In brief
Anne Elliot is twenty-seven, the unregarded middle daughter of a vain baronet who can no longer pay his bills. At nineteen she broke off an engagement to a penniless naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, on the advice of her godmother, Lady Russell. Now the family lets its house to an admiral and retires to Bath; the admiral’s wife is Wentworth’s sister, and Wentworth comes back rich, unmarried and resentful. He pays court to someone else in front of Anne. A fall on the harbour wall at Lyme changes what he sees, and in Bath he overhears her talking to a friend and writes her a letter.
Her family’s verdict comes in the first chapter: “her word had no weight, her convenience was always to give way—she was only Anne” (chapter 1). The subject is repair: what can be got back after eight years, and who has to admit what first.
Was Lady Russell wrong?
Austen puts the question four times, and the answers do not agree.
The first is Anne’s private view at twenty-seven. She “was persuaded to believe the engagement a wrong thing”, and now thinks she would have been happier keeping it, whatever the outcome. Yet “She did not blame Lady Russell, she did not blame herself for having been guided by her” (chapter 4). The chapter closes on the book’s most famous sentence: “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.”
The second is Wentworth’s, delivered to Louisa Musgrove with a hazel nut in his hand: “My first wish for all whom I am interested in, is that they should be firm” (chapter 10). Two chapters later Louisa, being firm, jumps on the Cobb, and “she was too precipitate by half a second” (chapter 12). Anne allows herself one dry thought, that “a persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favour of happiness as a very resolute character”.
The third is the narrator’s, in the last chapter, and it is flat. Lady Russell must “admit that she had been pretty completely wrong” (chapter 24), both in distrusting Wentworth’s manners and in trusting the villainous Mr Elliot’s. Her objection was that Wentworth “had nothing but himself to recommend him”, a “stranger without alliance or fortune” (chapter 4). Much of her prudence was rank.
The fourth is Anne’s, spoken aloud once, beside the greenhouse plants at a card party, and it is the one that surprises. “I am not saying that she did not err in her advice”, and she would never give it herself. But “I was right in submitting to her”, because otherwise “I should have suffered in my conscience” (chapter 23). Modern readers tend to find this meek. I find it the hardest-won position in Austen: she will not buy her happiness by rewriting who she was at nineteen.
Then Wentworth asks one more question. If he had written in the year eight, with a few thousand pounds, would she have answered? “Would I!” Lady Russell’s advice ended the engagement, but his pride kept it ended: “Six years of separation and suffering might have been spared.” A book that seems to be about being too easily persuaded is equally about a man too proud to try persuading again.
The shape of the book
The first edition had two volumes of twelve chapters; the Gutenberg text numbers straight through, so the second volume opens at chapter 13. The book moves through four places: Kellynch, where Anne is ignored; Uppercross, where she is useful and unnoticed; Lyme, where she is seen; and Bath, where she has to find her way to the right man through a crowd.
The pivot closes the first volume. On the morning of the fall a stranger at Lyme stares at Anne, with “the bloom and freshness of youth restored by the fine wind” (chapter 12), and Wentworth sees him stare. Later that day, with Louisa senseless, he says “no one so proper, so capable as Anne”. Her looks and her competence are recognised within hours, and neither was ever in doubt to the reader.
The voice
Nearly everything is heard through Anne, and she is usually right. Julia Prewitt Brown argues that the narrator’s authority here passes almost wholly to a character, with lapses. Anne’s trouble is that accurate knowledge has no outlet. On the walk to Winthrop she asks a harmless question: “But nobody heard, or, at least, nobody answered her” (chapter 10).
So the story travels by overhearing, as Robert Irvine has noted. Anne hears through Mary that Wentworth thought her “So altered that he should not have known her again!” (chapter 7). She sits under a hedge while Louisa declares “I would rather be overturned by him, than driven safely by anybody else” (chapter 10). The climax reverses the arrangement.
The lapses are ugly. The narrator calls Mrs Musgrove’s dead son a “thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable Dick Musgrove” (chapter 6) and mocks her “large fat sighings” (chapter 8). Beside them sit “the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves, and withered hedges” (chapter 10). Harshness and lyricism belong to the same mood.
The navy and the baronetcy
The opening sentence is a reading habit: Sir Walter Elliot “never took up any book but the Baronetage” (chapter 1). He objects to the navy because it brings “persons of obscure birth into undue distinction” and “cuts up a man’s youth and vigour most horribly” (chapter 3).
The tenants show up the landlords. Admiral Croft claims to have done little at Kellynch but send away mirrors: “Such a number of looking-glasses!” (chapter 13). Anne’s silent judgement is treason: “Kellynch Hall had passed into better hands than its owners’”. Mrs Croft is impatient of “fine ladies, instead of rational creatures” (chapter 8), and when the Admiral nearly overturns the gig, “by coolly giving the reins a better direction herself they happily passed the danger” (chapter 10).
Money settles the old argument without winning it. With “five-and-twenty thousand pounds”, Wentworth “was no longer nobody” (chapter 24), and Sir Walter enters the marriage “in the volume of honour”, the book that opened the novel. But Anne gets “no landed estate, no headship of a family”, which is why Irvine calls this Austen’s most radical novel. Her brothers Francis and Charles were naval officers, both later admirals.
The last sentence is the coldest and best: Anne “gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm”. The story starts in the peace of 1814, when Mr Shepherd can say “This peace will be turning all our rich naval officers ashore” (chapter 3). Austen finished writing in 1816, after Napoleon’s return and Waterloo, so “the dread of a future war” is no figure of speech.
The ending she threw away
The British Library holds the cancelled chapters, which it calls the only surviving manuscript pages of a novel she planned and completed for publication. Images are at janeausten.ac.uk, and her nephew printed the main scene in his Memoir, free at Gutenberg.
In that version, finished in July 1816, Admiral Croft hauls Anne indoors in Gay Street and leaves her with Wentworth, shouting at him through a door. Wentworth has been commissioned to ask whether she will marry Mr Elliot, in which case the Admiral will give up the lease of Kellynch. “There is no truth in any such report”, she says. “It was a silent but a very powerful dialogue”, and they are engaged. It is deft and funny, and it rests on a lease.
The Memoir says she “thought it tame and flat”, went to bed in low spirits and woke with something better. By 6 August she had written the White Hart scenes, now chapters 22 and 23. In the old scene the Admiral forces the moment and Anne answers a question of fact. In the new one she speaks, on the subject that matters, to somebody else, and he answers in the only private form the room allows: “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” (chapter 23).
The letter is not strictly accurate. “I have loved none but you” and “never inconstant” are qualified on the gravel walk soon after: “he had been constant unconsciously, nay unintentionally; that he had meant to forget her, and believed it to be done”. Austen gives us the great sentence and then the footnote, and the footnote is the more loving of the two.
Anne and Harville
Everything depends on an argument she does not win. Harville, seeing his dead sister’s fiancé engaged again, says Fanny would not have forgotten so soon. Anne answers with sociology: “We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion” (chapter 23). Harville points out that Benwick has done nothing since the peace but live with his family, and she concedes: “I did not recollect”.
When he cites literature she makes the claim quoted ever since: “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.” A moment earlier, across the room, Wentworth’s pen has fallen. Her next point is seldom quoted and as good: the question “does not admit of proof”, because the cases that strike us most are “such as cannot be brought forward without betraying a confidence”. She is standing in front of one.
Harville answers with the sailor watching the boat go. Anne grants him nearly everything, except one small claim, after which she cannot speak: “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.”
Illness
Austen felt unwell by early 1816, and by the middle of that year her decline was plain. Most biographers follow Zachary Cope’s 1964 diagnosis of Addison’s disease, though Hodgkin’s lymphoma has also been proposed. She rewrote the ending during that decline. In January 1817 she began Sanditon, stopping in March. In May she was taken to Winchester, and she died there on 18 July 1817, a year to the day after the first ending’s date.
The dying woman’s book is a tempting label to resist, since she began it in August 1815. But it is full of bodies: Anne’s lost bloom, Louisa’s head, Mary’s complaints, Sir Walter’s “Gowland” for the complexion (chapter 16). The serious note belongs to Mrs Smith, Anne’s old school friend, widowed, poor and crippled by “a severe rheumatic fever” (chapter 17). Anne finds in her “that elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted”, and calls it “the choicest gift of Heaven”. The last chapter insists that she “might have been absolutely rich and perfectly healthy, and yet be happy” (chapter 24). It is the book’s one account of happiness that does not depend on Captain Wentworth, and I would press the biographical link no further than that.
The people
Anne Elliot
Anne Elliot is past first youth, as no earlier Austen heroine is, and the most capable person in any room. Austen told her niece Fanny Knight in March 1817 that the heroine was “almost too good for me”. She can be sharp: “My idea of good company, Mr Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation” (chapter 16).
Captain Wentworth
Captain Wentworth is a self-made man among Austen’s heroes, and he has to learn to distrust that: “I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve” (chapter 23).
Lady Russell
Lady Russell “loved Anne better than she loved her own abilities” (chapter 24). But when she thinks Wentworth has settled for Louisa, “her heart revelled in angry pleasure, in pleased contempt” (chapter 14).
Mr Elliot
Mr Elliot, the heir, is polished, and Mrs Smith’s exposure of him is the clumsiest device in the book: “he is black at heart, hollow and black!” (chapter 21).
How it was made
Unlike her earlier novels, this one has no draft from the 1790s behind it. She worked from 8 August 1815 to 6 August 1816. Family tradition says she called it The Elliots, and the title seems to be her brother Henry’s, given after her death, though the idea runs all through the book. It may have been personal: in 1814 she was advising Fanny Knight about a suitor, and Gillian Beer has shown how alarmed she was at acting as a persuader.
John Murray published it with Northanger Abbey in a four-volume set in December 1817, with 1818 on the title page. The byline gives the year it appeared; the Gutenberg text prints 1818. Henry’s biographical notice named her in print.
Readers and critics
An unsigned Quarterly Review article of January 1821, attributed to Richard Whately, took the two last novels together and praised the subtlety of her moral teaching. Virginia Woolf’s essay in The Common Reader (1925) is the place to start: “There is a peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness in Persuasion.” She thought Austen a little bored, “The satire is harsh, and the comedy crude”, and finding that “the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed”. She is right about the satire; to me it reads as impatience, not boredom. A. Walton Litz called the novel one about the loss and return of “bloom”.
Afterlives
The best version I know is Roger Michell’s 1995 film for the BBC, written by Nick Dear, with Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds; it gives Root little dialogue and lets her face work, the honest answer to a heroine nobody listens to. ITV’s 2007 film has Sally Hawkins and Rupert Penry-Jones, and Carrie Cracknell’s Netflix film of 2022 has Dakota Johnson and Cosmo Jarvis. The web serial Rational Creatures (2019) takes its title from Mrs Croft.
How to read it
- Track who hears what. Mark every scene where Anne overhears, then see how chapter 23 turns it round.
- Then read the cancelled chapter. It takes minutes, and you can see exactly what the Harville scene added.
Read next
- Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817). Bound with it at first, and a very different view of what reading does.
- Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920). A renunciation in a rich society, with no second chance at the end.
- Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander (1969). The navy of Wentworth’s prize money, seen from on board.