so has the last word.

Persuasion is on its surface yet another “voyage of discovery,” the story of a woman fully arriving as an adult through marriage. By the novel’s conclusion Anne Elliot has acquired competence in the psychology of love and mastery of its fit into the moral and social worlds. She learns how to read men through the comparison of paired suitors, as in Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, who represent categories of personal worth within a newly defined classification of difference, a “modern” sense of what one should be and what one should not. Captain Wentworth, fully endorsed by the heroine and narrator at the end, is the modern man, with his belief in his own authority, his optimistic crediting of his own future worth (a species of investment in himself), and his demonstration of the power of the individual to overcome the constraints of traditional classifications. But this scheme argues not so much for meritocracy as for what Marilyn Butler calls a “natural aristocracy.” Class attributes are shown to be important in love, as part of the definition of “character,” which also means personality, morality, and right living. Clearly Jane Austen is on the side of “the duties and dignity of the resident landholder,” which Sir Walter has corrupted; she does not unequivocally endorse a society in which the middle-class or the upward striver wrenches authority from the historically privileged class.

Jane Austen, then, is both critical of the class system and wants to maintain it; that is, she wants to buttress it with better, more humanistic foundations. As in the novel Pamela, by the eighteenth-century author Samuel Richardson, a marriageable girl must not focus on trying to be a lady, but it is a truth universally acknowledged that there must be ladies. An Austen novel proposes a new system of signs opposed to the old conventions, reworking yet supporting fundamental social and religious categories. Persuasion in particular invites us to map Anne’s and Austen’s reading of her world onto our own and evaluate for ourselves the “cheerful confidence in futurity” that marked the early promise of Anne’s love affair. Speaking of the conventional social obstacles, the traditional privileges of class and gender that stood in the way of what she called “the play of spirit” in Jane Austen’s life, Virginia Woolf remarked most insightfully about Austen, “She believes in them as well as laughs at them.”

In this context, what does the title mean? Lady Russell gives both good and bad advice in her early act of persuasion: good in that it is based on tenderness and authority, bad in that it is constrained by pride rather than true feeling. But this seems to beg the question: If feeling so often trumps reason, how then does one know what is “true” (presumably as opposed to ego istic) feeling? How does this help us to conciliate modernity with tradition, the authority of individual desire with the authority of systems, to classify the classifiers? It is the modern question—as Captain Wentworth is a modern hero and the heroine’s marriage will be a modern marriage—and the question itself is left unresolved. Those who are attracted to Jane Austen because of nostalgia for the stability of class and clarity of old-fashioned values in picturesque English villages miss this most profound theme in her writing. Celebrated for simplicity, quaintness, and old-fashioned certainties, Austen in her last novel turns out to be complicated, thorny, and, most of all, anxiously uncertain about the world developing around her. At times she appears to be talking herself into a “cheerful confidence in futurity.” It is tempting to imagine where she would have taken this direction had she lived. But this novel was to be her final attempted act of (self-) persuasion.

Susan Ostrov Weisser is a Professor in the English Department at Adelphi University, where she specializes in nineteenth-century literature and women’s studies, and teaches frequently in the Honors College. Dr. Weisser’s Ph.D. is from Columbia University. She is the author and editor of three books in women’s studies. Her research centers on women and romantic love in nineteenth-century literature, as well as in contemporary popular culture. She wrote the introduction and notes to the Barnes and Noble Classics edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

1

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage,1 there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused