“individual” and “community,” is love and marriage. Through the social legitimation of her personal feeling, her personal worth is recognized, her social status as wife established, and her economic future as middle-class or better secured. Lady Russell is the temporary impediment in that she has a “value for rank and consequence” that “blinds her”—in this trait she is partly aligned with the social traditionalists, though also partly with the new ranking by feeling, since she alone is capable of appreciating Anne’s worth. Though Lady Russell is not entirely condemned—she is said to have a “more tempered and pardonable pride”(p. 25)—her decisive victory over the lovers at this point groups her with those who defend social hierarchies as fixed and given, so that she stands in need of correction by Anne.

The title of the novel, Persuasion, points to the causes and consequences of this momentous decision in Anne’s life. Feeling and reason are commonly categorized as inimical to each other in regard to the behaviors that determine lives, but here the treatment of persuasion is not confined to the reasonability of the external world versus the anarchy of internal selfish drives. On the contrary, the exploration of the internal world of the mind that constitutes much of this novel is given over to a remarkable literary description of what we would now call the process of rationalization and its consequence, the inability to trust to reason: “How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!” remarks the narrator (p. 15). Like Sir Walter and his inability to see Mrs. Clay’s freckles, we all see only what we want to; we are all of us blinded by desire, as much as Lady Russell is blinded by rational pride. Even thoughtful Anne can convince herself that giving up the engagement is for Captain Wentworth’s own good. As in the psychological novels of George Eliot and Henry James, or the psychoanalytic theory of Freud, emotion dominates over wisdom and clear thinking. This unreliability gives much finer shadings to the idea of “persuasion” than the plot at first seems to suggest.

When Anne stays home to nurse her nephew, she is selfless in volunteering, but her goodness is admixed with the unad mitted desire to avoid an awkward first meeting with her former lover. In this she is not as unlike her sister Mary and brother-in-law Charles, who are more obviously self-centered, as she at first appears. All are united in their willingness to be persuaded by what they want to think. In this scene in chapter 10 the free indirect discourse that reveals Anne’s thoughts melds with the author’s in forming a standard for valuing behavior. The implication is that there is a universal and stable standard available, but it is rendered unstable because of feeling. Though Anne knows this about others as a silent watcher and “longs” to represent the truth to them all, we soon see that she too rationalizes her own behavior: “From some feelings of interest and curiosity, she fancied now that it was too late to retract” when she realizes her former lover is going to accompany her party on a walk (p. 79).

Jane Austen’s characteristic style has an interesting relation to the ambiguity surrounding thinking and feeling. Her famous tongue-in-cheek satire or irony consists in a radical disconnection between what a character says and means, as when Anne, nervous about meeting her former lover’s relatives, now tenants at her own home, “found it most natural to be sorry that she had missed the opportunity of seeing them”(p. 31) or between the conventional and real meanings of a narrative description, as when Anne’s sister Mary and her husband are said to be “always perfectly agreed in the want of more money” (p. 42). Mary does unknowingly what the narrator does knowingly. She is deficient in “understanding” and “temper,” and has the “Elliot self-importance” and “no resources for solitude”(p. 36); but she says “I made the best of it; I always do” about supposedly feeling ill, when she so clearly does the opposite. Characters correct each other’s view while the narrator corrects our view of all of them, forcefully demonstrating a radical instability of perspective quite unlike the harmonized world associated with Austen’s work.

Mary’s character is based on the high comedy of rationalization, in which we are in on the joke of her selfishness. But Mary’s function is not simply comic; she shows off Anne’s temper, her restraint, patience, gentleness, moderation, self-suppression, even what Jane Austen calls her “forced cheerfulness.”