Persuasion, Jane Austen

J.A.D. Ingres, Madame Antonia Devaucay de Nittis

(March 18) I read Persuasion all at once over the weekend. It was a wonderful way to spend a weekend. I miss it now and would like to spend another couple of days with that set of characters and their scrupulous ways.

I thought I must have read Persuasion before because I am such a big Austen fan, but it wasn’t familiar. That is, the plot was familiar because it has many of the elements of a typical Austen plot; but I didn’t recall any of the little idiosyncrasies of the story, and I’m sure I would have remembered the comically vain father, Sir Walter, the emo suitor, Captain Benwick, and the spoiled sister, Mary, at the very least. They are amazing.

The heroine, Anne, is preternaturally wise and kind and virtuous, as is the hero, Captain Wentworth, but they aren’t cloying or tiresome; rather, they’re heartening somehow. Persuasion presents so many selfish and heartless people that Anne and Captain Wentworth are a contrast and a reprieve, and you want to cheer them on. In fact, I was struck by how a lot of the older people, the father, the older sister, the Dowager Viscountess, and even Lady Russell sometimes, are such poor role models. Austen is scornful of both the upper classes and the generation ahead of the heroine's in this novel.

However, though Persuasion is full of broad caricatures and grand passions, the charm of the novel is in the quietness and subtleness of the main action (the reconciliation of Anne and Captain Wentworth). So much hangs on so little – a look, a gesture, a tone of voice. The refinement actually supplies the most exquisite suspense.

The Amateur Emigrant, Robert Louis Stevenson

C.W. Jefferys, Immigrants aboard a ship to Canada

(March 4) It took me a long time to read this very short book -- it was interesting, but it didn't grab me by the lapels.

I usually enjoy historical journals -- it can be like time-travelling, especially when the writers go into the humble details of daily life -- there is always some food group or item of apparel or social custom that is bizarre and fascinating. I found Pepys's diary and L.M. Montgomery's journals, for example, real page-turners.

There was some element of the exotic in The Amateur Emigrant, but because Stevenson was doing something that was itself exotic at the time, it’s hard to tell if, when he is reporting on meals, entertainment and so on, it’s because they are ordinary or because they are out of the ordinary.

But, in the end, the details of life in the 1870s weren’t enough to make this chronicle fascinating to me. I think the style was a bit too ponderous: I had to read some passages four or five times to understand them; and I'm still not sure I understand some, such as this:

I have known men do hard literary work all morning, and then undergo quite as much physical fatigue by way of relief as satisfied this powerful frontiersman for the day. He, at least, like all the educated class, did so much homage to industry as to persuade himself he was industrious. But the average mechanic recognises his idleness with effrontery; he has even, as I am told, organised it.

It's a bit sententious, too.

The ponderousness and the sententiousness are surprising in the writer of Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (but I haven’t read those in decades and may be selectively remembering only the action and suspense).