Taking Farewell: Jane Austen’s Persuasion

Abstract

Although Jane Austen’s work is deeply influenced by eighteenth-century literature, especially fiction, she also breaks the mould provided by her predecessors. Austen picks up the themes of earlier novels and in her turn reimagines the novel as a genre. A voracious and unashamed reader of novels, she is well placed at the turn of the century to make her own contribution. As my analysis of Emma has shown, Austen reworks the notions of the orphaned heiress and the quixotic reader with a particular class perspective and social regeneration in mind. Likewise, Persuasion shows the influence of previous novels about orphans, but also changes the orphan paradigms that Austen inherits from her predecessors. Numerous eighteenth-century novels about orphans urge the necessity of feminine submission to the Law-of-the-Father, or depict the consequences deriving from it. Anne belongs to the category of heroines who have bowed to the symbolic order. Persuasion is akin to Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline in pointing out the necessity to question paternal authority or to Radcliffe’s matriarchal novels in the need to rebel against it. Austen does this by reversing the normal course of events: Anne ‘had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older — the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning’ (30).¹ If the eighteenth century insists on the subjection and repression of woman as prerequisite to the normal functioning of the social order, Austen directs attention to the utter waste of human potential produced by the acceptance of this requirement.