Austen’s Fiction in the Age of Commerce

Abstract

In the fifth chapter of Persuasion (1817), Jane Austen’s narrator describes the desolation of her heroine, Anne Elliot, as Anne contemplates her impending departure from her family’s ancestral home in the Somersetshire countryside. The move, to smaller rented quarters in the city of Bath, is a sad one. In language that has come to haunt criticism of the novel, the narrator observes: “Anne, though dreading the possible heats of September in all the white glare of Bath, and grieving to forego all the influence so sweet and so sad of the autumnal months in the country, did not think that, every thing considered, she wished to remain” (23). The heroine’s mood is as mercurial as it is doleful—in the span of a sentence moving between dread, regret and resignation. Yet, what has always struck critics is the way the Somersetshire scenery seems to function here, and elsewhere, as a kind of objective correlative for not only Anne’s but also Austen’s mood. “Autumnal” is the word used to describe Persuasion, the last novel Austen completed before her death and the work that critics often call her most personal. There is no need to rehearse the reasons why this critical commonplace, linking Anne’s autumn with Austen’s, is “teeming with fallacies”—a judgment Claudia Johnson rendered some time ago.1