Austen's Persuasion - What went wrong?

[Gyges]

I'm currently reading Austen's Persuasion, and I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that the heroine, Anne Elliot, is unapologetically Mary-Sue. In general, Austen's wry humour and characters are always a joy, but Anne just comes across as a complete blank slate compared to the other characters' subtle construction. She has very little personality and takes almost no part in the dialogue for the first half of the book, despite apparently having been personable enough to capture the garrulous Captain Wentworth's attention not eight years ago. Rather than weave her character into the narrative, her personality is offloaded on to the reader in chunks of description. And her description makes her out to be flawless: she is described as gentle, loving and kind; everyone's confidant; motherly and a favourite aunt; both her nieces and nephews and her sister's in laws prefer her to her sister; AND she was first choice for her sister's husband. And yet her family treats her like crap, and ignores her, obsessed by their own vanity. All in all she comes across as a martyred saint, unappreciated and unloved, whose single flaw is that at the ripe old age of twenty seven, she's slightly less pretty than she used to be.

I think the final straw for me was this line (actually fairly early on) "In music she had always been used to feel alone in the world" (Chapter VI).

What? WHAT? This is what the creator of Lizzie Bennet and Fanny Price came to? That sentence sounds like something from a scenester's myspace page.

I guess all I wanted to ask is, does anyone have a defence of Anne Elliot as anything more than a Mary-Sue?

[prendrelemick]

The worm turns.

[hawthorns]

I'm currently reading Austen's Persuasion, and I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that the heroine, Anne Elliot, is unapologetically Mary-Sue. In general, Austen's wry humour and characters are always a joy, but Anne just comes across as a complete blank slate compared to the other characters' subtle construction. She has very little personality and takes almost no part in the dialogue for the first half of the book, despite apparently having been personable enough to capture the garrulous Captain Wentworth's attention not eight years ago. Rather than weave her character into the narrative, her personality is offloaded on to the reader in chunks of description. And her description makes her out to be flawless: she is described as gentle, loving and kind; everyone's confidant; motherly and a favourite aunt; both her nieces and nephews and her sister's in laws prefer her to her sister; AND she was first choice for her sister's husband. And yet her family treats her like crap, and ignores her, obsessed by their own vanity. All in all she comes across as a martyred saint, unappreciated and unloved, whose single flaw is that at the ripe old age of twenty seven, she's slightly less pretty than she used to be.

I think the final straw for me was this line (actually fairly early on) "In music she had always been used to feel alone in the world" (Chapter VI).

What? WHAT? This is what the creator of Lizzie Bennet and Fanny Price came to? That sentence sounds like something from a scenester's myspace page.

I guess all I wanted to ask is, does anyone have a defence of Anne Elliot as anything more than a Mary-Sue?

I guess I'll have to revisit that one, but my impression was just the opposite. Of all her novels it felt the most organic and mature. It was her others, Emma especially, that annoyed me to no end. Maybe the fact that she was a "blank slate" was why I like it. But I'm sure I'm in the minority--always preferred the Brontes.

[nancybella]

Gyges, everything you describe about Anne Elliot there is meant to be funny. When Austen is sketching out her character, she's winking at the reader. How Anne feels about music is exactly how Anne is meant to feel; it's poking fun at how so many of us - at our myspace phase especially, as you say - it pokes fun at how many of us feel about ourselves in our grander moments.

It's those moments Austen seizes - she's the shrewdest, most professional eye for our follies - she seizes those things and makes characters out of them. That's her remit. If you're looking for more sympathy from Austen, she'll scorn you and you'll miss the comedy. If you insist on taking the comedy seriously, it'll read like platitudes. If you read it as merciless comedy, you'll see it's superbly placed, well-written dialogue.

They look like exaggerations but they're too well-observed and funny to be much in the way of exaggerations at all. Which makes you laugh all the more, as you realize life and people are not far different to this.

As Chesterton says about Austen, and this is what Austen is: ''her inspiration that of Gargantua and Pickwick; it was the gigantic spirit of laughter and indefatigable exuberance...She was the very reverse of a starched or starved spinster; she could have been a buffoon like the Wife of Bath if she chose.''

When you search for comedy in her every paragraph, Gyges, you start to find it. Emma is the best for this. It is loaded down heavily, a thick book wicked with observations. No character or situation or piece of dialogue at any moment gets away from it. You start laughing and you don't know where to underline; you'd have to underline the whole book. Each part is as good as the next: every part is equally great, but some parts are greater than others.

If you take one of her characters from Emma, a Miss Bates. She's the silliest person you could ever read. Nothings come out of her mouth. If you're disposed to find some serious reason for Miss Bates, it'll be intolerable reading. If you think, on the other hand, that this woman's wittering is closer to our own talk than we'd like to think, and the way people react to her says more about them than Miss Bates herself - if you try and take her in the funny-bone spirit, it starts to become very amusing. Every word of Austen's is pinched with salt. That's what she does; nobody does it like her.

In saying that, I'm glad Miss Bates isn't given more dialogue than she's given. She's the least attractive character in the book but she's still successfully executed for Austen's particular purpose. So Miss Bates is a great example of how Austen does not put a foot wrong. I'm amazed at the professionalism of Austen. I don't see that she does anything wrong. Nothing excessive, no bad habits. It's remarkable. She has such control of herself.

Her observations on the human species are more fearless than Darwin's on every other species, and she's more ruthless. She picks her subject, marriage (or the same thing, our preoccupation with union with the opposite sex), and gets down to business; hammers it all together rapidly, a total professional, tongue in cheek the whole way.

She has the sharpest of visions and applies the razor everywhere. She must have laughed a lot as she wrote. She must've been smiling and laughing through the morning-time. I'd say some bypassers saw her through her window and smiled to see such fun.

[nancybella]

I can see how Austen would prefer Emma to Pride and Prejudice. Between the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice, between Lizzy and Jane, there is some conflict. Jane always tries to find the good in people.

That's not what Austen is about, at her best. She may well use a character like Jane to point up Jane's follies, and not without some sympathy, as Austen isn't cruel. She does make you smile, and therein is the measure of sympathy.

But the thing about Jane, in Pride and Prejudice, is that not much fun is poked at her. Lizzy is partly troubled whether Jane's view are right and whether she, Lizzy, is too judgemental.

That doubt disappears in Austen's other novels. NO character - NO Jane - is exempt from having fun poked at them. Jane gets away with blue murder as a character. Jane Bennet was the last of Austen's innocence, thank goodness. Austen would not allow it again.

[nancybella]

In saying all of that, I'd be giving the wrong impression if I was making it look like Austen's characters are there as the butt of her jokes. That would be like saying real people are the butts of life's tricks or, if you're a believer, the butts of God's jokes.

No, she has real characters with real stories and concerns. It's just that who we are is endlessly amenable to humour. Where there's a wit, there's a way, and Austen has the wit.

Some people come to the finer novels insisting on finding a meaning for life. And for a lot of such people, a humorous take on life is incompatible with profound views. Humour is not profound for a lot of people.

These people, with this approach, cannot catch on to Austen.

A lot of young people must find Emma boring, because when we're young, we're serious.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

You can edit a post to add to it, rather than posting multiple times in a row.

[Gladys]

I read and enjoyed Persuasion long ago, and saw Anne Elliot as the epitome of a human being - someone to aspire to. I remember the novel as something of a genuine tragedy, resolved. Recently I read Pride and Prejudice and Emma. The former kept me in non-stop laughter throughout the second half of the book; the later I found saccharine at best.


Of all her novels [Pride and Prejudice] felt the most organic and mature. It was her others, Emma especially, that annoyed me to no end. Maybe the fact that she was a "blank slate" was why I like it.

My view also, except that I've read nothing funnier than Pride and Prejudice. As for the Brontes, Wuthering Heights is magnificent.


When you search for comedy in her every paragraph, Gyges, you start to find it. Emma is the best for this. It is loaded down heavily, a thick book wicked with observations. No character or situation or piece of dialogue at any moment gets away from it. You start laughing and you don't know where to underline; you'd have to underline the whole book.

Your description fits perfectly with the decidedly subtle Pride and Prejudice, whereas blatant Emma seems almost slapstick.


Jane gets away with blue murder as a character. Jane Bennet was the last of Austen's innocence, thank goodness. Austen would not allow it again.

Am I wrong in seeing parallels between angelic Jane Bennet and Anne Elliot? Both are intrinsically well-intentioned, putting the best construction on everything.

[nancybella]

Austen treats Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice with deference and seriousness; it's a wrong note; one feels Austen is bothered by it. She irons that crease out and it's not there in the other novels.

Austen starts poking more fun at Jane towards the end of the novel, as Jane's happiness is becoming more secure, as if it's safe for the author, through Lizzy, to start laughing at Jane only when her good ending is becoming secure. But Jane Bennet is a case of the character getting the better of the author, due to the author not having overcome her own inner barriers about who and what to respect and where false respect lies. Jane Bennet is a little bit of Jane Austen's impressionability left over.

No character escapes her sense of the ridiculous after Jane Bennet. She throws forever to the wind the respect we have for conventional pieties and only ever sees the double-standard in things thereafter, and makes it her vision to have a playful, mocking response to the way of things.

Society is no different today; people are no different. This is why Austen is ageless.

[Gyges]

Nacybella, that is a better way of looking at it! I suppose because I was reading Anne as Jane herself, as the internal monologue of a spinster who feels like she's missed out on life, it came across as platitudes rather than witty commentary. I do feel Anne's tragedy quite deeply, but I still feel that she's less of a character than other Austen heroines. Lizzy Bennet and Emma are both obviously flawed in amusing ways that nevertheless don't detract from their characters or likeability, but Anne Elliot still seems to combine washout passivity with Jane Bennet's innocence. Personally, Jane's innocence was always something I found quite irritating about her - her flawlessness makes her completely her impossible to relate to. But at least Jane had the spine to attempt to rebuild her life after Bingley abandoned her - before he comes back to Netherfield she's on her way to recovery, even able to make jokes about it. My problem with Anne Elliot is that she combines all Jane Bennet's irritating angelic good-heartedness with a seeming inability to attempt resolution to her own problems - if she had any of Lizzie's sharp wit she'd scorn Wentworth for chasing girls ten years his junior, or for his pompous self-deprecation; if she had Emma's self-belief then she'd go after him herself, or show him what he was missing by flirting with other men. And if she'd had any strength of character at all she'd have built a happier life for herself so that by the time he returned she'd be all "Wentworth who?"
But maybe I'm expecting too much from her considering most of her life she's been either ignored or had huge expectations put on her from her family and Lady Russell respectively. I like your take on it, I'm going to try and read it again from a more tongue in cheek perspective!

[nancybella]

I don't think there's anything tragic in Austen.

When Jane Bennet starts getting her life back together after Bingley drops her - but I don't think Jane does. Rather, she talks in that manner, but I think that's just meant to point up an amusing wilfulness of Jane's that Lizzy is onto.

Even so, I think Austen let her Jane Bennet off the hook a lot and gave her an amount of serious attention she, Austen, knows better than to give to the rest of her characters covering all her stories.

Anne can't be tragic; Austen is not melancholy. All her characters cause you to smile while putting the palm of your hand to your forehead in amused shame. There cannot be anything truly affecting about Anne Elliot.

Jane Bennet gets some fun poked at her. But not enough, and the extent to which she doesn't, it's a flat note and not like Austen.

But sorry, I'm repeating myself and I'm very glad you like my point. Chesterton says it best. He's a great critic of Austen. I'm going to start on Mansfield Park in a few days. Read it years ago, was a serious young person, and so, I think I missed the point. So I'm looking forward to getting the point anew and aright.

Austen's remarkable, the most flawless set of instincts, from one line and paragraph to the next, and it all moves so fast, so many serious points conveyed through our sense of the ridiculous in human affairs. What a gifted writer and thinker she was; the way she saw human society. If not for Tolstoy, I would think she's the last word on the human condition. They're both one of the last words. Sigh, I better be quiet. I can't convey her astuteness.

Austen offers an education in how to take a hard look at society. She sees it like a brilliant biologist. But because it's our own species, humour and wit is the diamond edge to it all. Austen is not sentimental. Yet what do we, as readers, look for in a story? Sentiment.

Sentimental stories are the best, I love them. That is the core of who we are. There's more meaning in tears and tragedy than laughter. That is the sad truth about life. But...there is still a lot of meaning in the laughter; it's a big tooth all by itself and Jane Austen extracts it.

It's not the service closest to our hearts but it's still a major service and Austen gives it.

So, we come to Austen's book determined to find tragedy and meaningful love.

There is some excitement and tender feelings, as she's describing love affairs. But that is the fat in Austen's stories, not the meat. The comedy is the meat. And really, she's a neat surgeon working on a messy carcass.

[nancybella]

I only mean to say I don't think Austen is tragic. I don't mean to express it so forcefully as to know it for a certainty. Sorry about that. That's just the enthusiasm of my own conviction speaking. I know it can be off-putting to read statements like that.

[nancybella]

I'll start on Persuasion in the next day or two before Mansfield Park. I read it years ago and I do remember being affected in a serious manner by the story. But that just makes me think now that Austen fooled me. I sought a sentimental education, as I eagerly, unapologetically, and continue to do every time I pick up a novel, whereas Austen offers an unsentimental education.

Very few people are ready for life's unsentimental education early in life. I certainly wasn't. Jane Austen was, as she was writing successfully in this manner in her teens. That really shows the strength of her mind: not just to think unsentimentally, but to do so with the maturity necessary to write clearly and engagingly to express a whole viewpoint on life in such a manner.

I nearly missed what Austen was about, or so I feel anyway, just speaking for myself. But I have the right view now and I'm re-reading her, and she's going to be the source of one whole half of my education and perspective on just what is happening in life, today the same as two hundred years ago.

[nancybella]

And to give the unsentimental education on the most sentimental subject of all, love between man and woman. To do it wickedly but without cynicism; always sincere and warmhearted. These truly are achievements and high demands to make of a writer, so many pitfalls. You have to be fit and never put a step wrong. Austen had it. She was the purest intellectual athlete, like that Greek statue holding the disc in a wonderful pose. But that's not a good example, as that's a sad image.

[nancybella]

I think one thing that perhaps can't be overstated too well is the reason we pick up novels, by and large, a very justified, natural reason, and which doesn't need any changing: we pick them up to assuage the romantic longings of our hearts, to read of love-relationships.

By and large. There are plenty of genres and differences, of course.

This impulse to read of love is what our lives are about, too. It's what life is about. All well and good, so far. To find love and a home for the affections and see life from these fulfilling relationships, where there is a mutual, but healthy, dependency.

My point is, there's a whole other side to life, not in contradiction to and not incompatible with serious love. That side has to do with how we don't just seek union with other people, but how we are forever separate till the day we die.

This is a hard reality to take. And if we are to become aware of this side of ourselves, without becoming unhappy, then we need humour, the kind of humour Austen creates. Our dependent side is love; our independent side is laughter - or some such gross simplification as this, if you can allow me and if I'm being intelligible and sensible...

Austen always comes off unfavourably with the romantic writers, the Brontes. It's always unfair to do that to Austen. She is doing something different; appealing to a different side of our nature. I love both types of writers equally, as I like both sides of myself equally; my dependent side and my independent side.

These aren't choices about our nature; they're doomed facts. This is our life and what we are made of.

The wonder of it all is that there's even more sides to us, so many variations. And it's the special, differentiating gifts of other top class writers that touch on these sides. And these discoveries we can make should we choose to do so.

But it is a big ask. A lifetime of growing pains, and we want to enjoy life. So we grow as much as suits us. And that's fine. I would never have it any other way.

[Gladys]

I'm currently reading Austen's Persuasion, and I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that the heroine, Anne Elliot, is unapologetically Mary-Sue. In general, Austen's wry humour and characters are always a joy, but Anne just comes across as a complete blank slate compared to the other characters' subtle construction. She has very little personality and takes almost no part in the dialogue for the first half of the book, despite apparently having been personable enough to capture the garrulous Captain Wentworth's attention not eight years ago.

In introducing Anne Elliot, the narrator tersely understates the personality of a woman exuding ten times the ethical and intellectual depth of sisters Mary and Elizabeth. The narrator's respect for Anne is fulsome throughout; and likewise mine. As a mature human being, she towers above her fellows in a way that reminds me of Dorothea in George Eliot's MiddleMarch, Maggie Verver in Henry James's The Golden Bowl or Sofia Semyonovna Marmeladova in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

Much of Emma is sentimental in tone and manner, whereas Persuasion is searing in its scrupulous presentation of a spinster isolated in a sad, harsh world. Never lacking in wit for the human condition, Jane Austen shows us the fine character of Anne Eliot indirectly, but powerfully. Persuasion is a moving portrait of a sterling woman.

[nancybella]

lol 'a woman exuding ten times the ethical...' makes the girl sound like a monster climbing a building. Fulsome respect does not characterize Austen, even when she's being respectful. I don't think Austen would ever allow her heroines tower in any sort of way. I doubt Austen likes sterling women. I'd say she likes her sterling in money, not in women.

Is it still Jane Austen we're talking about here? Or is there some other Austen I haven't heard of?

[nancybella]

I think to be able to see a comparison between a George Eliot character and an Austen one is to draw with cheese and eat chalk!

[The Comedian]

I'm struggling through this book right now. I got about 50 pages in, then had to take a break and read something else. Now I'm back on it and I'm determined to finish it.

Truth be told, Austen is one of the authors that I just can't relate to -- her and Dickens. But every summer, I try them again, determined to not let them beat me. I read Emma many years ago, and was so confused that I couldn't follow it after a while. Same thing now with Persuasion-- I read it, then I get so kerfuddled: who likes who for what, now? Who is socially higher than who? Who is Lady Russell? Which of these characters: Crofts, Wentworths. . .does she like or not like? Uppercross? Kellyscrich? Lyme?. . . which of these is better than the other again? I can't remember. . . . . .

When Anne "smiles, knowingly" I have no idea what she knows.

Really, this is more of a me problem than an Austen problem, I'm sure. But I'm going to finish this short book no matter what.

I do have to say, that based on my limited experience, I "like" this novel better than Emma which I remember drifting off for pages and pages, but anyway. . . . Gladys -- (especially), I'm glad to see this thread; it's given me something more to look for in the novel -- Anne as an inspirational figure.