1897, My Favorite Novelist and His Best Book, Munsey's Magazine, vol. 18, p. 351.

PERSUASION

1818

"Persuasion"-excepting the tangled, useless histories of the family in the first fifty pages-appears to me, especially in all that relates to poor Anne and her lover, to be exceedingly interesting and natural. The love and the lover admirably well drawn: don't you see Captain Wentworth, or rather don't you in her place feel him taking the boisterous child off her back as she kneels by the sick boy on the sofa? And is not the first meeting after their long separation admirably well done?EDGEWORTH, MARIA, 1818, Letters, vol. I, p. 247.

The book shows broader sympathies, deeper observation, and perhaps more perfect symmetry, balance, poise, than the others. The always flexible, unobtrusive style, in which reduction of emphasis is carried sometimes to the verge of equivocation, concealing the author, yet instinct with her presence, in none of her books approximates more nearly to Cardinal Newman's definition "a thinking out into language." In general, the qualities that appear in the others are in “Persuasion” perhaps more successfully fused than before. CLYMER, W. B. SHUBRICK, 1891, A Note on Jane Austen, Scribner's Magazine, vol. 9, p. 384.

"Persuasion" represents the ripest development of Jane Austen's powers, that latest phase of her thoughts and feelings. It is a novel which, while not wanting in the several excellences of those which preceded it, has a mellower tone and a more finished grace of style than any of the others. It was written at a time when bodily strength had given place to weakness; and although her mind was more active than ever, her physical condition insensibly influenced her thought, giving this latest of her books that deeper note of feeling, that finer touch of sympathy and tenderness, which make "Persuasion" the greatest of all her works.-ADAMS, OSCAR FAY, 1891-96, The Story of Jane Austen's Life, p. 254.

It was Miss Austen's last story, and has more depth of feeling and pathos than most of hers. . . . The delicate miniature painting of the characters in these tales is apt not to be appreciated by the young,

and the tone of county society of that day disgusts them; but as they grow older they perceive how much ability and insight is displayed in the work, and esteem the forbearance, sweetness, and self-restraint of such a heroine as Anne. - YONGE, CHARLOTTE M., 1893, Anne Elliot, Greut Characters of Fiction, ed. Townsend, pp. 18, 19.

Of Anne Elliot, the heroine of “Persuasion," she wrote to a friend, "You may perhaps like her, as she is almost too good for me. She is too good for most of us, but not the less charming, and even the brilliancy of Elizabeth Bennet pales a little before the refined womanliness of this delightful English lady. Whether the future of Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney was wholly ideal may be doubted; we may even have secret reservations as to the absolute bliss of Emma and her Knightley; but there can be no sort of question as to the ultimate and unalloyed happiness of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, who is another of those pleasant manly naval officers whom Miss Austen, drawing no doubt from material in her own family circles, depicts so sympathetically. DOBSON, AUSTIN, 1897, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, Introduction, p. xii.

GENERAL

Miss Austen's works may be safely recommended, not only as among the most unexceptionable of their class, but as combining, in an eminent degree, instruction with amusement, though without the direct effort at the former, of which we have complained as sometimes defeating its object. For those who cannot or will not learn anything from productions of this kind, she has provided entertainment which entitles her to thanks; for mere innocent amusement is in itself a good, when it interferes with no greater; especially as it may occupy the place of some other that may not be innocent. The Eastern monarch who proclaimed a reward to him who should deserve a new pleasure, would have deserved well of mankind had he stipulated that it should be blameless. Those, again, who delight in the study of human nature, may improve in the knowledge of it, and in the profitable application of that knowledge by the perusal of such fictions as those before us.-WHATELY, ARCHBISHOP, 1821, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, Quarterly Review, vol. 24, p. 375.

By the way, did you know Miss Austen, authoress of some novels which have a great deal of nature in them?-nature in ordinary and middle life, to be sure, but valuable from its strong resemblance and correct drawing. I wonder which way she carried her pail.-SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1822, Letter to Miss Joanna Baillie, Memoirs, ed. Lockhart, ch. lv.

All-perfect Austen. Here

Let one poor wreath adorn thy early bier, That scarce allowed thy modest youth to claim

Its living portion of thy certain fame.
Oh, Mrs. Bennet! Mrs. Norris, too!
While memory survives we'll dream of you,
And Mr. Woodhouse, whose abstemious lip
Must thin, but not too thin, his gruel sip;
Miss Bates, our idol, though the village bore;
And Mrs. Elton, ardent to explore:
While the dear style flows on without pre-
tence,

With unstained purity, and unmatched sense.

-CARLISLE, EARL OF, 1825, The Keepsake.

Our dinner-party this evening was like nothing but a chapter out of one of Miss

Austen's novels. What wonderful books those are! She must have written down the very conversations she heard verbatim, to have made them so like, which is Irish. -KEMBLE, FRANCES ANN. 1831, Records of a Girlhood, July 31, p. 441.

My idol.-MITFORD, MARY RUSSELL, 1832, Letter to Mrs. Trollope; What I Remember, by T. A. Trollope, p. 496.

The delicate mirth, the gently hinted satire, the feminine, decorous humor of Jane Austen, who, if not the greatest, is surely the most faultless of female novelists. My Uncle Southey and my father had an equally high opinion of her merits, but Mr. Wordsworth used to say that though he admitted that her novels were an admirable copy of life, he could not be interested in productions of that kind; unless the truth of nature were presented to him clarified, as it were, by the pervading light of imagination, it had scarce any attractions in his eyes.-COLERIDGE, SARA, 1834, Letter to Miss Emily Trevenen, Aug.; Memoirs and Letters, ed. by her Daughter, p. 77.

It is the constant manner of Shakspeare to represent the human mind as lying, not under the absolute dominion of one domestic propensity, but under a mixed government, in which a hundred powers balance each other. Admirable as he was

in all parts of his art, we most admire him for this, that, while he has left us a greater number of striking portraits than all other dramatists put together, he has scarcely left us a single caricature. Shakspeare has had neither equal nor second. But among the writers who, in the point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings.-MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1842, Madame D'Arblay, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.

We should say that Fielding and Miss Austen are the greatest novelists in our language. Miss Austen has been called a prose Shakspeare; and, among others, by Macaulay. In spite of the sense of incongruity which besets us in the words prose Shakspeare, we confess the greatness of Miss Austen, her marvelous dramatic power, seems more than anything in Scott, akin to the greatest quality in Shakspeare. LEWES, GEORGE HENRY, 1847, Recent Novels, Fraser's Magazine, vol. 36, p. 687.

Home, and finished "Persuasion." I have now read over again all Miss Austen's novels. Charming they are, but I found a little more to criticise than formerly. Yet there are in the world no compositions which approach nearer to perfection.MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1851, Journal, May 1; Life and Letters, ed. Trevelyan.

She [Miss Milford] never taught me anything but a very limited admiration of Miss Austen, whose people struck me ast wanting souls, even more than is necessary for men and women of the world. The novels are perfect as far as they gothat's certain. Only they don't go far, I think. It may be my fault.-BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1855, To Mr. Ruskin, Nov. 5; Letters, ed. Kenyon, vol. II,

p. 217.

All in all, as far as my information goes, the best judges unanimously prefer Miss Austen to any of her contemporaries of the same order. They reckon her "Sense

and Sensibility," her "Pride and Prejudice," her "Mansfield Park" and her "Emma" (which novels were published in her lifetime), and also her "Northanger Abbey" and her "Persuasion" (which were published posthumously) as not only better than anything else of the kind written in her day, but also among the most perfect and charming fictions in the language. I have known the most hard-headed men in ecstasies with them; and the only objection I have heard of as brought against them by ladies is, that they reveal too many of their secrets. -MASSON, DAVID, 1859, British Novelists and Their Styles, p. 189.

Miss Austen is, of all his successors, the one who most nearly resembles Richardson in the power of impressing reality upon her characters. There is a perfection in the exhibition of Miss Austen's characters which no one else has approached; and truth is never for an instant sacrificed in that delicate atmosphere of satire which pervades her works. She has

been accused of writing dull stories about ordinary people. But her supposed ordinary people are really not such very ordinary people. Let any one who is inclined to criticize on this score, endeavour to construct one character from among the ordinary people of his own acquaintance that shall be capable of interesting any reader for ten minutes. It will then be found how great has been the discrimination of Miss Austen in the selection of her characters and how skillful is her treatment in the management of them.-POLLOCK, W. F., 1860, British Novelists, Fraser's Magazine, vol. 61, pp. 30, 31.

By those who have studied character distinct from its outward manifestations, as expressed in conformity to uses and customs, there will be found in Miss Austen's novels an expression of firm and original courage as clear as if she had braved society, whether theoretically or practically. The boldness which will vindicate for persons of mediocre intellect souls to be saved and feelings to be tortured, and which by such vindication can interest and compel a jaded, hurrying public, eager for changing excitements, to pause and to listen-is surely no common quality; but it has within itself a promise and an assurance of enduring reputation. -CHORLEY, G. F., 1870, Miss Austen

and Miss Mitford, Quarterly Review, vol. 128, p. 203.

Jane Austen was the flower of a stock, full, apparently, through all its branches, of shrewd sense and caustic humour, which in her were combined with the creative imagination. She possessed a

real and rare gift, and she rendered a good account of it. If the censer which she held among the priests of art was not of the costliest, the incense was of the purest. If she cannot be ranked with the very greatest masters of fiction, she has delighted many, and none can draw from her any but innocent delight.-SMITH, GOLDWIN, 1870-81, Austen-Leigh's Memoir of Jane Austen, Lectures and Essays.

She was always very careful not to meddle with matters which she did not thoroughly understand. She never touched upon politics, law, or medicine; but with ships and sailors she felt herself at home, or at least could always trust to a brotherly critic to keep her right. It is said that no flaw has ever been found in her seamanship either in "Mansfield Park" or in "Persuasion."-CONANT, S. S., 1870, Jane Austen, Harper's Magazine, vol. 41, p. 227.

I am equally sure that Miss Austen cannot be third, any more than first or second: I think you were rather drawn away by a fashion when you put her there: and really old Spedding seems to me to have been the Stag whom so many followed in that fashion. She is capital as far as she goes: but she never goes out of the Parlour; if but Magnus Troil, or Jack Bunce, or even one of Fielding's Brutes, would but dash in upon the Gentility and swear a round Oath or two! I must think the "Woman in White," with her Count Fosco, far beyond all that. Cowell constantly reads. Miss Austen at night after his Sanskrit Philology is done: it composes him, like Gruel or like Paisiello's Music, which Napoleon liked above all other, because he said it didn't interrupt his Thoughts.FITZGERALD, EDWARD, 1871, Letters, vol. I, p. 335.

The extraordinary skill which Miss Austen displayed in describing what Scott called "the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life," places her as a novelist above her predecessor, Miss Burney. But it is more doubtful whether she is entitled to rank above her contemporary Miss Edgeworth. In Macaulay's opinion Madame de Stael was certainly the first woman of her age; Miss Edgeworth the second; and Miss Austen the third. Yet Miss Austen has one advantage over Miss Edgeworth which is very important. In reading Miss Austen no one ever thinks of the moral of the story, everyone becomes insensibly the better person for perusing it.-WALPOLE, SPENCER, 1878, A History of England from the Conclusion of the Great War in 1815, vol. 1, p. 378.

A distinguished English scholar said to a lecturer who had extolled the tales of Charlotte Brontë, "I am afraid you do not know that Miss Austen is the better novelist."

If the scholar had explained doubt less he would have said, in comparing Miss Brontë or George Eliot with Miss Austen, -and the three are the chief of their sex in this form of English literature-that her distinction and superiority lie in her more absolute artistic instinct. She writes wholly as an artist, while George Eliot advocates views, and Miss Brontë's fiery page is often a personal protest. In Miss Austen, on the other hand, there is in kind, but infinitely less in degree, the same clear atmosphere of pure art which we perceive in Shakespeare and Goethe. It is a thread of exceeding fineness with which she draws us, but it is spun of pure gold. There are no great characters, no sweep of passion, no quickening of soul and exaltation of purpose and sympathy, upon her page, but there is the pure pleasure of a Watteau. Austen's art is not less in the choice than in the treatment. She does not, indeed, carve the Moses with Michael Angelo, but she moulds the delicate cup, she cuts the gem.-CURTIS, GEORGE WILLIAM, 1881, Editor's Easy Chair, Harper's Magazine, vol. 62, p. 309.

Miss

Like Wordsworth, she sought to show the charm that lies under the common things about us, and with a fine feminine humour, under sentences clear, simple, and exactly fitted to expression of a shrewd good sense, she came nearer to Fielding

than any novelist who wrote before the reign of Queen Victoria. - MORLEY, HENRY, 1881, Of English Literature in the Reign of Victoria, With a Glance at the Past, p. 111.

Her humour flows gentle and spontaneous; it is no elaborate mechanism nor artificial fountain, but a bright natural stream, rippling and trickling over every stone and sparkling in the sunshine. . Her picnics are models for all future and past picnics. Her machinery is simple but complete; events group themselves so vividly and naturally in her mind that, in describing imaginary scenes, we seem not only to read them, but to live them, to see the people coming and going: the gentlemen courteous and in top-boots, the ladies demure and piquant; we almost hear them talking to one another.PITCHIE, ANNE ISABELLA THACKERAY, 1883, A Book of Sibyls, pp. 200, 201.

To-day, more than seventy long years have rolled away since the greater part of them ["Letters"] were written; no one now living can, I think, have any possible just cause of annoyance at their publication, whilst, if I judge rightly, the public never took a deeper or more lively interest in all that concerns Jane Austen than at the present moment. Her works, slow in their progress towards popularity, have achieved it with the greater certainty, and have made an impression the more permanent from its gradual advance. The popularity continues, although the customs and manners which Jane Austen describes have changed and varied so much as to belong in a great measure to another age. BRABOURNE, EDWARD LORD, 1884, ed., Letters of Jane Austen, Introduction, vol. I, p. xii.

She never exhausts a scene by what is called word-painting. She indicates its main features, and describes the general effect it produces upon the spectator, rather than recapitulates the size, weight, and colour of its various component elements. To say that she has a strong insight into female character is almost superfluous. George Eliot does not enter more deeply into the workings of the female mind and heart than she does. Add to all these claims that our author's novels are perfectly unexceptionable from every point of view, and that they combine rational amusement with no small degree