Persuasion
Chosen by Colm Tóibín
I read Persuasion first when I was 15, since it was on the school curriculum in Ireland. (The other novel was Conrad’s Lord Jim.) Thirty eager country boys, under the guidance of a priest, learned all about baronets and country seats and single girls and marriage plots, and Lyme and Bath. While most guys in the class believed themselves to be Captain Wentworth, or at least Admiral Croft, I thought I was Anne Elliot, but quietly and secretly and not all the time.
Then an extraordinary thing happened. The school authorities – this was a diocesan boarding school in County Wexford – thought that we should all lose our country accents, the bumpkin sounds we made when we spoke. People would, it was intimated, laugh at us if we ever went to Dublin. They found us an elocution teacher. Over weeks, she made each of us read a passage from some book so she could correct our horrible vowel sounds.
It came to the turn of one boy from a remote farm. I don’t think I had ever heard him speak much before. He was a nice, quiet fellow. He chose the passage from Persuasion that is Wentworth’s letter, the one that begins “I can listen no longer in silence”. He read it with coiled and wounded passion, using his own country accent. He read it like he meant it. Wentworth’s desperation to make himself clear to Anne had entered this boy’s spirit. He managed to put the elocution teacher in her place.
And what about the book?
It is a novel of loss. At 14, Anne Elliot lost “her dear mother”, and five years later, through bad advice, lost the possibility of a fulfilling marriage with Wentworth, a navy captain. Now, as the novel opens, she has, at 27, lost the freshness of youth. Also, she and her father and her sister have lost Kellynch Hall, the family seat; it is to be rented to strangers, and the Elliots must move to Bath.
Anne, when she meets Captain Wentworth after eight years, must face the fact that “the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look”.
Loss gives Anne a kind of autonomy. It allows her to relish her own solitude, it offers depth to her intelligence, her powers of analysis and her social tact. Wentworth, in the final pages of the book, notices Anne’s aloneness as a heightened form of being. As he listens to her speak, he writes to her: “You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others.”
Although the original advice not to marry Wentworth came from a close friend of the family, Lady Russell, Jane Austen is careful not to judge the lady too harshly. Lady Russell is sensible and kind, but she is also alert to the importance of rank. She lives in the real world in which Anne Elliot, the daughter of a baronet, should not marry a penniless navy captain.
What changes over eight years are not the characters – they stay remarkably the same. What changes, in fact, is England. This is a novel that captures a pivotal decade in the life of the nation. In the time of peace after Trafalgar and Waterloo, members of the navy, self-made men, could become figures of distinction, characters to be reckoned with.
Austen knew the navy through her brothers Francis and Charles. When Persuasion was published in 1817, five months after her death, her brother Francis wrote: “I do not know whether in the character of Capt Wentworth the authoress meant in any degree to delineate that of her Brother: perhaps she might – but I think parts of Capt Harville’s were drawn from myself.”
The members of the navy on land live fluidly in a liminal social space which is effectively the space of the novel, the sort of in-betweenness where Anne herself lives, where she seems at home with both posh Lady Russell and poor Mrs Smith, and seems comfortable also moving from place to place in the book, having lost the dry land of her father’s house.
So, too, us rural Irish schoolboys in 1971 lived in a liminal social space called literature. Even though it all had happened more than 150 years before, and it was in another country, and we had nothing in common with any of these people, we were lured by Austen’s genius into that foreign world until each of us, in our own accents, could follow Wentworth to say as clearly as he could: “I can listen no longer in silence.”
Colm Tóibín is the author of Long Island.
Emma
Chosen by Katherine Rundell
Austen wrote, in the season before she began Emma, “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” I like Emma, passionately: but even more, I love Austen for daring to write a heroine who is snobbish, meddling, a stranger to her own heart. I loathe the rule that a heroine must be persistently likable – Emma rejects the idea that the moment a woman missteps, she is no longer worth our attention. Emma is vividly human to us, which is far better than perfection; sitting still in a drawing room, she has the kinetic energy of a runaway train. It is the novel I love most: the book I have read more times than any other.
The plot of Emma is either almost nonexistent or vast, depending on where you stand to look at it. Austen famously wrote that it was “the delight of my life” to work on “three or four families in a country village”. This is the only one of her major works that is exactly that, a story that barely leaves the village of Highbury; and a book that shows as much of the sweep of the human heart, of fear, love, morality, untruth, foolery and triumph as a Shakespearean drama.
It’s a book riddled with riddles, puzzles, charades: they work as a salute to the ways in which humans baffle and confound each other. The burning warmth of its comedy means that the satire never becomes merely punitive, but it is a novel that refuses to let the reader off the hook. The text is, I think, formally perfect. It insists that details are the dwelling place of rich meaning, wit, love – Mr Knightley’s generosity in providing the baked apples to Miss Bates, Mr Woodhouse and his gruel, Mrs Weston and her baby’s caps – and, equally, it has the formal patterning of a fairytale. Each new arrival to Highbury, Jane Fairfax, Frank Churchill, Mrs Elton, appears almost as an apparition to Emma; each forces her to confront something painful and unflattering in her own character in seeing it externalised in them.
Emma is unique in being the only Austen novel in which the heroine does not marry into wealth, but it is nonetheless a book shot through with money, from Mrs Elton’s £10,000, to Frank Churchill’s dependency on his aunt, to Harriet’s nothing. It’s a novel that refuses to pretend that love – and it is real love, the love that powers the novel – takes place in a vacuum, divorced from class and wealth and place and moment. It refuses, too, to let us pretend. Emma is “an heiress of thirty thousand pounds”, equivalent to perhaps £3m today. Austen’s voice neither approves nor condemns; she merely shows us, over and over, the ways in which it gives Emma freedom.
A 19th-century critic wrote of Austen: “She contemplates virtues, not as fixed quantities, or as definable qualities, but as continual struggles and conquests, as progressive states of mind, advancing by repulsing their contraries, or losing ground by being overcome.” Emma is a novel that never ceases to shift; it understands confinement, repression, revelation, transformation. As the Irish poet Thomas Moore wrote in 1816, the year after its publication: “Let me entreat you to read Emma – it is the very perfection of novel-writing.”
Katherine Rundell is the author of Impossible Creatures.
Pride and Prejudice
Chosen by Rebecca Kuang
When my father came to the US from China for graduate school, he was determined to learn English by gorging himself on the best of anglophone culture. He bought a book on great American films; he read everything by George Orwell. But he adores Jane Austen most of all: his written English carries an Austenian diction. His favourite joke: that my mother’s nerves are his oldest friends.
Several years later, when the rest of the Kuangs made our home in the US, my father took me to the library and filled up a basket of abridged versions of English classics. I recall Robinson Crusoe, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Oliver Twist, Moby-Dick, and of course, Pride and Prejudice. I was to read the best of the English canon. This was how I would acquire good English.
“Good English” – a loaded phrase, an idea that slips too quickly towards xenophobia and self-loathing. I wasn’t thinking in those terms, and I doubt my father was, either. We just wanted to be taken seriously. I found my way to a comfortable relationship with English eventually, but only after years of debilitating shyness, a speech impediment that resembled muteness, and elocution drills that involved jamming a pen between my teeth. English is now my dominant language, and yet I still mix metaphors, I still mispronounce words I’ve only encountered in text (“debris”, “Beaujolais”), and I still conflate “r” and “l” sounds when I am speaking too quickly.
Pride and Prejudice proved too challenging for an eight-year-old, and I didn’t attempt Austen again until I had graduated college. I didn’t major in English, and classics of any kind intimidated me.Back then, I felt Austen’s protagonists, with their “principals” and “allowances”, didn’t have anything to do with me. I would never speak the Queen’s English, and I no longer wanted to pretend.
Nearly 20 years on, I discovered what my father was responding to. Austen is not pompous at all; the pretension is not the point. The Bennets are of little means. Mrs Bennet’s nerves are agitated because she can only secure her daughters’ futures by pairing them off. Why wouldn’t she be stressed? The romance between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy may be charming, but it was Austen’s acute observations of desperate players manoeuvring a punishing game that kept me reading.
My father is a viciously funny man who adores wordplay in any language. To him, I realised, good English meant Austen’s ruthless turns of phrase (“Mary wished to say something sensible, but knew not how”), and her elegant, parallel constructions (“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine”). To my father, good English meant the unexpected word which sums up a person’s demeanor, an awkward dynamic, or an entire matrix of gender and class.
I’ve since been married off myself, and to a man named Bennett, no less. My father is delighted. He won’t stop asking my husband about my nerves.
Rebecca Kuang is the author of Yellowface.
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Mansfield Park
Chosen by Neel Mukherjee
I don’t much care for Pride and Prejudice. There, I’ve said it, phew. It’s a Christmas bauble – attractive, shiny, pleasing every time you look at it; Austen herself called it “rather too light, and bright, and sparkling” – but what comes after Austen’s best-loved novel is a dark, darkly glittering gem: Mansfield Park is her bleakest, most complex book.
The gravitational pull of the twin suns of romance and economics within which all of Austen’s novels orbit has taken on here a unique torsional force that subjects both to severe stress. All the romancing, some of it morally suspect, comes to nought, and Fanny’s and Edmund’s union in the very last pages is rushed (it occupies barely three pages),and hardly convincing.
But that is not the point; rather, the question to ask is why this should be so. In this novel about nature and nurture, about education and character, about desire or impulse versus morally informed duty, Austen tests the limits of all these values and concepts within the structure of the family; so severely that the family in question, the Bertrams, is left in tatters at the end.
Much has been made of Sir Thomas’s ownership of – and, quite possibly, trade in – slaves in his plantation in Antigua, which is the source of his wealth, and the foundation of the parks and trees and gardens that bring Fanny so much solace and joy. Is Sir Thomas a newly rich baronet or has the title – and wealth – been passed down the generations? Why is he so anxious to rush his eldest daughter, Maria, to an economically advantageous marriage – and Fanny, too, of course – when he knows, with absolute certainty in the case of Fanny, that affections are not involved?
The novel also marks a turning point for Austen in terms of technique. It is here that we first see Austen moving from her early “light realism” to what was to become the dense rendering of surroundings, places, objects, appearances in the realist novel of the mid-19th century, and also to the connection between a character’s interiority and the “objective correlatives” of the outside world. The passage in which Fanny looks with horror at the greasy, dusty remains on a table in Portsmouth is a succinct masterclass in this. Then there is Austen’s beautiful development of what has come to be known as free indirect discourse (surely she was the first writer to try this most agile and supple form of narration), that almost imperceptible sliding between narratorial voice and a character’s thoughts that we first see clearly in Mansfield Park.
Neel Mukherjee is the author of Choice.
Northanger Abbey
Chosen by Sarah Moss
Like any book to which one returns, Northanger Abbey has appeared differently to me at different stages of life. I read it first when I was younger than its 17-year-old heroine, Catherine, and I read it, not incorrectly, as a defence of women’s fiction. Catherine is one of the genre’s silly girls, like the younger Bennet sisters and, more dangerously, the Bertram sisters in Mansfield Park and Louisa Musgrove in Persuasion. She’s barely educated, not especially pretty, naive, physically active in a way that undermines her claim to heroism among the fragile bodies and sensitive minds of 19th-century literary heroines. She dislikes sewing, isn’t much interested in fashion, and the only books she enjoys are sensational gothic novels, which she reads with the eagerness now seen in young women devouring “romantasy”. Austen’s narrator is robust in defending young women’s literary culture from snobbish disdain, outraged by girls’ shame at being caught reading novels: “work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed … the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.”
That interestingly present omniscient narrator is what most intrigues me now, a character I once took for granted who now seems to establish the novel as metafictional beyond the obvious intertextual play. “If the heroine of one novel be not patronised by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?” (“Patronised” here means “given patronage” rather than “insulted”, a telling shift in meaning.)
The question of the heroine’s right to “protection and regard” is central. At first it seems that Catherine’s addiction to gothic fiction has misled her. She goes to stay with her friend Eleanor and Eleanor’s attractive brother Henry in their ancient stately home, complete with military father, ruins and gothic stonework. Surely, Catherine thinks, grumpy General Tilney must have done away with his wife, or imprisoned her down an underground passage, surely the handwritten notes in a chest in Catherine’s bedroom must be important messages (no, laundry lists). Silly Catherine.
Except that she’s right. When General Tilney realises that she’s not after all an heiress, he throws her out, leaving her to make her own way across the country by public transport, a journey that might trouble the parent of a sheltered teenaged girl in any century. And as ever in Austen, the romantic hero’s attractions are questionable. Henry says, “the abilities of women are neither sound nor acute – neither vigorous nor keen”. Later he tells Catherine, “a taste for flowers is always desirable in your sex, as a means of getting you out of doors and tempting you to more frequent exercise than you would otherwise take”. Patronising git (old and new meaning). He loves her youth, her naivety, her malleability. She loves his authority and his looks. It’s not promising. Austen is always an anti-romantic novelist, frank in her distrust of the happy ending, deeply cynical about the genre: “my readers … will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity.” Fine then, we’re out of paper, have the wedding.
Catherine’s fears are only slightly misdirected. The patriarchy is out to get her after all. The gothic is – always – real.
Sarah Moss is the author of My Good Bright Wolf.
Sense and Sensibility
Chosen by Naoise Dolan
I first read Sense and Sensibility during an Austen binge in my early teens. Since then I’ve reread the tale of sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood a few times, most recently a couple of years ago in Italian. I find Austen translations an excellent way to learn foreign languages: she’s not too abstract and I know the plots inside out.
As a teenager I couldn’t stand Marianne, since I uncomfortably recognised in her my own lovergirl ways. Not only do I idealise relationships, but poetry and music and falling leaves. Like Marianne, I sort everyone into one of two categories – “special to me” or “not” – and the special people can do no wrong. I trust them instantly, forgive them endlessly and await explanations and apologies that never come. Time and logistics are irrelevant: frisson matters more to me than banal considerations such as how long we’ve known each other and whether we even live in the same country.
I used to judge my inner Marianne – and project that judgment on to her character – but now I militantly refuse to give up on romance. It’s braver to live with intermittent heartbreak than with permanent suspicion and ennui.
Austen does not wholly share my championing of Marianne, yet she crafts no character beyond the reach of sympathy. Even Marianne’s faithless paramour Willoughby can be read as cowardly rather than evil. It is hard to call off an intoxicating flirtation before the other party gets attached; it is also hard to surrender your worldly prospects in order to be with them. His failure to commit is spineless, but not beyond human comprehension. Willoughby’s seduction and abandonment of Colonel Brandon’s ward is more difficult to interpret charitably – but we only get Brandon’s account of this, and he is hardly impartial. Male manipulators recognise their own. I suspect Brandon is just as slimy as Willoughby and that experience has made him more strategic.
He bides his time with Marianne, anticipating Willoughby’s inevitable desertion while buttering up her family. Nor is blander-than-celery Edward Ferrars a winsome match for the subtly acerbic Elinor.
The heroes lack the charm of Darcy, Wentworth, Knightley or Tilney, but Sense and Sensibility is the Austen novel with the most nuanced relationship between sisters. Anne Elliot’s are the worst, full stop, while the siblings of Fanny Price and Catherine Morland barely exist. Lizzy and Jane Bennet are too uncomplicatedly amicable for how close they are in age, and the youngest three Bennets are mere objects of condescension. Emma Woodhouse is a consummate only child. Only Elinor and Marianne offer a close sisterhood that feels real: mutual respect and boundless frustration, where they would equally kill for or kill one another. (The youngest Dashwood girl, Margaret, gets the Price/Morland treatment, though.)
Norms have changed since Sense and Sensibility. We no longer resolve personal disputes with pistols at dawn, and if a man requested a clip of our hair we’d call the police. But there will always be Elinors and Mariannes – and Willoughbys, I fear.
