Needing fiction in another vein after chewing on Pynchon and before climbing Dos Passos, I just finished Persuasion, Jane Austen's last novel, which I wanted to like more than I did. It has most of Austen's virtues: the poeticizing of everyday emotions; the ironic eye for the missed communication, the misinterpreted glance; the sure control of point-of-view and free indirect discourse, letting the reader use her intelligence to discern the truth; and as an added bonus, an awareness of global events beyond the English village that is her usual territory. In this case, it is the British Navy, which Austen was intimately familiar with, as far as possible for a woman of her time, since her brother eventually became an admiral.
It's a short novel, but even so, the climax does seem delayed, and when it finally comes, the curtain falls even more quickly after it than in her other novels. We know her main characters will get together: it's the how that is of infinite interest in Austen. I enjoy Austen most when her characters realize each other's love because they are acting unselfishly or disinterestedly, such as happens in Emma. Anne Elliott in Persuasion is so perfect, acts so rightly almost all of the time, that no real suspense builds over whether she and Captain Wentworth will get together. Perhaps Austen's health affected her writing. Still, I think her art would have expanded had she lived; some people bemoan Mozart's early death, but I think Austen was the more grievous loss.
I am not a full "Janeite," as her followers call themselves, and I do not read all her books annually, as, supposedly, E. M. Forster and Angus Wilson did. But I hate when she is called a "miniaturist" who worked in a constricted field with a limited cast of characters--employing "a fine brush on ivory." Her field was the human heart, which is infinite in its depths and heights--or at least to each of us it is.
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