50 Lashes with a Wet Noodle for Reviewer of Jane Austen’s Persuasion

Why must we always imagine even wealthy, privileged women to have been marginalized? Sometimes they lived remarkably comfortable lives compared to men.

False feminist assumptions creep in everywhere, so deeply embedded that one despairs of their ever being overcome.

Recently, Deborah Ross, the humorously caustic reviewer of the latest film version of Jane Austen’s Persuasion declared in The Spectator that everyone involved in the abysmal recent adaptation “should probably be sent to prison. Not for life, but until we could be confident they’d learned the error of their ways and there was minimal risk of reoffending.”

I share Ross’s indignation at the ham-fistedness that creates a vulgar heroine who drinks wine straight out of the bottle (unthinkable for Austen’s Anne Elliot) and winks jauntily at the camera while carrying on a cheeky monologue.

But alas, even the reviewer shows how far she is from understanding Austen’s social world when she sums up the initial situation of the main character by saying, “Basically, Anne is still a spinster at the grand old age of 27 and therefore confined to the edges of society.”

NO! Simply no. Why must we always assume some form of prejudice to have been exercised on the women of former times?

No prison time is warranted here, but I advise 50 lashes with a wet noodle for Ms Ross. There’s also the matter of her claim that, seeing once more the man she had loved, “Anne now realizes what she has missed.” No again. Anne always knew what she missed. She was persuaded to refuse Frederick Wentworth’s marriage proposal only because he had no prospects and the young Anne, only 19 years old, thought she was doing right to heed the advice of her godmother, Lady Russell.

But back to the more typically feminist-compliant error: “confined to the edges of society” because she is “still a spinster.”

This is a truly bizarre thing to say about the elegant and well-educated (if heartbroken) Anne, who happens to be the daughter of a baronet (a member of the lowest rung of the English aristocracy, entitled to the prefix Sir before his name). The Elliot family resides at Kellynch Hall, a manor house on a large plot of land. As a member of the landed aristocracy, Anne’s father has no formal occupation except as landlord of his estate, with the responsibility to maintain and pass it on to his heir.

Because of her titled family, Anne will never have to worry seriously about money, and will certainly never have to work to earn her keep. If she so wanted, she could spend her time as her older (also unmarried!) sister Elizabeth does, relishing the dignity of the family name and paying court to viscountesses and other aristocratic personages in a continual round of dissipated socializing. No confinement at all.

In an early description of Anne’s sister Elizabeth’s doings, we learn that her time is mainly spent visiting “all the drawing-rooms and dining-rooms in the country,” “opening every ball of credit” in the neighborhood  (in other words, dancing first to the admiration of the gathered throng), and travelling with her father to London every spring “for a few weeks’ annual enjoyment of the great world” (Chapter 1).

In the course of the story, Anne goes with her family to Bath (a popular vacation spot for the wealthy) to reduce the costs built up by the family’s luxurious lifestyle. In Bath, they take in the waters, visit boutiques, have card parties, attend concerts, and dine with other upper-class families.

Anne is deeply unhappy in the story for several reasons, but persecution for her “spinsterhood” (the word is never used of her in the novel) is not one of the them. She has an insufferably conceited, indifferent father and older sister, and she is still mourning the loss of the one man she loved. But the implication of the reviewer’s sentence, that early 19th century society had no room for unmarried women, is preposterous.

We must stop believing that every woman who ever lived has been marginalized, wronged, persecuted, and neglected.

Austen's novels abound with powerful women of high social rank. In Persuasion alone there is Lady Russell, whose husband died many years before and who had had the opportunity to re-marry but chose not to. There is also the much sought-after Lady Dalrymple, whom Anne’s father prays will receive him in Bath. As an Elliot, Anne had no need to marry, would always have had money and consequence and a highly comfortable existence.

The lives of lower-class and middle-class men of her society, in contrast, give real meaning to social marginalization. Let’s take one such group referred to frequently in Persuasion: men employed in the British navy. Such men’s life at sea was often grim and deadly: cut off from their families and society for months or even years at a time (some of them press-ganged into service against their will, often not allowed to disembark from their ships for fear they would flee), they endured atrociously poor food, low pay, rigorous discipline and cruel punishments (such as flogging)—not to mention continual danger from disease, battles, and storms.

If such men weren’t hideously maimed or killed in battle, they could die from living in close quarters with rats, in near-constant cold and wet conditions. It didn’t help that ships’ surgeons worked in filthy conditions (and without anaesthetic), which contributed to the likelihood of agonizing death from gangrene and other diseases. The isolation, hardship, and suffering are almost unimaginable.

Yes, women were expected to marry and most women sought to do so. Jane Austen herself did not marry; and before her untimely death at age 41, she lived a productive life as an author and much-loved member of a busy family and close-knit community. Her father and brothers were proud of her. She would have had wounding words for anyone who imagined her to be “confined to the edges.”