Straight Talk in Persuasion

Abstract

‘Art’ is an important word in Austen criticism. Used admiringly, it turns up in almost all discussion of her work, its centrality asserted in book titles from Mary Lascelles’ Jane Austen and Her Art (1939) to Roger Gard’s Jane Austen’s Novels: The Art of Clarity (1992).¹ When writing about Jane Austen’s art, critics generally refer to her narrative control, her subtle indirections, her mastery of refracted discourse. Emma is usually taken to represent the apogee of this artistry, while Persuasion is often seen in slightly different terms — sometimes as a shift to a new Romantic mode, and sometimes as a draft which has yet to attain Emma’s level of polish.² Of course, no reader of Persuasion argues that it is not artful, and its subtleties are usually organized into three categories: control of viewpoint through a particularly reliable and admirable heroine, use of indirect speech and physical gesture as modes of communication, and careful layering of narrative voice and characters’ speech. My reading of Persuasion does not deny any of these artistic techniques, but argues that even while Austen deploys them, she simultaneously questions her own artful constructs, inscribing into her text interrogations and even subversions of her own subtleties.