, with such tremulous feeling, the various lines which imaged a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness, and looked so entirely as if he meant to be understood, that she ventured to hope he did not always read only poetry, and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.
His looks shewing him not pained, but pleased with this allusion to his situation, she was emboldened to go on; and feeling in herself the right of seniority of mind, she ventured to recommend a larger allowance of prose in his daily study; and on being requested to particularize, mentioned such works of our best moralists, such collections of the finest letters, such memoirs of characters of worth and suffering, as occurred to her at the moment as calculated to rouse and fortify the mind by the highest precepts, and the strongest examples of moral and religious endurances. (Vol. I/III, Ch. XI)
Anne's reading has helped her to bear suffering and adversity through eight long years, although
Anne could not but be amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme to preach patience and resignation to a young man whom she had never seen before; nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination. (Vol I, Ch. XI)
"I will not allow books to prove anything"
Reading is so important to Anne's understanding of herself and her situation that at the beginning of the book it is a metaphor for her perception of others, especially Wentworth. As her feelings are thrown into turmoil at their first meeting since his return, she asks herself, "Now, how were his sentiments to be read?" (Vol. I/III, Ch. IV).
At a critical moment near the end of the novel, she will have the opportunity to literally read his sentiments. And a spoiler alert: if you have never read Persuasion, you may wish to skip to "Emulating the feelings of an Emma" below.
At the Musgrove's rooms at the White Hart in Bath, Anne encounters among the party Captain Harville and Captain Wentworth. Captain Harville has been given the unwelcome errand to have a miniature of Captain Benwick set for his new fiancée; characteristically, Captain Wentworth has offered to undertake the task himself in order to spare Captain Harville's feelings. While Wentworth is writing out a letter of instructions, Captain Harville and Anne debate constancy in men and women. In support of his arguments against women's fidelity, Captain Harville cannot resist referencing his own reading:
"Well, Miss Elliot," (lowering his voice), "as I was saying, we shall never agree, I suppose, upon this point. No man and woman would, probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you—all stories, prose and verse. If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men."
"Perhaps I shall. 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 anything." (Vol. II/IV, Ch. XI)
When Harville speaks of his own joy at being reunited with his wife and children after a year at sea, Anne responds,
"I hope I do justice to all that is felt by you, and by those who resemble you. God forbid that I should undervalue the warm and faithful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures! I should deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by woman. No, I believe you capable of everything 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 or when hope is gone."
She could not immediately have uttered another sentence; her heart was too full, her breath too much oppressed. (Vol. II/IV, Ch. XI)
Wentworth, of course, has overheard every word of their exchange. Under cover of writing the jeweler's instructions, he takes a new sheet of paper and pours out his still-ardent feelings for Anne, using the same metaphor of reading the beloved's feelings that Anne employed at the beginning of the novel when thinking of him:
"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan.—Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others.—Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in
F. W."
(Vol. II/IV, Ch. XI)
As a final indication of the importance of reading to Anne's self-understanding, it is through her reading of Wentworth's impassioned words that the misapprehensions that have kept them apart are dispelled and the two lovers are brought together again at last.
Amanda Root as Anne Elliot in Persuasion, adapted by Nick Dear, directed by Roger Michell, and produced by BBC Films, 1995. See Jane Austen proposal scenes, part 6: Persuasion.
"Emulating the feelings of an Emma"
Ford's book highlights an important dimension of Austen's characters that I had considered before only in the cases where well-known writers or books were explicitly mentioned (Cowper and Scott for Marianne Dashwood, Cowper and Inchbald for Fanny Price, Ann Radcliffe for Catherine Morland, and Scott and Byron for Anne Elliot). She illuminates many references that to me were obscure, especially the significance of conduct books in Pride and Prejudice and Madame de Genlis's Adelaide and Theodore in Emma.
To offer just one more example where Austen could assume that her contemporary readership would understand a reference that in our day requires explanation, when in Persuasion Anne volunteers to stay in Lyme to nurse Louisa Musgrove after her fall, she muses on a literary parallel: "Without emulating the feelings of an Emma towards her Henry, she would have attended on Louisa with a zeal above the common claims of regard, for his sake" (Vol. I/III, Ch. XII).
Emma and Henry are characters in Matthew Prior's poem Henry and Emma: A poem, upon the model of the nut-brown maid (1709), which was reprinted throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Title page of Henry and Emma by Matthew Prior, Manchester and London, 1793. Image source: Internet Archive
In the poem Henry woos and wins the beautiful Emma, but fears that she will be inconstant. Like Walter cruelly testing Griselda in Chaucer's "The Clerk's Tale," Henry decides to test Emma "by one great trial" (line 179). He pretends to be in love with another "younger, fairer" woman. Emma responds,
Yet let me go with thee, and going prove,
From what I will endure, how much I love.
This potent beauty, this triumphant fair,
This happy object of our diff'rent care,
Her let me follow; her let me attend,
A servant: (she may scorn the name of friend). . . (lines 599–604)
Although Anne claims not to share Emma's feelings, at this point she is convinced that Wentworth and Louisa are sure to marry once she has recovered. Her willingness to care for Louisa "for his sake" indeed shows how much pain she is willing to endure out of love for Wentworth.
Ford's elucidation of many references such as these, which a hasty (or in my case, ignorant) reader might simply pass over without understanding, reveals an important aspect of the almost infinite richness of Austen's fictional world. What Jane Austen's Characters Read (and Why) will increase the pleasure of anyone entering, or re-entering, that world.
