Being Anne Elliot - Time and transcendence in Jane Austen’s ‘Persuasion’
Austen’s last novel, like an Octavia Butler novel or a Charlie Kaufman script, shoves readers into a time-tunnel of consciousness. E.M Forster wrote, ‘In a novel, there is always a clock.’
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Hello friends,
Today we are talking about Time.
When you really get into it, it’s fascinating how so many of our best artists through ages and centuries - from Proust and Dickens (“It was the best … it was the worst …”) and Joyce, to T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Octavia Butler, on up to playwright Harold Pinter and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman - seem to take the concept of Time and wrap it like a cloak around their stories.
Or perhaps that is too gentle an analogy - if the artist is Butler or Kaufman, they are smashing Time into a tunnel and they are shoving you down it - beware: You might find yourself on a 19th century American-southern plantation, or in the head of John Malkovich.
And when an author starts pulling and pushing the accordion of time, they are signaling to us that time and experience are being masterfully manipulated in the service of saying Something Big; they have embarked on something more powerful than what-happens-next, and a major artistic project is unfolding.
Jane Austen is, as far as I can see, not often held up as a great manipulator of time and certainly not as far as I can tell seen as a purveyor of time travel narrative! Yet it seems to me that Austen is doing all of these things as an artist and storyteller in her last published novel, Persuasion.
It is full of time references: In every key moment, and probably on every page, you find a narrative that is wrapped in the presence of Time. And those time references not only shape the story but they shape our consciousness as it moves through the story, putting us in a vortex of experience shared with the novel’s protagonist, Anne Elliot.
We are right inside Anne Elliot’s head, through this hundred-plus pages, and more so than perhaps any other Austen heroine.
The difference is Time.
Not much happens, actually, in this novel - it’s controversial to say this, and rightly so. Because Austen has been misconceived as a miniaturist who paints little portraits of those around her, in a narrow, gentry-laden slice of society.
That’s all wrong, of course.
And when you really go spelunking into the depths of Persuasion, you find yourself plunged into an undeniable experience of great art at work.
And it’s art and innovation that influenced - we have it straight from Harvard Professor Louis Menand - the most inventive, time-crunching artists to come, like James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf, who compress novels and layers of experience and history into one day.
My take: You can’t have any of this without Persuasion. And what makes Persuasion possibly Austen’s most innovative work is her masterful manipulation of the concept of Time, and its merging with consciousness, to heighten the power of story.
So let’s break it down today, and look at Time in Persuasion and look at what Austen is doing with the constant, chronic references to time in this novel.
We want to talk about the things that make us put the book down and look out a window and take very deep breaths for a few minutes because we’re in an emotional cyclone and we’re not sure how we got here - all the heroine was doing was walking and thinking on a street in Bath, and we feel that she has just given us the universe, then taken it away, and then given it back again.
First, let’s get two things out of the way - and they are in some ways the Big Things that Austen is doing here, because they are the contextual, socio-historical, and ideological-historical things that Austen is doing, and it’s all fascinating. These have been written about before - but let’s just name them, so that we can get to the more interior, artistic things that this story is doing.
So, first the Big:
Time in Persuasion is mapping change and evolutions to seasons, and therefore connecting the narrative and the consciousness of our protagonist to Nature, and therefore to the Romantic ideals of natural law, natural order, and natural harmony for society.
So: The changing seasons, the passing of time, connects this novel to the Romantic movement in a really interesting way. Much of this is discussed in Jocelyn Harris’s deep, beautiful study of Persuasion in her work A Revolution Almost beyond Expression.
And the big thing that Harris explores is how references to time in the novel place the story in history. (So that helps us throw that “miniaturist” nonsense out the window.)
This novel is placed in a specific time, and the Romantic-movement context and the historical context provide a frame for Austen to say something in Persuasion.
At the same time, as Harris explores, the novel is very contemporary in its time and is consistently referencing the big issues of its day, even within its historical and ideological context.
Also, as the late great critic Nina Auerbach points out in “O Brave New World,” the evocation of time is adding a sense of dynamics, mobility, and movement, to the novel’s background of a static society.
Austen is saying things - as she always is and as we are always exploring here in these Austen Connection conversations - about the shifting sands of English society, a country at war, a country surrounded by revolutions, a country engaged in the expensive, exploitative imperialist enterprise, a country in search of new models of stability, the instability of aristocracy and possibly imperialism, wealth, and power.
Austen is conjuring - and forcing us to notice! - all of these things. And she is documenting the lives of people navigating a personal future within a country navigating a national future, on these shifting sands. That’s a lot.
And even more, she is invoking the most innovative models of thought and disruption of her day - namely the Romantic movement - and deploying its precepts, sensibilities, and proclivities in poetry and in people, and she is then taking on a Rationalist armor to proceed to deconstruct that in challenging ways. And in the process of all of this she is showing us possible models for a way forward - as a nation and as a human.
She is doing no less than all of this, friends!
And she is making us laugh in the process, for god’s sake!
And scholars like Harris and Auerbach have explored all of this in fascinating studies - so check those out (links below).
Because all of that has been beautifully explored, and none of it is what we actually want to talk about today.
What we want to talk about today are the things that make us want to weep, in this novel.
We want to talk about the things that make us put the book down and look out a window and take very deep breaths for a few minutes because we’re in an emotional cyclone and we’re not sure how we got here - all the heroine was doing was walking and thinking on a street in Bath, and we feel that she has just given us the universe, then taken it away, and then given it back again.
What’s happening?
What’s happening is that Jane Austen is wielding her art - in ways she herself likely was not fully aware of. She is channeling the magic of her deep, unconscious storytelling energy and working spells that take us up, down, in and out of history, consciousness, and time.
And the two more interesting things than the Big Things that this artistic rendering of experience is doing to us as we read is this:
It's making us feel - deeply - regret. (And it’s making us feel nostalgia, remorse, and even hope - all of which are bound up with regret, and the passage of time.)
And it is actually effecting a Transcendence.
So: Regret and transcendence. Regret and transcendence.
First we are steeped in one, throughout most of this sad novel.
And then we are airlifted out of it by the other.
Could have, should have, and the sad subjunctive
We get the regret early on.
It’s likely in the first 50 pages of any edition you’re reading, when Anne contemplates, decisively, what Captain Wentworth could have done and what, in contrast, she herself would have done.
It’s a piece of rational thinking, amid emotion. (Anne perhaps is the embodiment of Romantic poet William Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility.” And when I bring up that phrase I myself am transported through time and sitting on the living room floor in a flat in South Kensington, London, in my semester abroad sophomore year, listening to one of my first English professors, Professor Brown, talk about Wordsworth.)
You’ll remember, readers, and for those who need a reminder:
After being rejected by his love Anne Elliot, out of her sense of duty and amidst her family’s status-conscious snobbery, Captain Frederick Wentworth has gone overseas and made a fortune in the navy, risen in rank and status, and now returned to the neighborhood.
It’s been eight years. But, Anne reflects, it might have been sooner.
And we’re already plunged into the subjunctive, the past, present, and future tense, and wading into the sadness and regret that comes from Anne’s reflections, as she muses:
“...he need not have waited till this time; he would have done what she could not but believe in his place she should have done long ago.”
What a sentence. It’s almost incomprehensible - intentionally so - in its circularity and sadness.
Yet Anne makes it plain: He could have - and any could have evokes time in itself without our realizing it - come to her when he achieved his independence.
What a sentence. It’s almost incomprehensible - intentionally so - in its circularity and sadness. Yet Anne makes it plain: He could have - and any could have evokes time in itself without our realizing it - come to her when he achieved his independence.
But he didn’t. We all see this guy who is competent, strong, we must feel, in his love; but also strong in his resentments. He is “headstrong” (as he is described early on). “He was brilliant, he was headstrong.”
Anne Elliot, Bill Murray, and Groundhog Day, in reverse
And not only are our two lovers separated, resentful (him), and regretful (her), but they are in a time loop of estrangement.
Or, as Austen herself puts it early on, they are in: a “perpetual estrangement.”
A “perpetual estrangement”? Take that, Charlie Kaufman, and Kate Winslet, you of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Take that, Bill Murray.
This is Dante’s inferno. Milton’s Hell. This is Joycean interior monologue (thank you for the observation, Dr. Menand), at its birth. This is Groundhog Day in reverse, friends.
The first we notice that we’re in a “perpetual” Miltonian hell, where time slows way down and excruciating moments are stretched out, is in the actual meeting between Wentworth and Anne, where there is a buildup, as we follow Anne’s troubled consciousness, of the event.
He comes. He goes. The buildup is paragraphs. The event itself is not even its own sentence: “It would soon be over. And it was soon over. In two minutes …”
In this way Austen takes Time and makes it her tool. The author of Persuasion plays Time like an accordion.
Time in Austen’s hands is consistently compressed, smashed, mashed, and stretched, throughout this novel. Things happen in a mashup of a moment; or it’s the opposite, and a few seconds are stretched out for emphasis like Alicia Silverstone’s chewing gum.
When Wentworth lifts Anne’s troublesome heavy nephew off of her back as she struggles with him, and then she feels a passive, welcome “release” - time is slowed way down, as we feel how it feels to be Anne - this is art at work!
In other early passages, the historical is made to mingle with personal regret, memory.
In an early dinner together, Wentworth drones on and Anne, like everyone else, is forced to listen: “‘That happened in the year six. That happened before I went to sea in the year six,’” he pontificates.
And immediately after these quotes that place Wentworth on the frontlines of national history - Anne reflects immediately, on her own intimate memory, in a very key passage.
Read it and weep:
“Eight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up. How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness! What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals, – all, all must be comprised in it: and oblivion of the past – how natural, how certain too! ...”
It is a Groundhog Day of “perpetual estrangement.”
Time in Austen’s hands is consistently compressed, smashed, mashed, and stretched, throughout this novel. Things happen in a mashup of a moment; or it’s the opposite, and a few seconds are stretched out for emphasis.
And within its vortex, you can sense Anne in this passage attempting to grasp perspective, almost in the literal sense. She is giving herself a talking-to about how small that little incident of heartbreak must be in the grander scheme; she is forcing her intellect and will to “banish” it to the distance. She is struggling, friends, in the vortex.
“She distrusted the past, if not the present.”
And so, friends, do we.
Wentworth checking out Willliam checking out Anne
But, friends, this time-wrapped and time-warped perspective is going to change for all! This is a romantic comedy! You can breathe, a little, even if gasping.
Forster’s clock in this novel shifts, bends and shoulders the weight of emotions. Time is presented subjectively through Anne’s consciousness, as we painfully can see - but it’s also deployed to carry perspective, and all those shifts in perspective that occur throughout the novel. Time will carry them to Anne, even while crashing into her.
You can see this binding up of perspective, in temporality, and this shifting perspective in a really intriguing moment in this novel - when, after pages and pages of inhabiting Anne’s sad loss of bloom and vigor, we follow her to Lyme, and the seaside, where we pass by a gentleman who “in the same moment” notices Anne. He notices her, and sees that “she looked remarkably well.”
This moment that is stretched out and slo-mo’ed, and is remarkable in its breath of fresh seaside air - did you feel it, friends? - and we begin to see our transforming heroine from another perspective.
But not only that - but, as many of you will appreciate, not only is Anne being noticed by this elegant gentleman (whom we learn is William Elliot, cutting a fine figure himself), she is also noticing herself being noticed. And not only that, but Captain Wentworth is also noticing her being noticed.
Finally, the ever-gazing, sidelined Anne is walking onto the stage. She is looking remarkably well.
The entire brief episode is drawn out - it’s a few seconds, slowed down for us to savor, in a way that surely struck, 100 years later, Marcel Proust.
But, friends, this time-wrapped and time-warped perspective is going to change for all! This is a romantic comedy! You can breathe, a little, even if gasping. Forster’s clock in this novel shifts, bends and shoulders the weight of emotions. … Time will carry them to Anne, even while crashing into her.
It all happens in the time it takes to make two simultaneous glances - one by William Elliot and the other by Wentworth.
Wentworth, he of the always holding forth, is now paying attention: He “looked round at her instantly in a way which shewed his noticing of it. He gave her a momentary glance — a glance of brightness, which seemed to say, ‘That man is struck with you, —and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again.’”
It’s a matter of seconds - but perspective, transformation, evolution, and return, is happening in a way that evokes past and future, regret, and hope, all at once. It’s a scene wrapped in time.
Intersecting Timelines and the Last Eight Years
And finally, after a story that seems to place our two people in separate timelines, Frederick Wentworth and Anne Elliot are beginning to come together. The present-tense is catching up to us, or you might say crashing into us.
It reminds me of so many classic time-travel stories - from Kindred, to Dr. Who, to “Brigadoon,” to The Time Traveler’s Wife (insert your favorite here!) - where memory, regret, history, and hope are bound up in an adventure across eras. And it’s in this momentary glance, that Anne and Wentworth begin to reconnect.
As the story progresses, time and emotion become even more bound together.
Their return to love is consistently placed in its chronology - “he had a heart returning to her at last” … “the tenderness of the past” - and, then, as the pair finally begin to come together in Bath, they begin to inhabit the present tense.
Now, Wentworth is invited to the family’s soiree: “The past was nothing. The present was that Captain Wentworth would move about well in her drawing-room.”
It calls to mind the musical, now made into a feature film, The Last Five Years, which tells the story of the unraveling of a young marriage through scenes of a husband and wife who inhabit separate timelines - he going forward, she going backward - and their timelines intersect only in one sadly-romantic scene, in Central Park, where he proposes to her. Another favorite example is Harold Pinter’s play “Betrayal,” which chronicles the unraveling of a marriage, going backward through time. The very last scene is an introduction between two people who will become destructive lovers - and we’ve seen all that will come to pass - so the final, frozen seconds contain so much.
I think artists and storytellers shape and reshape the experience of time in their narratives as a way to strongly evoke in us just those feelings of memory, regret, and sometimes hope, that are wrapped up in experience and consciousness and life. And what’s fascinating to consider is that Jane Austen had a part in setting a stage for this time manipulation - even sci-fi narratives, I’d venture! - with her final novel.
But back to our story. It’s all going to come out OK in the end. And finally, we’re there. Wentworth and Anne get on the same page and into the present tense. Their timelines converge.
And one of the reasons this comes as such an emotional release in the novel is because Austen has masterfully manipulated our experience of the story by slowing down, speeding up, and powering Time like a bored teenager brandishing the remote control.
Wentworth’s letter, his delivery, is “the work of an instant.”
The speeding up of time, the convergence of all the tenses - past, present, future and that sad subjunctive - are everywhere.
“There was no delay; no waste of time. She was deep in the happiness of such misery, or the misery of such happiness, instantly.”
Instantly!
Time and emotion merge: “The revolution which one instance had made in Anne was almost beyond expression.”
Time, in this story, seeps, overwhelms, drowns, and carries with it the detritus of memory, nostalgia, transformation, and change.
Time halts, lurches, stalls, skips and contracts.
Every moment and every emotion of this story is placed in time.
Time, in this story, seeps, overwhelms, drowns, and carries with it the detritus of memory, nostalgia, transformation, and change. Time halts, lurches, stalls, skips, and contracts. Every moment and every emotion of this story is placed in time.
You know well what happens to put Wentworth and Anne on the same clock, the same timeline: He writes that letter; she reads it; they find themselves on a busy Bath street together, walking, moving now forward - literally, figuratively, and together.
What is easy to miss is just how steeped in Time this final coming-together, this HEA, is.
Here’s a passage that shows how laden this moment is in the clock, and its memory and emotion, in a way that will make you feel pity for any screen adapter of this story.
Because the two simply take a walk. And yet that clock - and all the hurried, harried bustle of Bath, you’ll notice - continues to swirl around them as they walk. But time, for them, slows down. Austen takes it almost to a halt - and we are invited to savor the seconds, and all that has led up to it:
“There they returned again into the past more exquisitely happy, perhaps, in their re-union, than when it had been first projected: more tender, more tried, more fixed … And there, as they slowly paced the gradual ascent, heedless of every group around them, seeing neither sauntering politicians, bustling house-keepers, flirting girls, nor nursery-maids and children, they could indulge in those retrospections and acknowledgments … of what had directly preceded the present moment, which were so poignant and so ceaseless in interest. All the little variations of the last week were gone through: and of yesterday and to-day there could scarcely be an end.”
It is not perhaps until the very culmination of this story that time fades, almost altogether.
And it’s transcendence that takes over.
As their timelines and their lives come together, crashing into the present in a swirl of time and emotion, finally: Time doesn’t stop, our narrator tells us, but at the same time she raises that possibility: “Of yesterday and to-day there could scarcely be an end.”
And actually, there will be an end of it. They are together.
And it’s love, one has to suppose, that has the force necessary to take them - symbolically and literally, on a very ship out to sea. Sailing right away, as Jocelyn Harris points out, from all that historic and ideological context - in a transcendent outcome.
It’s a Happy Ever After that takes them outside history, outside culture, outside mortality.
And, finally, outside time.
Thank you, as always, for being here and engaging this entire month of January on the conversations about Persuasion. And thank you for sharing these conversations and this project with your colleagues, family, and friends who are book-ish and Jane Austen readers and viewers!
The project is growing - and these quiet conversations about Persuasion just this month have garnered thousands of visits, and that is blowing me away, and it’s because of you and your being here.
And, I really want to know: Do you have any thoughts or feedback on this post? And especially, do you have a favorite time travel novel or story? Whether it’s Doctor Who, or The Time Traveler’s Wife, or the many great works of Octavia Butler or Ursula K. Le Guin, let me know your favorites! Share any thoughts here - it’s wonderful to chat!
Coming up, it’s Valentine’s month and we’re going to have some fun talking about Bad Love and Jane Austen. As always we’ll celebrate the good where we can - but we’ll not flinch, will we friends, from the Bad! We’ll tackle all the Bad of Jane Austen head on. LOL.
Looking forward to the discussions with you.
Meanwhile, stay safe and warm and cozy with all the things that make you happy - and try not to watch the clock too much,
Affectionately,
Your Epistolary Plain Jane
If you enjoyed this post, feel free to share it!
Cool Links:
Jocelyn Harris - A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression
Nina Auerbach - “O Brave New World”
BBC Radio 4 “Open Book” program, where Richard Beard is examining Time in fiction - and in the most recent episode he quotes E.M. Forster: “In a novel, there is always a clock.”
I read the Norton Critical Edition of Persuasion, edited by Patricia Meyer Spacks
Cool Stuff:
Substack has a wonderful community of writers producing conversations and reviews about books. Some of the newsletters are collaborating with the newsletter What to Read If on a Used Book Swap, just to try out this fun idea. You take one of your favorites off your shelf, and send it in, and you get another used book from a participating reader in return. Check it out and sign up here: https://forms.gle/vcDZHD2xFYMrEPba8
A shout out to writer and novelist Elizabeth Marro who writes the wonderful Spark newsletter. I loved her recent post on first lines of favorite novels. Marro is also the author of a novel, Casualties. Check it all out!
Daughters of Jane - this has been a book discussion series from the DC Public Library on Jane Austen, and the last discussion takes place February 15 at 6pm EST. It’s on Persuasion. The group is making the book available from the DC Public Library, and uses Google Meet for the discussion: meet.google.com/ybt-uvqw-bnv
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