Two years into Brooklyn, I was still working on my Austen chapter. The thing was like a chronic illness, my only comfort being the grad-school adage that once you’ve finished your first chapter, you’re halfway through the dissertation, because writing the first one teaches you how to write the rest.
I had chosen to begin with Austen not only because I loved her work so much, but also because she seemed to me to represent the perfect starting point for my investigation: a writer who had celebrated community in its most basic and traditional sense—the settled, stable rural world, that good green place where everybody knows you and everybody belongs, the exact image of what I was trying to recapture in my own life. I had also decided to focus on my two favorite among her novels—Pride and Prejudice, of course, and the book that had long since won a special place in my heart, and now increasingly reflected my state of mind, Persuasion.
Austen’s final work, Persuasion was unique among her novels for its layered emotional texture and profound depth of feeling. The mood was wistful, melancholy, autumnal, projecting an atmosphere of nostalgia and regret that was unlike anything she had created before. A work of loneliness and loss, the novel was completed less than a year before Austen’s death. Whether she knew that she was dying by then—the illness that came upon her in the middle of writing the book was mysterious and, for a long time, intermittent—it was impossible to say. What seemed clearer—Austen turned forty during the novel’s composition—was that Persuasion reflected the ripened outlook of a woman who felt herself to be passing into the next phase of life.
The novel’s special place among her work was clear from its very first chapter. The heroine, Anne Elliot, was not a blooming girl of seventeen or twenty, a Catherine Morland or Elizabeth Bennet springing lightly over the threshold of adulthood and into the adventure of romance; she was already twenty-seven, still young by our standards but well past her prime by those of Austen’s day. Anne had already had her novel, so to speak, and it had ended in failure. Eight years earlier, she had fallen rapidly and deeply in love with a dashing young naval officer named Captain Wentworth. Wentworth was modeled on Austen’s brother Frank. Both made captain at a young age; both fought in the great Battle of San Domingo. Even their first names were similar: Wentworth’s was Frederick. Both also came ashore after that momentous engagement to get themselves a wife, but while Frank did marry his bride in that summer of 1806, Anne and Wentworth’s romance only led to grief.
He was “a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit, and brilliancy.” She was “an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling.” But she also came from a family of aristocratic snobs that made the Bertrams of Mansfield Park look like socialists. A young man without wealth or pedigree was just not going to do. Anne’s father, the odious Sir Walter—spiteful, shallow, and vain—“thought it a very degrading alliance” and “gave it all the negative of great astonishment, great coldness, great silence, and a professed resolution of doing nothing for his daughter” (that is, refusing to give her a dowry). Anne’s mother, Lady Elliot, a warm and decent woman whose excellent judgment had saved her husband from the worst consequences of his character, might have seen to it that justice was done after all, but she had died when Anne was fourteen, and her place in Anne’s life had been taken by Lady Elliot’s best friend, Lady Russell.
Lady Russell appreciated the heroine as her father never did—Anne’s virtues were far too fine for Sir Walter to know how to value them—but she was no more cheerful about the match. “Anne Elliot, with all her claims of birth, beauty, and mind, to throw herself away at nineteen! . . . Anne Elliot, so young; known to so few, to be snatched off by a stranger without alliance or fortune!” It was the same snobbery with a kinder face. And so, without a friend to take her side, Anne was pressured into breaking the engagement. Wentworth went off in anger and resentment, and Anne, her bloom ruined and her spirits sunk, was left to waste her youth in the bitterness of futile regret.
Flash forward eight years, and the heroine was more alone than ever now, alone in a way that none of Austen’s other characters were. Even Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, had her cousin Edmund and her brother William and the genuine if lazy affection of her aunt Lady Bertram. But while Anne still had Lady Russell, for what she was worth, that was all she had. Having never gotten over Captain Wentworth, she had refused the hand of a local gentleman a few years later, and she seemed to have no chance of ever being offered someone else’s. Her younger sister, Mary, had gotten married herself (to Charles Musgrove, the same local man whom Anne refused). Her older sister, Elizabeth, was as cold and mean as their father—one of the things that made her Sir Walter’s favorite—and equally awful to Anne. Isolated in her own family, the heroine “was nobody with either father or sister; her word had no weight, her convenience was always to give way: she was only Anne.”
Fanny also had Mansfield Park to hold on to, but now Anne was even going to lose her own beloved home. Sir Walter, with a very high opinion as to what so great a man deserved, had run himself into such a morass of debt that he was forced to rent out the family manor and move to Bath. Elizabeth would be coming along, of course, but her chosen companion would be, not the sister whose excellence she could never perceive, but an oily young widow named Mrs. Clay, all flattery and compliance, who had worked her way into Elizabeth’s affections.
Anne would go to stay with the Musgroves and play the role of spinster aunt that Austen knew herself by then so very well. She would take care of her nephews while Mary, a world-class whiner, complained about how put-upon she was; she would play dances for Charles’s lively, lovely younger sisters Henrietta and Louisa (who resembled Austen heroines far more than Anne now did); she would listen to everybody’s grievances about one another; she would make peace between them when she could; and above all, she would stay in the shadows, where a spinster belonged. It was to be a lesson, she mused, “in the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle”—not that Anne was much of anything even in her own circle.
My circumstances, needless to say, were very different from Anne’s, but I shared her feelings of loneliness and melancholy. I hadn’t lost a parent or a home, but I had done what I could—what I had to do—to distance myself from both. I had wanted to be on my own, and now I was. I just didn’t realize quite how on my own I was going to be. When you’re young—when you’re in high school and college and even your early twenties—you take your friends for granted. Of course they’ll always be there. You take friends for granted. Why would you ever have trouble making new ones? Then all of a sudden—and it can feel very sudden indeed—everybody’s gone. Some have moved, some have married, everyone’s busy, and the crowd of potential friends by which you’ve always been surrounded has evaporated.
I still didn’t want to get married, but I didn’t want to be alone, either. Yet just as it was for Anne, that’s how it was starting to look like it was always going to be for me. I still loved living in my own place and being out from under my father’s shadow, but my Austen chapter wasn’t taking me forever just because it gave me so much work to do. A lot of days, I didn’t even have the strength to face it. I would drag myself out of bed, only to sit around and stare off into space. The air would sag, the clock would point its contemptuous hands, my cat would look at me and seem to wonder why I wasn’t moving. I would feel ugly and worthless. Anne was depressed—that’s what it meant for Austen to say that her spirits were low—and let’s face it, so was I.