Feeling Embodied: Consciousness, Persuasion, and Jane Austen

"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight and a half years ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone I think and plan.—Have you not seen this? Can you have failed to have understood my wishes?—I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something that overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others.—Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating in

"F. W.

"I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never."

—Jane Austen, Persuasion

The Remarkable Letter of Chapter Twenty-Three

For eight and a half years, Anne Elliot has longed for the words of Frederick Wentworth's letter, and we as Persuasion's readers have waited for them as well—twenty chapters of waiting—since Anne's first murmuring of "he" at the close of Chapter Three. However, I'd like to suggest that we've waited far longer for what this letter holds. If Jane Austen's novels all lead ineluctably to the return of "him" and the proposal (renewed or first offered), the heartfelt moment of declaration between the lovers before Persuasion seems in Austen's writing to be essentially non-representational, though its idea can be alluded to as a shared ellipse between the lovers. We are given words after the proposal of when each realized that he or she loved, and how each feels now that the acknowledgment has been made. But Austen mostly drops a veil over the actual words of love first exchanged—the words of passion spoken in the moment, not recollected in the tranquility of a moment later from the position of the established "us." ¹

Who then is this writer, Austen as Wentworth? Frederick Wentworth overhears Anne Elliot meditate out loud (apparently to Captain Harville) on what she has longed to tell Wentworth throughout the novel—of her attachment to him, disguised still in general terms as "the nature of a woman's attachment." And it calls forth from him not speech, but words written in the moment back to her—her call to his response becomes her longings met. Written in the present tense, this letter, built around the imperative "must," insists on the emergence of these words that "must" be said because something must be represented. These words body forth as this letter—this representation of what Wentworth feels now, asserts he has always felt. There is no time to lose, no time for reflection, no time for the separation of felt-experience from thought-experience. And for Austen, I want to assert, there is no time to lose. Austen probably knows by the time of the letter's final composition in 1816 that she is dying. She is forty years old. ² If ever there is a moment for Austen to feel pressed (by her losing ground with life) and able (by her maturity in life) to write a language of...