Correspondence). She accuses Austen of unfemininity: ‘Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete, and rather insensible (not senseless) woman” (letter of April 12, 1850). But the influential critic George Henry Lewes admired her realism, which he called “daring from its humble truthfulness,” and an American critic writing in 1849 cited her as a ”model of perfection in a new and very difficult species of writing ... [with] no surprising adventures, ... no artfully involved plot, no scenes deeply pathetic or extravagantly humorous.” By the end of the century Austen was identified with Scott’s view of her, as embodying a realism that copies nature and imitates the commonplace yet imparts moral wisdom, “universal truths,” and is instructive where romance inflames.

Persuasion is forever being called “mature,” implying that Jane Austen had at last arrived at some culminating wisdom in her lifelong struggle for it. It is also frequently described as “autumnal,” emphasizing its status as her last completed work before dying. As far back as 1862, a reviewer labeled it her “tender and sad” novel. In fact, Persuasion begins with loss, both personal and economic, and slowly reverses the trajectory.

Though Persuasion, like other Jane Austen novels, is about the maturing through trial of a young woman, the novel does not begin with its central character, Anne Elliot. Instead the first pages are devoted to her father and his obsessive vanity about his lineage as baronet, from which follows his contempt for those he considers beneath him. Like many of Austen’s fictional fathers, Sir Walter is detached, ineffectual, and self-serving (the good fathers in Austen’s novels tend to die before the novel opens, as in Sense and Sensibility), but unlike Elizabeth Bennet’s father in Pride and Prejudice, he is also shockingly stupid. He has one trait uniquely his own in contrast to Austen’s other clueless patriarchs: He is said to value his beauty only slightly less than he values his social rank. Austen slyly classifies Sir Walter as feminine in his erotics of self: “Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did” (p. 4). Personal vanity is linked to a kind of romantic love for himself that precludes his feeling much affection for his family: “He considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and the Sir Walter Elliot, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion” (p. 4). Here, as elsewhere in the Austen canon, the egocentric ity of personal display is tied to the falseness of social place as a marker of distinction. The presence of vanity strongly indicates here that real worth is inner value, demonstrated by “true” taste that is modest, clean, and neat, not by outer symbolic displays or performance.

In Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, the heroines have fond sisters who are their complements and provide the intimate support the heroine requires in order to speak her mind within the narrative. Anne Elliot is not an only child, but her sisters are monsters of selfishness and either ignore her shamefully or use her shamelessly. Before the end of the first chapter, it is established that the heroine is both privileged and very little valued or recognized: a “nobody,” “only Anne” within her family. Her godmother, Lady Russell, a close friend of her dead mother and clearly a mother-substitute, is alone capable of understanding her worth, but she is hardly a fairy godmother to Anne’s Cinderella, as we soon find out.

The narrative gets underway at the point (the end of the very first chapter) when we learn that the high ranking of this family on the social hierarchy does not guarantee the stability of their economic value; the finances of the estate are in peril, debt is accumulating, and the family must “retrench”—that is, live at less expense. This instability of economic privilege conflicts with the belief that recognition of social privilege is universal, which is both the essence of Sir Walter’s being and at the core of traditional British society. Sir Walter reacts with a foolish refusal to economize, while Anne is shown not only to be wise and prudent beyond her years but also strong and humble in her willingness to climb slightly down the economic ladder with dignity. The manor house that is the symbol of the estate, the source of their family wealth and privilege, must be “let”—they must separate from it but not entirely give it up. At this point