I has taken me altogether far too long to read Persuasion.
It seems I had started it way back on the 26th of
April… that’s like… three weeks ago! It shouldn't take three weeks to read 180 (or
thereabouts) pages! Not Jane’s fault. She’s actually got quite a gift for wit
and irony; but it took me a while to recognise it. I was about 20 pages in,
eyes glazed over and numb from enduring 19th century chick lit, when
I suddenly stopped in the middle of an exchange between the central character
Anne, and her married sister Mary; and said aloud “Hang on… Is this supposed to
be funny?” Then I backed up a bit, and read it over. You know what? It IS
funny, and it’s meant to be funny; albeit a bleak, often cutting kind of
humour. Anne’s interactions with her family put her firmly in the thankless
position of long suffering, unappreciated caretaker for the mentally feeble.
One wonders why she endures it, but of course it is the early eighteen hundreds,
and she is an unmarried, younger daughter of landed gentry, duh!
Here I would normally put my book on the kitchen bench, take
a photo of it, and post it. But I didn't read a real book, I read a free epub
file from Project Gutenberg so here is a picture of my cheap crappy ereader.
The story is a simple one, a romance (of course), about
Anne, the youngest of Sir Walter Elliot’s three daughters, who at 27 feels she
has missed her one opportunity in life to marry, and be happy when at nineteen
she was persuaded (get it? ‘Persuasion’/’persuaded’) by an old family friend and
substitute mother, not to accept the
proposal of naval officer Frederick Wentworth as he was beneath her, and
unworthy of the station that would be afforded him by association with the
family. So, young and impressionable, she turned him down, he went off to war
and made his fortune and she settled firmly into her thankless role of family
caretaker and observer of everyone else’s lives, dramas, romances… never being
allowed, or allowing herself, her own.
Then eight years later, whilst she is staying with her
needy, delusional, hypochondriac sister Mary and her husband; for the purpose
of being out of the way while her vain, spendthrift father and spoiled,
uncaring eldest sister set up house in Bath after having to let the country
mansion for financial reasons… Who should show up as a relative of the new tenants?
Why it is none other than Captain Frederick Wentworth, back from the wars after
having made his name and fortune.
He is still pissed at her for breaking it off eight years
ago, and promptly sets about courting a couple of her air-headed cousins whilst
Anne stands by quietly, and far too acceptingly, watching… resigned to
spinsterhood.
Throw in a few more naval officers, a grasping opportunistic
cousin, an old school friend come by ill health and bad finances, a cousin’s
ridiculous brain injury born of jumping into a Captains strong arms once too
often and failing to be caught; and various other hi-jinx ensues…
You've got to know it all turns out alright in the end, as
these things do. It’s a rom com after all.
Unfortunately I found the ending seemed somewhat rushed, and
not as polished as the rest of the book. As though it was still part treatment,
rather than finished work. I think this can possibly be explained by the fact
that it’s the last book Jane Austen finished before she died. She was writing
it when she got sick in January 1816, she finished it in August of that year,
and died in July 1817. It was published posthumously.
I did enjoy this book, despite how difficult it was to
concentrate on. It’s all that nineteenth century language and sentence
structure and sensibilities… it can be a chore to wrap one’s head around it
without getting distracted… I got no other excuse.
And here is a picture of Anne Hathaway pretending to be Jane
Austen, because she’s much prettier than any portrait I've seen of the actual
lady… which may not necessarily be a reflection on Jane’s looks, but rather the
skill of the artists… I don't know, I never met her.
