Not Wise Yet: Revisiting Austen’s Persuasion
Unfortunately, sometimes you really do understand things a little better when you’re older.
By Whitney Rio-Ross
When I saw that Netflix was adapting Jane Austen’s Persuasion in 2022, I smiled—not because I was looking forward to the film but because I knew it would be bad. Persuasion is an internal novel with minimal action or interesting dialogue. Previous attempts to bring it to screen had, understandably, fallen flat for me. The only way to make Persuasion an interesting movie was to make it unrecognizable. Based on the Netflix trailer, the filmmakers had decided to do just that.
I also smiled because I didn’t care. Persuasion was my least favorite Austen novel, and I would not grieve its destruction. Persuasion lacked the wit and biting social commentary that drew me to Austen’s writing. It was merely a love story, and a shamelessly romantic one at that. To summarize:
Anne Eliot and Captain Wentworth, once engaged, run into each other nearly a decade later. She regrets having broken the engagement after a family friend persuaded her to do so. He’s still angry with her for giving him up so easily. After months of silent yearning, Captain Wentworth writes Anne a love letter. She is so elated that she must go find him immediately, wherever he is, as if they won’t see each other again that very evening. (I credit Austen with cinematic lovers needlessly running through airports.)
I had read the book three times by the end of college, and every time I finished, I thought, “That was… sweet.” I could admit there were some interesting philosophical passages, but I found the philosophy in Sense and Sensibility equally compelling and more entertaining. I could also recognize that Austen was doing something revolutionary with her narration of Anne’s internal dialogue throughout the book. But the earnestness of the love letter and pages of quiet longing made me squirm.
As I smirked through the Netflix film’s terrible reviews, though, I felt Austen jab me with her pen. Any time one of her heroines feels morally or intellectually superior to others, it’s time for her to learn a lesson by re-examining her values, actions, and prejudices. I knew I needed to reread Persuasion. Now that I was a decade older and had been in love myself, it was time I returned to Austen’s final novel.
There had to be a word for what was missing, but I hadn’t learned it yet.
Growing up, I didn’t plan to get married. I wasn’t set against it, but I didn’t find the general idea particularly appealing. Unlike a Jane Austen heroine, I didn’t need marriage for financial security, and the attitude toward spinsters has improved slightly over the last three centuries. I agreed with Elizabeth Bennet when she said, “I am determined that only the deepest love will induce me into matrimony.” If that deepest love didn’t come, I’d survive—even thrive.
In college and grad school, I was surprised to find that this perspective on marriage drew me suitors. Some classmates saw my attitude as a challenge they were meant to overcome. (This egoism took them out of the running.) Others believed that my indifference to future romance indicated a lack of standards or distaste for commitment. (These were the guys who enjoyed saying that the idea of “soulmates” was a misunderstanding of Plato and then asked if I had seen Before Sunrise.) Yet I found that not seeking a perfect spouse who checked all the boxes on my nonexistent list raised my standards for a life partner. It was going to take someone remarkable to make me want marriage when the arrangement itself wasn’t enticing. If someone who doesn’t enjoy pets adopts a puppy, that must be one outstanding canine.
I was willing to fall in love at some point and dated with that possibility in mind. Yet even when I cared profoundly about a partner, even when I would say I loved them, I wasn’t excited to marry them one day. When I tried to imagine our future, I felt only a hazy loneliness that I couldn’t articulate. There had to be a word for what was missing, but I hadn’t learned it yet.
Most humans desire companionship, and plenty are worthy of our affection.
Anne is older than Austen’s other heroines (a certified spinster at age twenty-seven) and wiser in her understanding of both world and self. She is also practically perfect—caring, pragmatic, poised. (Anne’s saintliness remains my chief disappointment with the novel.) We see almost no character development, because she has already matured by the time we meet her, thereby skipping over the years that transformed her from a pliable, timid girl to a woman who knows and trusts her own mind. And apart from this development, Anne was already a beacon of virtue when she broke off her engagement at nineteen.
At the beginning of Persuasion, Austen sums up Anne’s past in a sentence: “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.” This line had never struck me before, but this time, it pierced. When we meet her, Anne has not simply matured into someone who makes her own decisions. Her maturity also allows her to comprehend that the chance she had to marry for love was a rare privilege she won’t come by again. It also ruins her chances of marrying anyone else, including the kind gentleman who would become her brother-in-law. There was nothing wrong with him, but now that she had known love, she couldn’t marry someone for whom she felt only mild affection.
Anne’s story (and mine) isn’t about changing from a cynic to a romantic. It’s about learning the meaning of romance only after falling in love. Austen never married, but she watched many marriages age. At the point when she wrote Persuasion, her social circle was no longer girls playing the marriage market but women living with the consequences—good or bad—of the choices made in youth. Perhaps this aging was necessary for Austen to write a love story like Persuasion, which is not so much a marriage plot as a lovers’ reunion and a meditation on the possibility that some loves cannot be rivaled.
I long thought of “The One” as a juvenile fantasy. Most humans desire companionship, and plenty are worthy of our affection. I still don’t believe in the general idea of romantic soulmates. But as someone who couldn’t want marriage until I desperately wanted to marry a particular person, I’m embarrassed to say that perhaps some couples, like Anne and Wentworth, seem meant-to-be—or are at least unable-to-be with anyone else.
I don’t know if I’ve ever been more horrified by the end of a movie.
Two months after we got married, Joshua (my husband) and I watched La La Land. The trailers had promised dancing, humor, and romance. No one warned me that it would give me a mild panic attack and nightmares for years to come.
At the end of the movie, we find out that the protagonists don’t end up together, but they both achieve their career goals. That might be sad, but the filmmakers weren’t satisfied with sad; they wanted devastation. Years after the relationship has ended, the heroine stumbles upon a jazz club, which happens to be owned by her ex. She watches her gorgeous former lover perform the song he wrote for her. Next to her sits her clueless husband, who is decidedly less attractive than Ryan Gosling. As the music swells, we watch an alternate timeline play out, one where the charming pianist puts the relationship before his dream. The two have an adorable child and are still successful in their careers. But alas, the heroine is now married to someone else.
I don’t know if I’ve ever been more horrified by the end of a movie. The idea of running into Joshua after marrying someone else is my personal hell. I imagine myself watching him speak at a conference. (Joshua doesn’t play piano.) Next to me sits my husband, and while he is usually adequate, he becomes as interesting and attractive as a potato when compared to Joshua. This scene is the anti-Persuasion. “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope…. I have loved none but you,” writes Captain Wentworth. In my imaginary conference room, I am all agony, trapped in regret, wondering how I could have married someone else while Joshua still walked the earth.
That night, I had a nightmare that has recurred countless times over the last seven years. A man I once dated is proposing, and I am paralyzed with uncertainty. Yes, I enjoy this person, and he would be a good husband. But I know I’m not in love with him; there is something lacking, like a key ingredient missing from a familiar dish. I’ve tasted it before, and my mind races to find the name, going through a rolodex of everyone I’ve been involved with romantically. Then I remember Joshua. I can’t marry this guy when I know that I have been so in love with someone else, someone who is still out there. Breathless but relieved, I wake up.
Though I try to avoid making assumptions about dead writers’ love lives, it’s impossible not to read Austen’s personal experience onto her final novel.
Despite writing the world’s most popular marriage plots, Jane Austen had remarkably little romantic experience of her own. She never married and left no evidence of a torrid love affair, despite what a few imaginative biopics might suggest. She was once engaged—for a day. The morning after accepting the proposal, she changed her mind. Thanks to Persuasion, Austen’s readers have managed to turn this morsel of romantic intrigue into a juicy drama. Though I try to avoid making assumptions about dead writers’ love lives, it’s impossible not to read Austen’s personal experience onto her final novel, written when she was well beyond marriage prospects. As Anne looks back at her broken engagement with acute regret, how are we supposed to forget Austen’s proposal? How can we not suspect that her last novel is her personal fan fiction?
Whether Austen strongly identified with Anne or not, the novel is a story of regret, despite its happy ending. I first read Persuasion when I was sixteen. My biggest regret at that point was every outfit I had worn between 2001 and 2003. I hadn’t been allowed to make life-changing choices yet. Try as I might, I could not identify with Anne’s regret, especially one so long-lasting. Austen’s other young heroines wouldn’t have understood, either. Though I, thankfully, still don’t have major regrets that render me sleepless, that terrible nightmare persists for a reason. I am haunted because I could have been Anne Eliot.
I nearly missed my chance with Joshua, and not because I wasn’t interested. We had fallen in love the year before while seeing other people, but we continued those doomed relationships out of guilt and stubbornness. We even decided we should stay away from each other because we knew other relationships wouldn’t stand a chance if we were in close contact. (A word of advice to the unwed: When you know you would break up with your partner for another person you’re close to, break up with your partner. Stop wasting everyone’s time.)
Then, a couple of months before graduating from divinity school and living at least a thousand miles apart, we were both single and wondering what was next in our lives. While on a jog, I stumbled to a halt when I realized that I might never see Joshua again after graduation. A life without him seemed impossible. Thankfully, in the eleventh hour, Joshua told me he wanted to be in a relationship—a serious one. I told him I needed a few days to think. (Very romantic, I know.) When I showed up to give him an answer, I didn’t have one and instead asked him for an explanation. Why now, when I was moving back to Tennessee and we might go months without seeing each other? We were almost free of “Will They or Won’t They?” He offered several reasons, including that we couldn’t seem to stay away from each other. Then he brought out the real issue: “I don’t want to always wonder.”
I knew I would always wonder. I knew that the faintest possibility of this relationship would haunt me. I also knew that if I dated Joshua, even if we broke up, I wasn’t going to marry anyone else. It was him or no one, and that thought mortified me. Did I believe in soulmates now? Did I think we were meant-to-be? It was all so embarrassing. But love bears and overcomes all things, even humility and philosophical panic. “Ok,” I said, and in a huff of humiliation, walked away. I saved the cinematic first kiss for a time when I wasn’t so upset.
I needed to grow up to appreciate Persuasion and take the romance seriously.
I’ve always felt a need to defend my love of Jane Austen, which sounds ridiculous given that she is one of the most universally acclaimed authors in the English language. But I must defend why I love her. I fear someone might think I love chick lit, that I read for the romance. (Lord, forgive me for the ways I have internalized misogyny.) I explain that she’s hilarious, especially if you know anything about the Regency era. I point out passages that criticize sexism, mock social standards, and offer religious insight. Truly, these are the parts of Austen I love most, but I avoid admitting that she writes stellar love stories. Whose heart doesn’t pound when Edward Ferrars shows up at Elinor’s house or when Mr. Knightley says, “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more”? Persuasion is all about the desire displayed in these passages. It begins years before the first pages and steadily grows until Wentworth’s killer confession of “half agony, half hope.”
I no longer blush at Persuasion because it betrays a particularly feminine desire for romance. Yet I still blush because it is shamelessly earnest in a way no other Austen novel is. What is more embarrassing than desiring another person so intensely that you write a letter like Wentworth’s or chase after your long-time crush like Anne does? I still find the idea of making such romantic gestures mortifying.
That’s why I lied about my dream. I don’t wake up after I remember Joshua exists. I turn away from the guy proposing and run to find Joshua. That’s why I’m breathless when I wake up; I’ve been running at full speed. The very first time I had this nightmare, I knew the last part came straight out of Persuasion and was amazed that a novel I didn’t particularly like had somehow branded itself on my subconscious. This time, when I read Anne react to Captain Wentworth’s love letter, a new understanding unlocked. Of course she can’t wait until after dinner to see him. As said in When Harry Met Sally (whose ending should credit Austen), “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
In college, it was impossible for me to hear “You’ll understand when you’re older” as anything but an insult, especially when it involved literature. But I needed to grow up to appreciate Persuasion and take the romance seriously. It’s still my least favorite Austen novel. I still find the heroine boringly perfect and wish we saw more of Anne and Captain Wentworth in the act of falling in love rather than their vague reminiscence of that missing chapter. (Nothing is as sexy to me as mutual character growth; that’s why Pride and Prejudice works so well.) But that is all more an issue of personal preference than quality of writing. I appreciate the narrative far more than I did before I had been in love or was even old enough to regret anything I had done a decade ago.
When I reread Persuasion this time, I also reread myself. I found myself more open to what I would have called a fairytale a decade ago, and not simply because of my own experience with love. Maturity shouldn’t only mean understanding the parts of the world we have now experienced. It means allowing for the possibility of stories we would have never imagined before and delighting in what we do not yet know. Next time I pick up a book to reread, I will remember a line from Persuasion, when Anne finds out she will be near her love again: “She hoped to be wise and reasonable in time; but alas! alas! she must confess to herself that she was not wise yet.”
Whitney Rio-Ross holds a Master’s in Religion and Literature from Yale Divinity School. Her writing has appeared in Sojourners, Reflections, America Magazine, LETTERS JOURNAL, The Cresset, St. Katherine Review, The Other Journal, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Birthmarks and lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband.
