“Should I read Persuasion?” you ask.
How shall I reply?
It is rare that a book creates such a problem of recommendation.
The novel is, as you know, by Jane Austen. Generally speaking, it is always a simple matter to recommend Austen. Pride and Prejudice is a serious candidate for Best Novel Ever. So, presumably if someone can write the Greatest Novel of All Time, the rest of her output is at least minimally worth reading. Right? Ah, but can I answer that?
Now only a churlish sort of person would ever disrecommend Austen. She writes beautifully about beautiful people in a beautiful world. There is a reason that a Jane Austen Ball has the tinge of the romantic hanging about it. But, does that mean it is OK to recommend reading Persuasion?
Why the angst? Persuasion the novel is about Persuasion the act. Before the story starts, our heroine Anne Elliot wanted to marry the dashing Captain Frederick Wentworth, but was persuaded to avoid this romantic entanglement by the well-meaning Lady Russell. Fast forward nearly a decade, the novel begins and Anne, still single, meets Wentworth, also, mirabile dictu, single. You know how it ends. It’s Austen.
A novel with a plot that hinges on the idea that persuading people to do things is a really bad idea. Should I persuade you to read it?
Is persuasion itself an ethical act? The act of persuading is an assertion that the persuader knows something the persuadee does not. The persuader has decided that the persuadee should act in a certain manner. There is no escaping the fact: if I try to persuade you to do something, then I am fundamentally asserting that I know better than you what will be best for you.
This raises a pair of deep problems. If you are trying to persuade me of something, how do I know that your motives are pure? After all, you are trying to change my behavior by asserting that your advice is in my interest, but you might equally well be trying to persuade me to do something because it is actually in your interest, not mine. This is exactly what you and everyone else does when playing games—admit it, you have tried to convince your opponent to do something because you thought it would help you win. Do you do that in life too?
Second, if you are genuinely trying to improve my lot by persuading me that a certain course of action is best, how do I know that you actually understand what is best for me? Why should I trust that your advice is good? And, now flip the matter around. If you are trying to persuade someone of something, how do you know that your advice is good? How do you know that you are right in what you are trying to persuade someone to do? Do you really know the other person and the situation that well?
It’s a tricky problem. You have a friend who is dating a person who is fundamentally unsuitable for your friend. But, your friend is in love, blind to the massively obviously failings of the beloved. Is it your right to try to persuade your friend that this relationship is manifestly not good? Is it your obligation to do so? Or do you stand by and watch your friend go down a path which you know will only end in misery?
That question is probably unsolvable. Persuasion is just a fact of life. Obviously, if I think you should do something, I will try to persuade you to do it. It’s hard to be a college professor and not think that I should, at a minimum, try to persuade students that learning is fun.
So, should you read Persuasion? Depends. If you have not read Pride and Prejudice and Emma, then you should most definitely read those two novels before you pick up this one. Having read those two, if you want more Austen, then this is a fine book.
Fine, not truly great, though. The prose is marvelously Austenish and the world is fun, so that redeems the book. But the novel itself is woefully undercooked. Other than Anne Elliot there is not a filled-out character in the book. Anne’s father, Sir Walter Elliott, is impeccably sketched. Nobody else in the novel rises to the level of three-dimensional or even interestingly two-dimensional.
The plot reads more like the outline of a plot than a plot itself. By two-thirds of the way through the novel, Anne has three suitors. You know which one she will end up with, so it isn’t like sitting on pins and needles. But, these two other suitors show up out the blue, begin something akin to courting Anne, and then abruptly vanish. There is also a whole coterie of other relatives and acquaintances, all of whom are interrelated and none of whom are terribly distinguishable from each other. In other words, the world of Persuasion is nowhere near as complete as the world of Austen at her best.
In fairness, it is worth noting that this novel was not published in her lifetime. Maybe she was planning to add another 100 pages and fill out the world. Indeed, even the title was not her own; the manuscript was entitled The Elliots, which would have been a much better title.
Other than the meditation on the nature of Persuasion, is there anything else to discover herein? Yep. And, it is one of the tragedies of the College Shutdown that I have missed the opportunity to have what would have been an incredibly merry discussion. I had assigned this book in one of my reading groups for the semester. We were slated to discuss it right after Spring Break.
Toward the end of the novel, there is a lengthy discussion on the difference between the affections of men and women. Which one is more constant? If a man and a woman love one another and then are torn asunder for a time, who is more likely to retain affection the longest? It’s a lively debate in the novel. I would have loved to have raised that question in a room full of Mount Holyoke students. It would have been an incredible conversation about love, gender roles, and innate sexual differences. To say the conversation would have been lively is an understatement. Curse you, coronavirus! (Insert raised shaking fist.)