Celebrating Persuasion (review)

Abstract

Reviews Celebrating Persuasion. The Jane Austen Society of North America Annual General Meeting, 1993. The Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) held its Annual General Meeting (AGM) at Chateau Lake Louise from 7-10 October 1993. The meeting was organized by Juliet McMaster and Bruce Stovel of the University of Alberta and dedicated to the memory of J. David Grey, who, along with Joan Austen-Leigh and Henry Burke, founded JASNA in 1979. The Lake Louise AGM was the largest in JASNA's history with some six hundred conferees in attendance. As has been customary—a custom modified at this year's Board of Directors' meeting—this AGM focused on one novel of Jane Austen's and was convened under the title "Celebrating Persuasion." The 1994 meeting in New Orleans will begin a new pattern of alternating a theme with a novel. Next year it will be "Jane Austen and the 3Rs: Rebellion, Revolution, and the Regency." And the 1995 meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, will return to an Austen novel with Mansfield Park as its subject. Persuasion was the last novel that Jane Austen completed. It was published posthumously in a volume with Northanger Abbey in 1818. Readers generally consider it to be Austen's most Romantic novel, showing the influence not only of Scott and Byron, whose poetry is discussed in it, but, with its emphasis on the restorative powers of Nature , of Wordsworth as well. (Jane Millgate's paper on "Persuasion and the Presence of Scott," incidentally, gave the best scholarly account of the Austen-Scott relationship I have come across.) The novel's twenty-seven-year-old heroine, Anne Elliot, whose emotional life is on hold as it opens, has her feelings projected onto the autumnal landscape around Kellynch and Uppercross only to find them restored to life by Lyme Regis and the sublime power of the sea. This invigoration stands her in good stead in Bath, where Captain Frederick Wentworth, from whom she separated eight years previously, proposes marriage to her, finding "her spring of felicity" to be "in the warmth of her heart." Persuasion elicited a great variety of comment at the 1993 AGM. There were papers presented in plenary sessions by Elaine Showalter and by Isobel Grundy. And Margaret Drabble read a story about the descendants of the characters in Austen's novel, amusing EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 6, Number 3, April 1994 284 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:3 her audience with the doings of the Elliots of our time. In addition to these presentations, there were twenty-seven papers presented in three "break-out" sessions of nine papers each. That meant that once you decided to attend one paper, you chose to miss eight others. To remedy this problem all the papers were simultaneously recorded, and you could buy tapes of those that you missed. Taking advantage of this technology, I managed to hear, read, or listen to seventeen papers. And having been asked to review the meeting for this periodical, I felt especially responsible for tracking down speakers who seemed to have something to say about Persuasion from perspectives originating in the eighteenth century. On these, then, I will principally comment. Persuasion, we all remember, opens with Sir Walter Elliot and his daughter Elizabeth needing to "retrench" to avoid having to leave Kellynch-hall, their ancestral seat. As the first plenary speaker, Elaine Showalter began at the beginning with a paper called "Retrenchments." She led us through some of the historical meanings of the word—like retrenching the head for having it cut off!—but by far her most important move was to shift retrenchment from the economic into the emotional sphere. There she demonstrated that Anne Elliot is the one most adept at formulating a seven-year plan to save Kellynch because she has just been through eight years of prudently managing her emotional life. Having given up Captain Frederick Wentworth, persuaded by Lady Russell not to risk marriage to a naval officer of precarious means, Anne has retired into herself, retaining "the nice tone of her mind" but losing her bloom and buoyancy of spirits doing so. Living circumspectly with her feelings, Anne is just able to save her...