Edugraph Writers’ Circle: Finding Strength in Austen’s ‘Persuasion’ Against Society’s Odds

Persuasion–Even after having read this book four times, I find it difficult to chronicle the ocean of feelings it took me through. There’s something so stirring about this novel that never fails to leave an indelible mark on me.

Persuasion has been named Austen’s most mature work; a deserving title for the book. Unlike Austen’s other works about the first love of youth, this is the story of the aftermath: what happens when love has left, when the zeal of youth has faded away and one cannot afford to be unaffected anymore.

We meet Anne, blank and empty, upon whom is the persisting scar of having given up Wentworth. When the two cross paths again, they witness the life they have built untouched by the other, the different people they have become, one unrecognisable to the other. It is as if an invisible wall runs between them that separates them despite being so close.

Through Anne’s tale, Austen criticised the British society of the Regency era; how the rigidity of class positions dictated the lives of young women, otherwise so full of life; but confined by the behavioural constraints of a selfish setup that determined their worth by their marriageability.

Anne Elliot’s story is that of melancholy, loss, and yearning, which subtly portrays the unmatchable loneliness that she feels and is unable to share with anyone–revealing it through Anne’s constant attempt to be useful to everyone around her, an attempt to conceal her agony of not being wanted.

The novel's tragedy is not that the two have spent the fleeting years in a futile attempt of pretending to have forgotten, but that they might have spent an entire lifetime longing, searching for each other in every crowded hall and missing it each time, until they lost sight completely.

Austen takes us through this unbearable, invincible agony of the possibility of a lifetime of yearning for something beyond our reach. Such is the beauty of persuasion.

The writer Baibhabi Majumdar is a student of St Augustine's Day School, Barrackpore, West Bengal.

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