Persuasion

Persuasion tells the story of how a love that was once frozen in time, became thawed through fate’s twists and turns. Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth fell in love in their spring of youth, but because Wentworth at the time had no fortune nor title to his name, Anne was persuaded against marrying him. Years later, when Wentworth’s success in the navy had made him much more eligible, he returns, and the two find themselves entangled in a bramble of hidden motives and concealed feelings between themselves and the people around them. The plot itself is heartwarming though I did find the story to be a little too circuitous and a slog at times in the middle, and its themes concern more on specific social norms and social class of the time rather than some more universal themes that had been in Pride and Prejudice.

In Anne and Wentworth’s first romance, Anne was persuaded by Lady Russell, an older, maternal figure in the story, to not marry Wentworth. Although Anne later says that the decision wasn’t necessarily wrong since at the time as according to their society it would have been an “inappropriate” match, the interference did sever a beautiful relationship that was true, both at the time and still true years later. The older generation’s conservatism is a force to be respected but young people who can’t balance the conservative wisdom with their own budding ideals would end up with regret: a modern day example, a young person who listened to his or her parents to go the safe route, to medical school or law school or go become a little person in a big company would never have known the exhilarations and freedoms that only the privilege of youth can afford. Anne and Wentworth would have created a much stronger bond had they been certain of their feelings and rose up the ranks of wealth & society together instead of Wentworth doing it alone. As a counterfactual, it would have also been perfectly understandable if Wentworth no longer had such an attachment to Anne when he made his triumphant return. Austen is a romantic, and an equally likely, more realistic retelling of the story could have been the tragedy of Anne passing up the love of her lifetime because she didn’t have the firmness or the audacity to make a leap of love and trust in herself and her judgment of how firm a character Wentworth is and would continue being. To me, older people’s advice is not something to strictly heed, but rather something to apply sparingly to moderate my own idealistic excesses. I’m still convinced that all the world’s greatest things are done because of the zeal of the youthful ones who have wisdom to listen, but not follow what their elders instruct.