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The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.
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Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill 4 burner gas grill on special. Buy for only $199 and entertain all season with the Hampton bay West Grove 7 piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This MEM Real day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot while supplies Last price invalid May 14th or May 27th. US only exclusions apply. See homedepot.com pricematch for details. Hey folks, it's Jack. Emma and I are still on our History of Literature podcast tour, so we're replaying some past favorite episodes. We should be in Bath now or on our way, which has some ties to Mary Shelley and of course to Jane Austen. In honor of that, we're replaying our look at Persuasion, Austin's final completed novel, which is set in Bath. Our episode came in three parts today. Part 1 A look at Persuasion. I hope you enjoy it. Hello. On December 20, 1817, the literary world received an extraordinary Christmas gift, two novels by a supremely gifted and innovative novelist known for works like Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. The new novels were Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, published together in one edition, along with a biographical notice of the author, who until then had been anonymous. Although the publication was cause for celebration, it was a melancholy one, as the author had died six months before. Her name, of course, was Jane Austen. We'll discuss her final completed novel, Persuasion, today on the History of Literature. Okay, here we go. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Podcast, I'm Jack Wilson. We're looking at Persuasion today, written by Jane Austen in a kind of race against time as she began to feel the effects of of the disease that would take her life. It's a mature work, a profound one, I would say, with a simple enough plot overlaid with subtle and complex emotions and deep profundity. For many, it is their favorite Jane Austen work, and it's easy to see why. Virginia Woolf said quote in Persuasion, Jane Austen is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed. End quote. Now, we have a tradition on the podcast of ending episodes with Virginia Woolf quotes giving her the last word. But today we're just getting started. Probably we're going to have two, maybe three episodes on this book. Here's what I have planned. First, we'll go through the origins of the book, where Jane was in her life and career when she wrote it. Then we'll talk about the themes, in particular, what we think of Persuasion, what we think of persuaders and the persuaded and the act of persuasion itself. It's not nearly as commonly discussed or reflected upon or expressed as qualities like love and evil or greed or revenge are, but it's a worthy quality nevertheless. It has a surprising range to it once you really dig in and start to explore. And then we will have a pair of guests. Our friend Gina Buonoguro, romance novelist and Jane Austen superfan, who talked to me about the first half of the book, and Mike Palindrome, fan favorite, will join us for a discussion of the second, and maybe we'll throw in some literary news and a few other goodies along the way. We do aim to please, after all. So Jane Austen completed six novels in her lifetime, but although she wrote early in her life, she was not published until later. So it was really only in her last few years that she was beginning to be recognized outside her family. Sense and Sensibility was published when she was 35 years old, Pride and Prejudice when she was 37, Mansfield park when she was 38, and Emma when she was 39, and then she died at age 41. So that was it for her lifetime, those four books. Everything else was published after her death. But what's interesting for Persuasion is that she began the book after she was a published author of the four earlier novels. She was on the other side of the divide that comes from being a family favorite on the one side and being out there in the world on the other, endorsed and exposed a bit more worldly than being the young Writer with a novel in the drawer. Perhaps she was also on the other side of life, so to speak. There's a big difference even today between a woman of 19, which is how old Jane Austen was when she began writing Sense and Sensibility, and a woman of 39, the age she was when she began writing Persuasion. Well, even today that's a big gap. But the gulf back then was at least as large and probably more so, which I'm extrapolating from the texts of Jane Austen herself. The one we're looking at today views the difference between 21 and 28 as practically. Or maybe it's 19 and 27, practically an entire generation. Marriageability looks, position in life, even those seven or eight years are transformative. So how much more so then does a 20 year gap change one's outlook? I think we can see that if we're examining Jane Austen's novels. So Jane Austen is always perceptive and always wise, but the focus of her attention in Persuasion has shifted. It's a more mature book because it looks at life from a more mature place. Even what it addresses is a more mature topic. It's more reflective, broader, the difference between a young person's heroic burst and an older person's questioning of what it all means. Think of love as being like a rock thrown into a pond. The earlier books look at the impact of the rock as it hits the surface, the disturbance it creates, the sound and fury of the splash. Persuasion, on the other hand, starts with a rock that's disappeared under the water. What we're observing are the ripples as they stem outward. We're taking in the whole pond, recalling the moment of the splash, reflecting on our emotional response. In tranquility, we might think about what caused that rock to go hurtling through the air in the first place. We might look at the hole in the water and wonder where the rock is now. Jane Austen never married, but she appears to have been well acquainted with love and courtship and disappointment and regret. We've discussed Tom Lefroy in the past, the Irish friend, quote unquote, with whom Jane flirted as a young woman. That relationship was doomed, in part, it seems, because of his lack of prospects. But he then rose to prominence, which Jane must have seen and wondered about. There are echoes here of the romance at the heart of Persuasion. Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth are young and the match is not good. But years later, the objection seems to have been premature, not borne out by circumstances. Only at that point, it may be too late. Getting it wrong. When looking at the future we'll talk about this when we talk about Persuasion in a lowercase P. Persuasion, the concept, one of its qualities is that it's about the future. It's someone who's persuading, is offering a glimpse of various possible futures. It has a predictive element to it. Here's what's likely to happen. If you do X, it could lead to Y, it will lead to Y. On the other hand, if you do something not X, you will get a different result. In retrospect, sometimes that prediction turns out to have been wrong. Other young relationships that Jane Austen had are with Harris big wither, a 21 year old heir. 26 year old Jane apparently agreed to marry him and then changed her mind the next morning. There are some other hints that she fell in love with a man who died soon afterwards. Jane also had the examples close at hand of her sister Cassandra's relationships and relationships of her other relatives, most particularly a niece, which we will also discuss later. The main point I want to make is that Persuasion, the novel, is Austen looking back. She's lived a full life. She knows she's sick. She's exploring not just the immediacy of love and romance, but all the after effects. There's often a criticism of novels about young love that they end with a marriage and a hand waving happily ever after. When of course, we know that's not necessarily true of marriages. We'd like to think that Prince Charming and Princess Wonderful or whoever are now united in perpetual bliss and we can roll the credits, glad to see the universe has cooperated in our desire to see happiness achieved. But grown ups know that their marriage might be even more interesting than the story of how they overcame this or that. Objection. And and let true love prevail. In Persuasion, Austin's looking at something even more soaked with reflection and regret. What about the love you turn down? What happens to people when they don't even get that initial happily ever after? Do they end up settling later? Do they live a full life alone? Do they shrivel up somehow, living with a sense of failure and regret? Do they blame others? Can they manage to rekindle any kind of happiness? Jane Austen took on these ideas with a novelist's eye in mind and did so with the stamp of approval that her books were well reviewed and widely read. She was a novelist, capital N, and she was finding new territory for her novels to explore. Let's take a quick break and then look at the concept of persuasion. Hey, folks, Launching a business is fun, but there's so much to do and so much risk. What if I put out a podcast and nobody listens? What if nobody buys my products? That's why it's great to have one. Go to partner on your side Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, from household names like Heinz and Mattel to brands just getting started like Gymshark and Death Wish Coffee. 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Focus features in Blumhouse Obsession When I
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have a crush on a guy no
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one knows, Be careful.
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I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone in the entire world.
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Who you wish for obsession is 96% fresh on rotten Tomatoes.
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I love you so so so so much.
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It's blood soaked nightmare fuel.
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Brooke I just blood you put on her.
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Jane Austen has a habit of setting out thematic positions or oppositions for us in the titles of her works. So Sense and Sensibility is one example. Wisdom versus Emotions. In other words, which one do we follow? Which one prevails? Pride and Prejudice is another. Those two terms sit awkwardly together. Somehow they must be balanced so we don't let our self regard and our judgments of others turn into dangerous qualities that must be avoided or overcome. Persuasion, which was actually the title chosen for the book by her brother Henry. Her title, Jane's title was the Elliot's, but it's a great title, a great choice by Henry. And unlike SNS and pnp, Persuasion has an argument built into its single term. Persuasion isn't pitted against an opposing term like dissuasion because it embodies tension within itself. It doesn't need to be pitted against a term like that. Persuasion has so many aspects to it, I think we need to break them down. Let's do it in the context of the novel's plot. And Elliot is our protagonist. When the book opens, we are eight years beyond the great romantic event of her life. She was in love with Frederick Wentworth. But Lady Russell, a kind of surrogate mother figure, her own mother had died, persuaded her not to marry him. Anne is now living with that absence as life has moved forward and a replacement for Frederick never arose. She's, in fact, only Ann, not much respected by a family, too caught up in their own drama to value her exceptional qualities. Lady Russell sees them. Anne reminds Lady Russell of her friend Anne's mother, which makes things all the more bittersweet. No one in the book values Anne more clearly, and no one is more responsible for her not having married what in the world, in retrospect, appears more and more like the love of her life. And to make things worse, Frederick Wentworth now returns from the Napoleonic wars with prize money and a socially acceptable position of navy captain. With hindsight, this was a great opportunity lost. But the book isn't called Regrets or Lost Opportunities or Fate and Fortune. It zeroes in on persuasion. What does that mean? What does that do? What role does that play? What do we think of persuaders and the act of persuasion? We can root our understanding of the word persuasion in Dr. Johnson's dictionary, which came out in 1755. This is pretty close to our era. We can imagine that the definition that he employed was probably followed by Jane and most of her contemporaries. Here's his definition. 1. The act of persuading, the act of influencing by expostulation. The act of gaining or attempting the passions. Note that last clause, the act of gaining or attempting the passions. His definition for persuade expands on this. The definition is 1. To bring to any particular opinion. 2. To influence by argument or expostulation. Persuasion seems rather applicable to the passions and an argument to the reason. But this is not always observed. We allow a number of possibilities in our concept of persuading. It's getting someone to do something, to adopt a position or view or course of conduct. We change their mind. We persuade by any number of tactics, maybe through rational argument, which has a kind of purity to it, or maybe it's through bribes or threats or lies, which is at the other end of the moral spectrum. Or maybe we persuade somewhere in the gray areas. Maybe we persuade someone through appeals to their sentiment by using rhetorical tricks. Maybe this is something we want for our own sake more than for theirs. Maybe we persuade them by using guilt or by appealing to their sense of self sacrifice. Maybe our motives in persuading them are impure. Or maybe we're convinced we're right when we're not. And maybe we resort to tactics designed to interfere with their own good judgment. Persuasion has been at the heart of morally troubling outcomes since the Garden of Eden. As Johnson noted when he cited the serpent with me persuasively hath so prevailed that I have also tasted. I assume that's Adam talking there. In another passage in Paradise Regained, Milton says of Satan, the tempter, the. The persuasive rhetoric that sleeked his tongue and won so much on Eve. Sleeked his tongue. Another sleeked tongue is the one employed by Iago, one of Shakespeare's greatest villains, who employs several of Aristotle's methods of persuasion to get what he wants. He manipulates everyone, all under cover of seeming reliable and sincere and trustworthy. Oh, good Iago. He is ruthlessly cunning. He manipulates everyone around him, preying on their doubts and insecurities and weaknesses. His greatest act of villainy is to persuade Othello to murder his wife. In fact, Othello is almost persuaded the opposite. When he goes into her room to kill her at night, believing that she must die, else she'll betray more men, he stops and says, O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade justice to break her sword. Othello is so twisted that he thinks Desdemona's sleeping breath sweetness itself a sign of her purity and innocence. He rejects it as a false sign, as if that's the cunning and guile he must resist. That's what Jane Austen is tapping into here, that persuasion is a double edged sword. It's better than forcing someone to do something against their will. In Milton, Jesus himself notes this. He says it's more humane, more heavenly. First, by winning words to conquer willing hearts and make persuasion do the work of fear. Persuasion is working through others, getting them to do what you want. When God gave humans free will, he was expressing this respect for personal autonomy and the dignity of human agency. It's better morally for people to choose for themselves what to do rather than to have others choose it for them. But we are sometimes invested in them choosing a particular path, either altruistically, because we love them and want them to be happy and believe that a certain path will take them there, or less altruistically, because we see some advantage for ourselves, or because we want them to be miserable. The scenario she chose that Jane Austen chose is the most heartbreaking one. Operating from the best of motives. Lady Russell persuades based on good, sound reasons, and Ann adopts the choice, adopts the decision, and they turn out to be wrong. Anne has been the one to make the choice which is correct morally. But when it's clear that she's sacrificed her happiness for nothing, she can't help but look back on her decision and notice that Lady Russell played an instrumental part in it. But what does she do with that information? Lady Russell was only trying to help. Should Anne blame her forever wallow around in self pity? To do so is to minimize her own agency. She was persuaded. After all, we don't blame Satan for persuading or God for letting it happen. When we blame Eve, we don't have a great example of Jane Austen herself being dissuaded by a Lady Russell figure. But that's not essential. Sometimes the persuasion comes from within. People can persuade themselves of an outcome and come to regret that later too. Why did I let my emotions take over? Or why did I talk myself out of that? Why did I become an accountant instead of following my dream of being an actor? I persuaded myself that I couldn't do it. Maybe that was how Jane looked back at her own decisions and the course that her life took. But we don't have to limit ourselves to speculation on that because we have another example that's much closer to the Lady Russell and Elliot dynamic. Just months before she began writing Persuasion, Jane Austen found herself in a scenario like the one she created in Persuasion, only she was in the position of Lady Russell. Her beloved niece, Fanny Knight had a potential suitor. Jane Austen had written warmly of him and her niece, who greatly esteemed her beloved aunt. Jane, used Jane's approval as a reason for accepting him. There was one danger in particular to this match. They would have to wait for a long engagement before they could wed. As we know from the surviving letters, Jane did not react with the kind of pride or honor in being put into this position. She was appalled. She seems to have thought that the years long engagement would be too tough on Fanny, sensing as she did that Fanny's love for this particular man was not strong enough to survive the burdens that such a long wait would impose. She writes in her letter. You will think me perverse, perhaps. In my last letter I was urging everything in his favor and now I am inclining the other way. But I cannot help it. I am at present more impressed with the possible evil that may arise to you from engaging yourself to him in word or mind than with anything else. When I consider how few young men you have yet seen much of, how capable you are, Yes, I do still think you are very capable of being really in love. And how full of temptation the next six or seven years of your life will probably be. It is the very period of life for the strongest attachments to be formed. I cannot wish you, with your present very cool feelings, to devote yourself in honor to him. It is very true that you never may attach another man his equal altogether, but if that other man has the power of attaching you more, he will be, in your eyes, the most perfect. End quote. But Jane didn't want to dissuade her niece either. Her strongest reaction was that she didn't want to have this responsibility foisted on her. She wrote, quote, you frightened me out of my wits by your reference. Your affection gives me the highest pleasure, but indeed, you must not let anything depend on my opinion. Your own feelings, and none but your own, should determine such an important point. I dare not say determine to accept him. The risk is too great for you unless your own sentiments prompt it. You frighten me out of my wits by your putting this in my hands, by saying that you're doing it because of something I said. You must not let anything depend on my opinion, just your own feelings. This is a Lady Russell determined not to be a Lady Russell, and maybe a Jane Austen who remembered the Lady Russells in her own life and thought, I've resented them for their advice ever since. I won't play that part for Fanny. She has to play it for herself. She'll be stronger. And I won't bear the blame for a future that could very easily not work out. Persuasions are about the future, about seeing different scenarios unfold. You might regret it. The long engagement here might make you restless, and you might turn down other opportunities. And you might always resent the fact that I praised this man and you jumped into an engagement with him. That's what Jane Austen is doing, giving her a sense of what is likely to unfold. Life is so hard. Making decisions is very hard. It can feel like a gift to help people make their decisions or to jump in and make those decisions for them. How many times have you done this for a friend or a loved one? They come to you, they say, I don't know if I should break up with my girlfriend. And you listen to them describe the scenario, and you think, I know exactly what you should do. But you also know that you can't just say it that way. You can't say, okay, break up with her. It has to be their decision. Or maybe I should say, you can't relieve them of that burden, that agency. You can say, if I were you, I'd break up with her. Or it sounds like. You could say, it sounds like you want to break up with her, or it sounds like you'd be better off without her. You can say, here's what I think might happen if you stay in this relationship. Or, well, here's the downside of the two of you staying together, if that's how you feel, but what you can't do. What's tempting but worse, is to say, break up with her because I know what's best for you and I'm telling you to do it. Do it even if you don't want to, because I said so. They have to leave the conversation aware that it's their decision, their agency. We do this every day in situations that are modest as well as monumental. Before we decide anything that involves multiple people, we decide explicitly or not, who should decide. We say, well, you're the one who's going to be eating this meal, so you should decide what to order. Or, this is your career we're talking about. Don't ask me to decide whether you should quit your job. And yet we want to help, we want to guide, we want to give advice. Older people in particular want desperately to help younger people avoid mistakes. Well intentioned persuasion is as inevitable for both the persuaded and the persuaders. It's not enough to wash our hands of everything and say, leave me out of this. We do what Jane Austen did in her letter to Fanny Knight. I count two and a half sentences saying, don't let anything depend on my opinion, and two and a half paragraphs saying, here's my opinion. That letter is dated November 30, 1814. Jane Austen began writing Persuasion in August of the following year. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that Austen's novels are imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society without genius, wit or knowledge of the world. End quote. He could hardly be less right. There's more wit in a Jane Austen novel than in the entire collected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in my opinion. And there's enough genius to power a good sized planet. And there's knowledge of the world too. Her examination of an act of persuasion and its rippling effects shows us that. And in our next episodes, we'll look at the characters and plot of Persuasion and we'll talk to our guests about their reading of the book. And we'll find out how things ended for Jane Austen and whether in her final book she managed to find a happy ending among these rippling currents, and if so, how exactly she pulled that off. Okay, we have a bit more time today. That's a good stopping point, I think. So let's close with one of our my last books. This time we'll hear from our guest, Stephen Dobransky. Speaking of Milton, Professor Dobransky is an expert in Milton and Miltonic studies. Will he choose something by John Milton for the last book he will ever read? Perhaps Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained? We'll find out after this. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. 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Okay, we're joined by Stephen Dobronsky, who is a distinguished university professor at Georgia State University and an expert in the works and life of John Milton. Professor Dobronsky, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written. Wow.
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I guess the right answer is that I would like it to be a really long book.
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Yeah, well, Milton has got some lengthy ones if you want to go back to him.
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I think it would be a book either that would inspire me right at the end or maybe provide some comfort because it's familiar. And I might go toward the latter. I might choose Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. That's the last novel he completed. It's one of my favorite. I've read some of Dickens novels multiple times, but that one I've only read once and it so moved me. I so love the character of Eugene and Lizzie. And it is a nice long book as well. But it was such a moving experience. I think it would remind me at the end of the Power of Words because I think Dickens succeeds on the sentence level, but also on the grand edifice. And it's novels at their most powerful. When I read one of his books,
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Dickens would be very good. He's such good company. I'm always struck by that when I open up Dickens. I get used to novels being sometimes a little bit impenetrable, and the longer ago they were written sometimes the harder it is to kind of engage with them, or it just takes more work. But I'm always surprised by how Dickens voice is still so engaging and he's such good company. It seems like that would be a really good choice. A really good aspect of having a book like that at your side in that time.
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I think so. And I think that when we think of Dickensian, we think of the labyrinthian plots or the wonderful coincidences as the resolution of the novel presents itself. But as you say, the world he creates, the streets of London, the smell, the sights, the sound, it's a very immersive experience. And some of those individual sentences and those characters he creates are so vivid that it can be captivating, distracting, all enveloping.
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Okay, an excellent choice. Professor Stephen Dobronsky, thank you for joining me on the history of literature.
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Oh, it's been a delight. Thank you so much.
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Okay, that was our introduction to Persuasion. If you'd like to hear more, you can check out our discussion with Gina buonaguro in episode 503, in which we discussed the first half of Jane Austen's novel and our discussion with Mike palindrome in episode 504, in which we explore the second half. Those are still in our archives, still available for free. We'll be back next time with a look at French novelist Colette. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
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