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New Year's Resolution and the Art of Persuasion

© Pamela St. Clair

How to welcome the New Year? While most of the world looks forward, I thought I would look backward, to 1818 to be precise. At first, this backward glance began as an early attempt at a New Year's resolution to tackle the "classics" (or "the canon," as Harold Bloom would refer to that esteemed list of books that exalts us by enlightening us about the nature (good and bad) of the human condition) that I failed to conquer before. And, as with most New Years' resolutions, guilt factored into this decision, for as a student of English literature, I felt derelict for harboring this blasphemous thought (and I whisper these words to myself as I write them): I have never been a Jane Austen fan. The novel of manners and marriage never appealed to my pre-teen heart or mind. I was more enamored with the wild Heathcliff, the stolid Jane Eyre, and the enigmatic knitter Madam Defarge. And somehow, I managed to slide through undergraduate and graduate school without once opening an Austen novel. Shame on me.

To rectify matters, I cleared my mind of adolescent cobwebs and prejudices and decided to embark on a novel with which I had little (read: no) familiarity and of which I had never seen a movie adaptation: Austen's last work, Persuasion.

At twenty-eight, Anne Elliot, the novel's protagonist, is older than the average Austen heroine. Anne's graciousness, tact, and insightful readings of others elevate her above her vain and selfish sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, and above her father, whose "vanity of person and of situation" were disguised for seventeen years by his wife Lady Elliot, who "humoured, or softened, or concealed his failings, and promoted his real respectability." Lady Russell, a close friend of Lady Elliot, provides guidance when Lady Elliot dies. She champions Anne, who is largely ignored by her immediate family, because she admires Anne's character, which resembles that of the late Lady Elliot, who (aside from being saddled with Sir Walter) was "an excellent woman, sensible and amiable; whose judgment and conduct, if they might be pardoned the youthful infatuation which made her Lady Elliot, had never required indulgence afterwards." How did I miss this humor when I was younger? The foolishly proud Walter Elliot was not deserving of Lady Elliot, who apparently had one detrimental and significant lapse of judgement when she succumbed to Walter's handsome features; and likewise, Anne, although she would never dream of suggesting such, is not deserving of the pretentious, silly family she coddles and appeases.

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