Here's The Jane Austen Heroine You've Never Read

By Louisa Hall    |   Friday, August 22, 2014 - Off the Shelf Louisa Hall will surprise you with her eclectic life. She grew up outside Philadelphia, graduated from Harvard, and she played squash professionally and was ranked #2 in the country. These days, she teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first novel, The Carriage House, was recently published. We knew she loved Jane Austen books, so we asked who her favorite characters are. True to form, she surprised us with her response: When I first read Jane Austen's novels in high school, I was enthralled by the whole set of tart, intelligent heroines who manage to fall in love while criticizing not only their future husbands but every other aspect of the society into which they were born. The only Austen heroine I couldn’t bring myself to adore was Anne Elliot in Persuasion. She had none of the lively scrutiny of Lizzy Bennett, none of the sparkling wit of Emma Woodhouse. She was deflated and sad. At twenty-eight, she seemed old. She mocked no one, not even her vain father or her spoiled sisters, no matter how dismissively they treated her. Flush with the confidence that only a teenager who has experienced nothing of the world can possibly muster, I wished that Anne would put up more of a fight. When I re-read Persuasion while floundering in graduate school, I had somehow become as old as Anne, and this time, my reaction to her was different. I realized that Persuasion is about a young woman who’s forgotten how to be her previous self. When Anne was younger, she was vibrant and intelligent; there was no reason for anyone to suspect that she wouldn’t succeed. When the reader meets her, however, she has changed. She can barely remember how she used to carry herself. It’s as if she’s entered a different, bleaker reality from which she can’t find her way home. The feeling that Anne is just outside herself, struggling to find a way back inside, is not only a result of the novel's plot, but also a product of the narrative voice that Austen applies to her heroine. Throughout her novels, while remaining in third person, Austen brilliantly slides from inside her characters' heads to positions quite far away. When she is close to Anne's conceited father, for instance, we perceive the world as a constant assault upon Sir Walter Elliot's well-deserved self-esteem. When she is farther away, we understand that his self-esteem is in fact a pathological level of misguided confidence. In Sir Walter's case, this sliding perspective allows us to chuckle from a safe distance. . READ FULL POST