Today marked not only the passage of another year, but the day that I officially surpassed Jane Austen’s eldest heroine, Anne Elliot, by two years.
Persuasion opens with a weary, yet resilient and most importantly SINGLE Anne Elliot. We learn through back story that in her plum youth, Anne was quite the recipient of male affection and turned down at least two suitors (her now brother in-law and her spurned ex-fiancé Captain Wentworth who returns to the story just as Anne has lost her last drop of youth). We’re left to believe that, if, the events of this novel did not take place that Anne most certainly would have died choking on her own words and her father and elder sister would be too preoccupied recounting past familial aristocracy, that Anne’s lifeless body would most likely be eaten by stray cats(!). But don’t fret, Captain Wentworth returns before Anne turns (gasp) thirty and sets into motion her path toward self-recognition and in so doing, regains Wentworth’s weathered heart.
What I’ve always loved about Austen’s final and most mature novel is that we get to start later in her life (for Austen’s times) compared to her other heroines. She’s lived. She’s made mistakes. She’s taken bad advice. But she learned her own mind from it, and although harbors regrets, recognizes the value in learning about herself from those mistakes.
But what does that mean for a single, female New Yorker nearing thirty over two hundred years after the novel’s publication and Austen’s death? Wentworth finds her at first “So altered that he would not have known her again” (referring to her physical appearance), but later finds her person altered for the better. But Anne and Wentworth didn’t have Instagram and Facebook to occasionally remotely drop-in on their exes. Perhaps we need time and space to better understand ourselves and our grievances with those around us. And what if an ex-lover doesn’t return to our lives as an inciting incident towards self-awareness? This is the question and beginning of my journey, as I make time my Captain Wentworth. And experience the only mirror I have to hold up to myself.
Persuaging 