A Psychological Reading of Persuasion

The wound is a short engagement in the summer of 1806. Wentworth, made commander after the action off St Domingo, has nothing but himself, and he is sure the navy will make him rich. Sir Walter does not forbid the match. He offers astonishment, coldness, silence, and a resolution to do nothing for his daughter. Lady Russell, with a horror of imprudence, sees that confidence as a dangerous character added to an empty purse. Anne might have withstood her father's ill-will. There is not one kind word from her sister. What she cannot combat is Lady Russell's steadiness joined to tenderness. The friend is godmother, and in Anne she can fancy the dead mother alive again. Anne is persuaded the engagement is wrong, and her consolation is that she is consulting his good even more than her own. He leaves the country feeling ill-used. A few months end the acquaintance. An early loss of bloom and spirits is the lasting effect.

More than seven years later she does not blame Lady Russell, and she does not blame herself for having been guided. She does believe she would have been happier maintaining the engagement than she has been in the sacrifice of it. His expectations have been justified. She knows this from navy lists and newspapers. The decision was closed in other people's language. The feeling stayed open in hers. Duty and desire are two records of the same afternoon, and only one of them was allowed to speak.

Sir Walter never takes up any book for amusement but the Baronetage. The self is a page that can be reread. Elizabeth, like him, has held a mother's place in the house since she was sixteen. Anne, with an elegance of mind that would rank her high with people of real understanding, is nobody with father or sister. Her word has no weight. Her convenience gives way. She is only Anne. The instrument that files her is a face. Her bloom vanished early, and even at its height her father found little to admire, because her features were not his. He has no hope of reading her name on any later page of his favourite work. A loss of looks, which began as the body's record of regret, is read back to her as a loss of consequence.

Kellynch must be let. The retrenchment she can see is not the one the house will choose. When the family removes to Bath, she is claimed elsewhere because nobody will want her there. The slight and the job arrive together. Lady Russell is the exception who values her, and also the person whose judgment closed the engagement. Love and authority sit in the same friend. Persuasion here is not a stranger's pressure. It is the voice Anne has been trained to trust more than her own perception, and more than the man who wanted her.

After the first meeting, Mary brings a sentence Anne did not hear. Henrietta asked him, once they had left, what he thought of her, and he said she was so altered he should not have known her again. He did not know the words would be carried round. He had not forgiven her. She had given him up to oblige others. It had been weakness and timidity. Her power with him, he believes, is gone. He tells his sister he is ready to be caught by any pleasing young woman between fifteen and thirty, with one secret exception. Anne is mortified, and then glad. The verdict sobers her. A sentence that was not addressed to her becomes the way she governs an agitation eight years have not banished.

On the walk toward Winthrop she sits under a holly bush and hears the doctrine. Louisa would not be easily persuaded. When she has made up her mind, she has made it. Wentworth says a yielding character cannot be depended on. Let those who would be happy be firm. He pulls down a hazel nut, glossy and unpunctured, still in possession of all the happiness a nut can have, while its brethren have been trodden under foot. The sermon is about Anne, delivered to a woman who is not Anne. Firmness is the defence. If the break was weakness, he does not have to sit with the grief of having been left. Louisa is available as proof. Anne, behind the bush, is afraid to move. She is not invited to answer.

At Lyme a stranger on the steps looks at her with earnest admiration. The wind has put bloom on a face her father has filed as faded. Wentworth looks round, and she reads the glance as saying that even he, at this moment, sees something like Anne Elliot again. The sentence is her translation, not his speech. She is visible because a stranger has priced her, and because he has noticed the price.

Louisa then takes the doctrine past the man who preached it. He has jumped her from stiles. On the Cobb she must be jumped from the steps. He advises against a second jump. She says she is determined she will. She is too precipitate by half a second, falls on the Lower Cobb, and is taken up lifeless. Wentworth asks if there is no one to help him. Anne can still think. She calls for a surgeon, then sends Captain Benwick, who knows the town. Charles and Wentworth both look to her. The woman whose yielding was called weakness is the mind in the emergency. The woman whose firmness was called happiness is a body on the stone. A principle told to a nut becomes a half-second and a pavement.

Bath repeats the structure with better manners. Mr Elliot, the heir, is agreeable, and Lady Russell is disposed to like him. The charm is aimed. Mrs Clay is a danger to the path of the title if Sir Walter marries her. A son-in-law could watch that danger from inside the house. Anne's yes would help keep a vain father single. Mrs Smith, poor and ill in Westgate Buildings, does not tell the other account at once. While she thinks the marriage certain, she praises him, because she will not speak against a man who might become Anne's husband, and because she hopes the wife might help her. When Anne refutes the engagement, the story changes. He was unkind to his first wife. He has refused the help that might recover what Mrs Smith lost. He has watched Mrs Clay.

Anne can just acknowledge a possibility that makes her shudder. She might have been persuaded by Lady Russell, and time would have disclosed the misery too late. It is a shudder, not a second ceremony of refusal. It shows what the first persuasion trained. A beloved friend's steadiness can still occupy the place of Anne's own perception. The structure that closed the engagement has been waiting for a more presentable object.

Anne's mind is made of overheard speech until one page is addressed to her. At the White Hart she and Captain Harville dispute whether men or women love longest, with Benwick as the case. He grieved for Fanny Harville and is now attached to Louisa. Anne argues from confinement. Women live at home with feelings unemployed. Men have a profession. Harville answers from his own marriage. The privilege she claims is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone. Wentworth is at the other table, supposed to be writing to Benwick. His pen stops. He leaves a letter under the scattered paper and comes back, as if for his gloves, to place it before her. While the room thought he was writing to another man, he was also writing to her.

He can listen no longer in silence. He has loved none but her. Unjust, weak, and resentful he has been, but never inconstant. He can distinguish her voice when it would be lost on others. The letter reverses the argument she has just made, and it answers the hedge. The nut was a theory spoken past her. Resentment had been the tolerable story. It made her yielding into a feebleness his temper could not endure. Love that had never moved would have required him to admit that pride, not her altered face, had kept the years empty. The paper can say that. His speaking voice, in company, could not.

The ending does not recant the girl's obedience in order to crown the woman's desire. Beside the greenhouse plants she says she was right in being guided by the friend he will love better than he does now. Lady Russell was in the place of a parent. The advice may have been the kind that is good or bad only as the event decides. Anne would never give it. She was right in submitting. Kept against that friend, the engagement would have hurt her conscience more than the sacrifice did. He looks at Lady Russell and says, not yet, but there are hopes of charity soon. Then he names a closer enemy. His own self. In the year eight, posted into the Laconia with a few thousand pounds, he was too proud to ask again. Six years might have been spared. He has valued himself on earning every blessing. He must learn to brook being happier than he deserves.

She yielded to a tenderness she could not combat. He withheld a question his pride could not risk. The novel lets both accounts stand. The marriage answers the attachment, and the jealousy that had misread her ease at the concert as the ease of an engagement to another man. It does not reform the Baronetage, or disgrace the friend. Mr Elliot leaves Bath. Mrs Clay is next heard of under his protection in London. Anne's alloy is that she has no relations to bestow which a man of sense could value. Constancy kept the feeling. It did not, by itself, make anyone speak.

Readers still know a decision made in someone else's voice and then inhabited. A friend with real tenderness says a wish is imprudent, and conscience agrees because refusal would feel like ingratitude. Years later the wish is still there, and so is the record of having been good. The anxiety is the fear of having been weak when the people who loved you also outranked your perception. Anne's defence of her submission refuses the simpler story, in which the girl was merely oppressed and the woman is merely free.

The other recognition is ordinary. A sentence about you is said after you leave, and a sister repeats it without knowing she has delivered a wound. A family measures a quiet daughter by whether her face still earns the page they care about. Charm leans a household toward a person whose agreeableness is a plan. The letter matters because it is the first time the discussed person is spoken to.

The second chance waits on prize money, a peace that turns sailors ashore, and a father ruined enough to let the hall. Constancy does not pay the rent. Lady Russell's caution is not only control. In 1806 a sanguine officer with no fortune was a real danger, and Anne says the advice is good or bad as the event decides. Vanity is already the name for Sir Walter. A clinical label would be an import. To call her yielding a trauma, and her later defence a failure to heal, overrules the argument she makes beside the plants.

The narrator stays near her, so the reader is recruited. Wentworth's claim that her power with him is gone is a mind the ending revises. Mrs Clay's removal to London is evidence of a double game, and whether he marries her is left doubtful. Anne's claim that women love longest because they are confined is one side of a debate. Harville does not lose it on moral grounds. A reading that adopts her last sentence as Austen's settled psychology has stopped listening to the other chair.

Sense and Sensibility asks what two sisters do with a feeling that has no legal standing. Marianne treats volume as the only honest proof, because a quiet promise has already shrunk into nothing. Anne has the opposite training. Her feeling was quieted by a friend, and the quiet became the proof, to Wentworth, that the feeling had been weak. Pride and Prejudice is the psychology of a first story that hardens into armour. Elizabeth prices a man before she knows him, and the wit protects her from being priced. Anne has already been priced, by a father, by a bloom, and by a report of how altered she is. Her error is not a clever first impression. It is a submission she still calls right, in the same hour she takes the love back.