You're listening to The Conversation. This is our final episode of Jane Austen's paper trail for the year, but we'll be back in early 2026 with a special bonus episode where we're putting your questions about Jane Austen to a panel of experts. So if you've got something you've always wanted to ask about Austen, her world or her work, please send us an email or a voice note to podcast at theconversation.com. Now, on with our final episode. there is a new element in persuasion the novelist virginia wolf wrote in 1925 jane austen is beginning to discover that the world is larger more mysterious and more romantic than she had supposed she is seeing it through the eyes of a woman who unhappy herself has a special sympathy for the happiness and unhappiness of others persuasion is often described as austen's most melancholy novel. It centres on Anne Elliot, who seven years ago had been persuaded to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a naval officer with uncertain prospects. At the ripe old age of 27, Anne is now considered past her prime and lives a quiet life overshadowed by regret. When her family relocates to Bath, she crosses paths with Wentworth again, now a wealthy and distinguished captain. With the past between them, Anne is offered a precious second chance at happiness. But what does that really mean? I'm Anna Walker, Arts and Culture Editor at The Conversation in the UK, a platform partnering journalists with academics. You're listening to Jane Austen's Paper Trail. In this podcast, experts uncover the real Jane Austen to celebrate 250 years since her birth. Book by book will take you inside her work to help you understand her life. Welcome to episode six. Was Jane happy? later in the episode i sit down with two experts and a copy of persuasion to muse on jane's state of mind but first off my colleague jane wright and phd researcher nada sadowy head to lime regis in dorset on the south coast of england it's an important setting in the novel and austin's own favorite holiday destination welcome nada thanks for joining our podcast hello jane it's my first time here at the Cobb and it's so dramatic. It's such an empowering landscape. You feel that breeze, that air brushing through your hair and it's just really, really, really liberating. This intoxicating setting provided the backdrop to some of Jane Austen's most treasured walks and that's what Nada's ongoing PhD research at Cumbria University is all about. The transformative power of walking in Austen's novels. So what kind of town was Lyme? Lyme was then quite a famous seaside resort. Many people visited, sea bathing and walking and taking the air here was advocated for by a lot of writers, but also advised by many doctors. So when Austin visited, she walked along the cob. She enjoyed conversations with acquaintances. She bathed and she also danced. She attended the assembly rooms. And we also have pivotal moments in persuasion, of course, that took part here at Lyme in the Cobb. It actually makes a lot of sense why Austen would base it here. Austen herself envied the wives of sailors and soldiers because of what this place offers, the freedom, the liberty that you feel at the seaside. Yeah, you get a real sense of the elements here, don't you? Yes, yes, absolutely. So when Jane Austen came here, at what stage of her life and her writing was she at? We know she visited in 1803 and 1804. She was in her late 20s and she moved to Bath with her family. And Lyme and the Seaside was an escape for her from the city, from that social life. and those kind of like restrictions that were found in more bounded spaces. In 1804, Jane wrote to Cassandra about bathing in the sea. And this was after recovering from a mild illness. She writes, I continue quite well in proof of which I have bathed again this morning. It was absolutely necessary that I should have the little fever and indisposition which I had. It has been all the fashion this week in Lyme. What is striking in this is that Austen does not portray happiness as a grand declaration. You know, you could see it in her pleasure in sea bathing and the bodily freedom it affords her. So what does it mean for a woman to be in a landscape in Jane Austen's writing? In Austen's era, women's presence in a landscape was heavily coded. To walk was to step into the public eye, where women's behavior, their attire, the way they carry themselves, their manner of movement, you know, invited scrutiny. And places like promenades, public walks, they all functioned as social theaters, I would say. They were spaces designed for observation as much as they were designed for leisure. To walk is to risk judgment, but it is also the idea of inhabiting space differently, to claim moments of meaningful freedom within the boundaries of Regency society. And for Austen, walking meant freedom. So Lyme is the setting of the pivotal scene in Persuasion. Can you tell us what happens? Anne and Captain Wentworth, after eight whole years of being emotionally distant, they finally come into renewed emotional contact. Until this point in the novel, their relationship has been defined by restraint. It's been defined by pain, politeness, regret, awkwardness. Absence. Absence, 100%. and we see that walk on the cob shifts everything. The scene begins in high spirits. Austen would say that the young people were all wild to see Lyme and Anne walks in this invigorating sea air and Austen describes her transformation. Austen writes, she was looking remarkably well, her very regular, very pretty features, having the bloom and freshness of youth restored by the fine wind. Captain Wentworth looked round at her instantly. He gave her a momentary glance, a glance of brightness, which seemed to say, that man is struck by you, and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again. This is the first time Anne is visibly seen again by Mr. Wentworth. It is a moment of recognition, not only for her beauty, for her vitality, but her presence, her strength, which I think is really amazing. And then they proceed towards the Cobb. Louisa Musgrove, who's being courted by Captain Wentworth, wants to be dropped off the steps at the cob. And she does this twice. Austin writes that she was too precipitated by half a second the second time. And she falls. She falls lifeless and moving. Everyone around her descends into panic. Except for Anne. She remains composed, decisive. And she gives instructions. She offers comfort. She knows exactly what to do. Everyone turns to her. Captain Wentworth included. Anne is no longer overlooked. She is present. She's in the moment. The energy between Anne and Wentworth begins to shift. His anger softens into reflection and her timidity gives way to presence. The groundwork is laid for their renewed relationship. We see in here that walking and being out of doors quote as long as they could close quote that these characters open themselves up to transformation And we see especially for Anne that this walk along the cob becomes a walk back to herself to her strength, her voice, her true person, eventually, I would say, her happiness. My colleague Jane Wright there with Nada Sudui. I love the idea of Anne Wentworth walking towards transformation. The way Nada puts it really embodies the vast and sometimes conflicting emotions we experience over the course of our lives. But by now I feel we should expect nothing less. Jane Austen is often revered as a master of the psychological novel. But what did her own interior world look like? Coming up, I sit down with two experts to find out after this short break. I'm Gemma Ware, host of the Conversation Weekly podcast. Each week, I speak to an academic expert about a topic in the news to understand how we got here, from global politics to the latest scientific breakthroughs or the big dilemmas facing our planet. My guests draw on their deep research knowledge to pull out what really matters so that you can understand the context without the spin. Follow The Conversation Weekly for new episodes every Thursday, wherever you listen to podcasts and read more stories on theconversation.com. Welcome back. Freya Johnston, you're a professor of English at St Anne's College at the University of Oxford and the author of Jane Austen, Early and Late. Welcome to the podcast, Freya. Thank you. Hi. And John Mullen, you're a professor of modern English literature at the University College London and the author of What Matters in Jane Austen. Welcome, John. Hello. As I've been working on this podcast series, I've asked many people what their favourite Jane Austen book is, and I've been surprised by how many people say Persuasion. It has its share of famous fans too. The poet Alfred Tennyson paid a visit to Lyme Regis in 1867, specifically to see locations from the novel. John, why do you think Persuasion resonates with so many people? Well, I think it resonates with people once they've passed the age of 40, probably, particularly. because of all Jane Austen's novels it is the most melancholy and also in an old-fashioned way the most romantic. It's a heroine who thinks she's missed her chance of happiness in life really and then she gets a second chance and I think that that resonates with people when they get a bit further on in life. Well Anne Elliot as you've alluded to there John the protagonist of Persuasion is perhaps Austen's most melancholic heroine. For me, Austen's death before the publication of the novel makes its portrait of a woman looking back at her life with regret all the more striking. John, do you think Austen was in a particularly reflective mood when she wrote this novel? It was possible that she was in a reflective mood because she was beginning to ail with the illness that was eventually to kill her, but she wouldn't have known that. But I don't think the melancholy in the book represents somehow the author's melancholy at all. I sort of don't think Jane Austen was that sort of novelist, actually. Well, looking to another source then, Freya, you're currently writing a book on Austen's letters. Does her correspondence generally paint a portrait of a happy woman? Are there any examples you can give us? Yeah, I mean, there isn't actually much of the correspondence left, but it still does include quite a variety of moods. Quite often, Austen sounds angry. She also sounds quite bitter at times about the lack of control over her own life, particularly in the letters that she sends after her father's retirement when the family moves to Bath, a place that she loathed and that Anne Elliot also dislikes very much in persuasion. And one of the great things that she enjoys about fame as an author is a degree of financial independence. And at that stage, of course, also the family has moved back to Hampshire, the county she never wanted to leave in the first place. So there is anger there, but there is also a happiness in the letters, certainly a degree of pride in her achievements as an author and just an enjoyment of writing. Also her own intelligence. She's quite sharp about other people. The vast majority of the letters are to her sister. And so, as you would expect, they detail a kind of closeness between them and they dwell on family matters for the most part. She's talking about purchases of food or clothing a lot of the time. These things aren't little things. They are the stuff of daily life that her novels also celebrate. And there is happiness in that. It's worth saying about the letters that they are quite unusual because many authors, the letters we enjoy and find interesting, are written to other authors. And they're about writing and about the life of writing. And Jane Austen's letters, the vast majority to her sister, Cassandra, and they're really to Cassandra. They're not to us. They're not to posterity. So, you know, when they were first published, I think quite a few Austen fans were a bit disappointed because where are the great thoughts of the author? Yeah. And even when she is giving literary advice or talking about books, it is usually to people who are either amateur authors or not authors at all. So one of her nieces, Anna, was an aspiring novelist. And some of the great comments about her own novels arise in the context of Austen advising her niece, saying things like, you know, three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on. I mean, that arises from thinking about a relative's work, not about another great author or in a public context of thinking about authorship at all. And she does seem to get great pleasure from advising her niece on writing, doesn't she? Yeah, yeah. One thing I love about Persuasion is the depth of its emotional storytelling and how we get a sense of the emotional state of almost all the principal characters. Austen is well known for her use of free and direct style, which shares a character's thoughts or feelings without explicitly stating that it's doing so. John, how does free and direct style help Austen to achieve this emotional depth in Persuasion? By the time she writes Persuasion, she's become extremely sophisticated with this technique. so we sort of share Anne's insights but also her delusions her mistakes and to some extent what I think some readers have thought of as a sort of masochism her self-punishment because she's sort of trying to make the best of the fact that she meets again this man Captain Wentworth who she was persuaded to reject eight years earlier for a little capsule example of how brilliantly free and direct style works in persuasion. After they've met again, Anne gets told by her very tactless, inconsiderate sister Mary that Captain Wentworth, after the meeting, has said to Mary that Anne, eight years on, was so altered he would not have known her again. She's lost her bloom. She's scrawny and tired and spiritless. And she replaces words in her head. And, of course, it's, you'd think, very painful. And then it says this extraordinary thing. She soon began to rejoice that she had heard these words. They were of sobering tendency. They allayed agitation. they composed and consequently must make her happier. Now that's not Jane Austen saying they must make her happier, that's sort of Anne in her head saying yes this is great, he doesn't find me attractive anymore, I may fancy him still but he doesn't fancy me, that's really good because it won't give me any illusions about trying to nab him again. I mean, it's funny and it's poignant and often the persuasion is brilliantly both those things at the same time. The lengths we will go to to make ourselves feel better about a romance that hasn't gone to plan. Well, at the start of Persuasion, when we learn that Anne was once engaged to Frederick Wentworth, Austin writes, A few months had seen the beginning and the end of their acquaintance, but not with a few months ended Anne's share of suffering from it. her attachment and regrets had for a long time clouded every enjoyment of youth and an early loss of bloom and spirits had been their lasting effect john does that echo attitudes towards emotion in the time in general what was the sort of understanding of happiness and depression in Austin saying how was that different to how we think about emotions well I think one thing you get from persuasion if you think about how words like spirits are used is a sense of kind of complexity which I sometimes think our blanket use of the word depression robs us of I mean, depression, let's face it, is always bad. But a word like melancholy isn't necessarily bad. It might sensitise somebody like Anne Elliot to other people's feelings, to the impressions of the time of year. And when you look at spirits in the novel, I mean, one of the striking things is, and it's so often the case with Jane Austen, it's not either good or bad. Louisa Musgrove, who is the sister of Charles Musgrove, who's married and younger sister. Louisa, when Captain Wentworth turns up again, is one of two sisters, along with Henrietta Musgrove, who Captain Wentworth seems to be interested in. And Anne Elliot watches this in a kind of agony. And Louisa has high spirits. Is that good? Maybe. I mean, it makes her good fun to dance with. It makes her sort of glow. It makes Captain Wentworth apparently drawn to her. but it also makes her sort of prone to disaster. She throws herself off the cob in Lyme Regis asking Captain Wembley to catch her and she does it too precipitately and she falls and bangs her head. So her spirits have their downside too. And one emotion that we do recognise that is named throughout the book is regret, one of the strongest themes of the novel, of course. Freya, do you think that's an emotion Jane was personally familiar with? I mean who isn't certainly if you're thinking about the evidence of the letters I wouldn't say that regret is is a prominent feature of the correspondence or an emotion that she talks about there I mean she did notoriously accept a marriage proposal from the unfortunately named Harris Bigwither and then overnight reconsidered it so whether she regretted that decision I suppose is something that we could speculate about that she did have the chance at one point in her life years before persuasion of having married and settled on a nice estate and have two friends, his sisters, close to hand. That would certainly have got the family out of Bath and the problem of having to live somewhere she disliked. But what else would it have meant? I don't think she regretted not having children, for instance. One thing that the letters do dwell on a lot is how unpleasant and kind of disgusting she finds aspects of childbirth. And indeed, two of her sisters-in-law died in childbirth during her lifetime. But beyond that, as John says, Austen is not really the kind of author to inscribe her own feelings very legibly in the novels themselves. One sort of emotional similarity perhaps we can see between Anne and Jane is the emotional resilience. We certainly see evidence in her letters of her ability to persevere through personal difficulties. John, she certainly faced her share, didn't she? Loss of her father, financial instability. Yes, yes, she did. And also famously disappointments about trying to get published. We know that she completed her six Finnish novels in the space of little more than seven years in what must seem a real furore of creativity. But it is striking that when she came to write those six novels. It was because she had somewhere stable to live. She didn't have to worry too much about money, thanks to the wealth that her brother Edward had inherited from distant relatives. In a way, perhaps for us, it was lucky that she had those early disappointments, because by the time in her mid-30s that she was writing her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility based on an earlier draft, she was already a practice writer. There's no novel where she's sort of getting the hang of it. Bang, Sense and Sensibility is a slam dunk masterpiece from the get go. So she made the best of her disappointments, we might say. And Freya, you've studied a lot of Austen's teenage writing as well. What kind of differences are we seeing at this point of maturity in Austen's writing compared to her sort of juvenalia as it's called? Well I mean the early works are in a very obvious sense different in the fact that they're very very short although I think there is some continuity between the younger and older Austen in the sense that even in the mature works she shows a certain impatience with endings she's often rather uninterested in the couples in her novels once they've sorted things out and some readers have always felt actually these endings are a bit perfunctory or not very plausible. I don't think people tend to feel that about persuasion, although the ending is slightly peculiar if we are thinking of it as a happy ending, because the final vision is of Anne still worrying, paying the tax of quick alarm for the fact that she's married someone who's in the Navy and therefore of whose security she's never really going to be particularly confident. Jane was very close with her sister Cassandra, as Anne Elliot is with her hypochondriac sister Mary, though that portrait of siblinghood is less than flattering, I would say. Was Austen's family a source of happiness or stress for her throughout her life, Rhea? Well, I mean, probably as with most families, both. Yes, she's absolutely, she is very close to her sister Cassandra, but close to and animated by the success or otherwise of all her siblings. I mean, if you want to think of the one that probably had the most stressful impact on her, I suppose it would be her brother Henry, who was quite reckless and lost his money and took down lots of other members of the family when his bank failed. Austen does seem to have reacted to that threat to her own security and to the security of other members of her family quite strongly. It does seem to be the case that she is always alarmed by threats to financial security, and understandably so, because the family is never rich. But she's delighted by and writes a lot about the success of her sailor brothers. Henry is not only a reckless character, he's also the person who actually helps to get her into print. So he acts as her agent, he negotiates for her with publishers, so he is an enabling figure as well as occasionally a bit of a pain. Cassandra is the one that she always relies on the most and she calls her back in the final months of her life because she needs her to be there. It's Cassandra's lap that Jane's head rests on for much of that time in her final days, isn't it? Well, as she dies, yeah. The relationship with Cassandra is often talked about because it's so important, but also her mother, her father especially, and her brothers were very important to her. I think if you could beam yourself down to an Austen family gathering with all of them sitting around the table, I think they were a really rather terrific family, actually. I think that they were open-minded, intelligent, humorous, optimistic people. I think they were a family who valued Jane's talents and her intelligence and enjoyed hearing her read bits of her writing to them. And I think that one can't overestimate how important that must have been to her. When Jane's sister Cassandra was just 24, her fiancé Tom Fowle died of yellow fever in the West Indies and she never went on to marry. Might Jane have been drawing on this experience of her sister for the character of Anne Elliot Freya? Well, I think it's very likely and there is that marginal note, probably in Cassandra Austin's handwriting and a key passage of persuasion about not being too prudent in your youth and actually just risking it and going for it. So I think the fact that Cassandra Austin probably wrote the words, dear, dear Jane, this deserves to be written in letters of pure gold next to that passage does suggest that there was some kind of parallel in Austin's mind between what happened to her sister. and indeed also towards the end of the book when Anne Elliot has that wonderful speech about women's superior capacity to maintain their emotions when existence or when hope is gone and she says it's nothing much to envy us for. If you really are continuing to love when even the existence of the person you love couldn't really be said to endure anymore, how could she not have had Cassandra in some sense in her mind in that passage too? Persuasion was the final novel that Jane Austen completed published just six months after her death in 1817 at the age of 41 Freya what do we know about how Austen died Well, she died in Winchester after an illness that had been dragging on for some time, but whose identity is still really uncertain. People have argued for ages about what this illness actually was. And for quite a while, the diagnosis was Addison's disease, partly because of a letter in which she talks about her skin changing colour. People have suggested leukaemia or some kind of cancer as a plausible candidate. But in any case, the symptoms seem to have been a kind of weakness or dizziness or nausea. The last thing she wrote, which she didn't complete, Sanditon, is amongst other things a satire of hypochondria. And one of the characters in that, Diana Parker, has the same symptoms or claims to. And so it's as if Austen kind of hoped through comedy to sort of spoof away the symptoms that she was suffering from. I don't think any of them thought that the illness would be fatal as quickly as it was, although one or more family members did say they thought that she wouldn't survive it. But she was very unlucky. I mean, most of her family is very long lived. So for her to die at 41 was a strange thing for an Austen and we don't quite know why. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because Persuasion, It's a novel which is sort of edged by death. Almost everybody in the novel is in mourning for somebody or other and wearing black, in fact. But it's sort of written against death and actually even comically so. One of the subplots of the novel, which is just the most satisfying subplot, there's this man, Captain Bennett, and he was engaged to the sister of Captain Wentworth's best friend, Captain Harville. And while he was at sea, she died. He's absolutely heartbroken. And yet after Louisa Musgrove's accident, he tends to her and then, blow me down, a few weeks later, they're engaged. There's this wonderful sentence. When Anne's thinking about Captain Benning, he had an affectionate heart. He must love somebody. You can imagine somebody saying that second sentence dismissively, mockingly. But it's not mocking. It's funny, it's comical, but it's also understanding. I mean, that is what he's like. He's full of affection. And so Fanny's died, he will find somebody else. And there's something perhaps quite natural about that. It's not a terrible thing. Persuasion is full of things coming back to life against death, including Anne and Captain Wentworth's love for each other. One thing all of Austen's heroines, including Anne Elliot, have in common is a happy ending. They all marry respectable and kind men, build comfortable homes for themselves, and generally end the novel in a more joyful place than they started it. But what of Jane's own ending? Would you say she was ultimately happy at the end of her life? Freya, let's start with you. I don't know how to answer that. I don't know how I would answer it about anyone. I mean, one of her favourite authors, Dr Johnson, famously said that nobody was happy and anyone who claimed to be happy was lying. But I think you could certainly say that by the time she died, the professional success that we've already talked about had brought her a great deal of satisfaction and enjoyment, and she was still creative right up until the very end. You know, so in that sense, I would say she was absolutely happy in terms of the expression of her novelistic gifts and creative self, and that that was only growing and growing and growing right up until the point she died. I completely agree with that. She was absolutely happy as a novelist, as it were, But I think Persuasion is a novel that very wisely sees, not that there's no such thing as happiness, but there is something ludicrous about trying to answer the question, are you happy? There's a great bit at the beginning of the chapter, indeed, in which Captain Wentworth writes the extraordinary letter declaring to Anne that he still loves her, where she's in this crowded room in the White Hart Inn. She senses his love is coming back to her. And it says she was deep in the happiness of such misery or the misery of such happiness. That's the way in which persuasion is true to happiness, that when it comes, it's often in a blur of contradictory feelings. One thing that she does talk about a lot in her letters is the happiness of domesticity. And that is also true of persuasion. One of the reasons why the Navy emerge as such virtuous characters is that they have such fantastic capacity to make domestic life good. Captain Harville, who her brother, Jane Austen's brother, Frank, thought might be in some sense a representation of him or that they certainly had qualities in common. He's depicted busy all the time making things, building shelves, you know, fixing his fishing nets, doing things around the house that make everything work better and make everybody's lives more comfortable. and those are the kinds of virtues that don't come in for much celebration but which genuinely contribute to a sense of being truly happy to be happy at home as again Johnson said is the result of all ambition and that seems to be something that comes across very clearly from Austen's letters that they're just the happiness of life at Chawton once they're all settled there and that's not necessarily marital happiness it's just domestic happiness. We also get a brilliant passage in a letter where she tells us of her the pleasure she gets from a recipe for sponge cake don't we? Yeah. Well, whether or not we ever will know if Jane was happy, we certainly know that she laughed. So that's a nice, yes, a nice enduring image to have of her. Thank you both for your happy company today. It's been such a pleasure talking with you. Thank you. Thanks very much. Though we can use her remaining letters, novels, and the accounts of her descendants to piece together the puzzle of her life, a full picture of Jane Austen, the woman, remains elusive. Every line she wrote contains a double meaning, every sentiment she shared might as easily be a joke, and the more I learn about her from our academic experts, the more I believe that's just how she liked it. There are only two known paintings of Jane, both by her sister Cassandra. One of them you probably know, the now famous portrait on the £10 note, hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in London. The other was painted during one of their trips to Lyme Regis. in it jane's sitting beneath a tree her back turned to us she's wearing a pale blue dress with a matching bonnet her hand resting gently on her knee we can only just see a sliver of her face peeking out from under the brim of her hat the novel austin was writing when she died sanderton was set in a seaside town inspired by lime it's a fitting final resting place then not where her body lies in the cold vaults of winchester cathedral but in the ink of her sister's portrait gazing out to sea, still keeping her secrets. Thanks so much for listening to Jane Austen's Paper Trail. Remember, in the new year, we'll be back with a Q&A episode, so if you have a burning question about Jane Austen for us, please email it to podcast at theconversation.com. A big thank you to all our experts for this episode, Nada Sadui, John Mullen and Freya Johnston. The senior producer of this series was Eloise Stevens, who did all our mixing and sound design too. Reporting in this episode from Jane Wright, with production help from Naomi Joseph. Alistair Tibbet and Alice Mason do all our socials and promotion, and our executive producer for the series is Gemma Ware. the conversation is a non-profit news outlet dedicated to sharing the work of academic experts with a wide audience you can sign up for our free daily newsletter by clicking on the link in our show notes if you like what we do please support us at donate.theconversation.com that's donate.theconversation.com and please do rate and review the podcast wherever you follow us and tell your friends about us too i'm anna walker and thank you for listening to jane austen's paper trail from the conversation Thank you.
