Fionnuala's Reviews > Persuasion

While ploughing through Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport recently, the frequent references to Jane Austen's Persuasion prompted me to take this neat book down from its place on a high shelf alongside its five sisters and keep it within view as a kind of incentive to finish Ellmann's 1000 page tome.

As it turned out, I didn't need an incentive to finish Ducks because it self-propelled in the second half, but even so, I still offered myself the pleasure of re-reading Persuasion once I'd finished it. There's nothing I like better than when one book leads naturally to another without me having to scratch my head and wonder what might make a good follow-on to what I've been immersed in.

The narrator of Ducks is well versed in all of Jane Austen's novels. She ponders on the dilemma of Marianne and Willoughby from Sense and Sensibility when confronted with an issue between her temperamental daughter and a good-for-nothing boyfriend. She mentions Emma Woodhouse a few times, and several characters from Pride and Prejudice too—indeed Mrs Bennett's famous line, "You have no compassion for my poor nerves" becomes a kind of unspoken mantra in Ellmann's book.

But the Austen character who is most often referenced is Anne Elliot, the main character of Persuasion. Ellmann's narrator identifies strongly with Anne. They both spent their childhoods in beautiful houses which their families no longer have access to. They are both very attached to the memory of their mothers whom they lost in their early teens, and the loss of the mother continues to influence their lives in different ways.

Of course the two books are very different in other respects, Ellmann's being a wide-ranging commentary on contemporary world issues, and including vast numbers of references to film, literature and poetry, while Austen's is a very contained account of a little slice of English life in the early 1800s, with very few literary references. The two such references I found are brief and easily glossed over—if I noticed them in previous reads, I moved on from them just as quickly. But I'm a different reader now and I love to find hints of other works in the literature I read. The first reference I spotted was to 18th century poet, Mathew Prior's Henry and Emma which tells of a test of loyalty which a lover imposes on his loved one: Emma must overcome a series of challenges in order to prove her constancy to Henry. Austen inserts the reference to Prior's poem just when Anne Elliot is being asked by the man she has loved for years to nurse back to health the girl he now seems to be in love with, so the story of Henry setting trials for Emma seems very apt indeed. And as we read on through Anne Elliot's story, we see the parallel more and more as Anne's constancy is further tested.

The second literary reference I came across is less significant to the plot and more connected to Austen's people-watching skills, the aspect of her writing I admire the most. How perceptive of people's foibles she must have been to be able to transfer to the page brief character sketches which manage to contain a host of subtle information especially relating to the more ludicrous traits of the personalities of her characters. In her other novels, there are portraits of ridiculous figures aplenty: Mrs Bennet, Mr Collins, Miss Bates, Mr Woodhouse, and several others I could mention, but surely none are so comically outrageous as super-conceited Sir Walter Eliot and his equally puffed-up daughters Elizabeth and Mary. The very modest Anne Eliot is sorely tried, as if she needed the extra challenge, in having them for family!

However, there is one occasion when Anne makes an effort to put herself forward in the pushy manner of her family, but she is immediately self-aware enough to laugh at herself for the attempt : She could not do so, without comparing herself with Miss Larolles, the inimitable Miss Larolles.
As there is no character called Miss Larolles in this book, and Jane Austen doesn't elaborate further, I guessed the inimitable Miss Larolles must be a literary figure who would be familiar to Austen's readers. And so she is, as I found when I looked her up. She is a very ridiculous character from Fanny Burney's Cecilia, which was written about thirty five years before Austen wrote Persuasion. As I've never read anything by Fanny Burney, I decided there and then to begin Cecilia as soon as I finished Persuasion which I did all too quickly.

Burney's is a long book, quite as long as Ducks, Newburyport, but I'm happily reading it at the moment, finding other parallels with Austen's books, and relieved once again that one book has led me directly to another.