9 - Between the Lines: Poetry, Persuasion, and the Feelings of the Past

Summary

Walking, in town or country, is one of the devices used in Jane Austen's novels to depict intimacy, private reflection, or the possibility of transgressing – by however little – the boundaries of consciousness and polite social intercourse. The Romantic-era novel as Austen practises it admits transgression, in this sense, between the little sportive lines of a country hedgerow. In Persuasion (1815–16), overhearing is the other device used to render porous the estranged yet linked consciousness of the novel's two former lovers, Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth. The effect of such devices is to create an interstitial space in which the minds and feelings of the characters can meet; it is this space that renders Persuasion the most Romantic and private of Austen's novels. Each of the former lovers is the survivor of an earlier, failed romance that has been marginalized and apparently forgotten. Their recovery of this earlier romance involves the recovery of shared memory. Just as the ‘revisit’ poem returns the Romantic poet, often in the company of a second self, to a recollected landscape, so Persuasion revisits a landscape of former feeling and finds it changed.

The most memorable scene of overhearing in Persuasion occurs at the end of the novel, in the famous revised chapter, when Captain Wentworth overhears Anne discussing the relative constancy of men and women.