Lamron Lit Corner: Jane Austen’s final novel

“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.”

~Jane Austen, Persuasion

“Second chance romance” is a somewhat recently coined term for an anything but recently invented trope. The trope entails that two lovers whose previous relationship ended in heartbreak will find reunion and happiness over the course of the plot. Despite being fairly common in the storytelling world today, many attribute the trope’s popular beginning all the way back to 1817 with the publication of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, a novel centered around Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth whose “second chance” comes about as Elliot transitions into city life in Bath. Having been persuaded by friends and family to leave Wentworth eight years before the novel’s beginning, the man returns with money and fame from his time in the navy. It is here where he and Anne must now decide whether there is still room for love in each other’s lives.

Persuasion, Austen’s first written novel, was published just after the author’s death only five months prior, similarly to Northanger Abbey. This pairing continues to be written about today (in a previous Lamron Lit Corner article, for example), as the two books differ greatly. Whereas Northanger Abbey focuses on a young girl of only 17, Anne Elliot is already 27 at the beginning of Persuasion, an age often thought to be past marriageability by 19th-century standards. 

In a plot that likely draws heavily from Austen’s own experience of being unmarried late in life, the Persuasion characters quickly pass judgment on Anne. In fact, in the usual Austen satirical fashion, the supporting characters’ personalities are quite absurd. From a father too focused on his ancestry to realize the debts he’s caused, to a sister whose selfishness outweighs her sympathy for her children, these characters may actually be some of Austen’s most outrageous, all adding to the sympathy the reader feels for Anne as a quiet, lamenting protagonist. 

In typical Austen fashion, the bulk of the plot follows the twists and turns of Anne’s life as she witnesses Wentworth drift further and further away despite all her efforts to keep him in her life. In perhaps the book’s most famous passage, the narrator laments, “Now they were as strangers; worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted.” Locked in a draw, Anne must compensate for her hidden feelings by looking for suitors elsewhere.

Reading an Austen novel simply for the “romance” is a disservice to her books’ literary and historical value. Like Northanger Abbey and its ability to portray gender roles, power dynamics, and adolescence near the turn of the century, Persuasion isn’t just a story about “second chance romance”; Anne and Frederick aren’t just characters; the story isn’t just a story. The lives of women who refused to play into the marriage dynamics of the 1800s will never be completely captured in textbooks or letters. 

With her usual brilliance, Austen’s Persuasion uses language and irony in perfect unison to force us to look inward, to survey our surroundings in a new light. If these were just romance books, there would be no need to read them today.