‘Bad Morality to Conclude With’: Persuasion and the Last Works

Jane Austen, wrote her brother Henry, ‘seldom changed her opinions either on books or men’ (NA, 7). In Persuasion, her novel of first love revived, the presence of Austen’s first loves — the books that inspired her to become ‘THE AUTHOR’ — is strongly felt. In her excellent monograph, A Revolution Almost beyond Expression, Jocelyn Harris suggests several sources for the origins of Persuasion: Sarah Scott’s 1762 novel of a utopian feminist community, Millenium Hall; a story recounted by Oliver Goldsmith in his Life of Bath legend Beau Nash; Austen’s own reflections on the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo; and her response to harsh criticisms of Frances Burney’s last novel The Wanderer. Austen’s use of these heterogeneous elements (third-hand gossip, political debate, new and forgotten novels and poetry) is typical of her artistic practice in weaving together in fiction strands of thought that are otherwise unconnected. This artistic strategy of Austen’s recalls Bakhtin’s insistence on the heteroglossia of the novel, its compulsion to absorb other genres and to allow their several voices to be equally heard. Harris insists on the shared significance of these sources, and ultimately constructs a compelling narrative for reading Persuasion, in which the idealised, fictional eighteenth-century hero Sir Charles Grandison (Mr Elliot) is replaced in heroic pre-eminence by the historic Captain James Cook (in the form of Captain Wentworth), naval celebrity and British ‘discoverer’ of Australia’s east coast, New Zealand and Hawaii.2