The Reading Group Reads...
Jane Austen's Persuasion
WE met at the Hollingsworths' on 6 April. One of the most interesting and
rewarding aspects of the Reading Group is the different reactions to the books
read. Some readers found Persuasion slow to get into but then enjoyed it; some
didn't like it at all, finding the sentences too convoluted, the pace of it
all too leisurely (compare with The Da Vinci Code!), and many of the characters
unlikeable - for instance the vain Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall, his
unmarried and cold-hearted eldest daughter Elizabeth and his selfish youngest
daughter Mary, wife of Charles Musgrove of Uppercross. But some loved it, and
for two of us it was a favourite book.
It is set partly in the two villages and their manor houses of Kellynch and Uppercross in Somerset, partly in the city of Bath and briefly in Lyme Regis in Dorset. The central character is Anne Elliot, the second daughter of Sir Walter, who at the age of nineteen had been persuaded to turn down a proposal of marriage from a young sailor, Frederick Wentworth, whose prospects looked uncertain to her family and friends. In the novel he reappears nearly eight years later as a prosperous naval captain, still resentful of AnneÕs rejection. Of course he falls in love with her again and after various vicissitudes they are reunited.
We all contemplated the slow pace of a world where it took three and a half
hours to travel seventeen miles by horse and carriage with disbelief - and some
regret for a lost peace. We were again jolted back nearly two hundred years
when young Louisa Musgrove, who looked like making a match with Captain
Wentworth, fell off the steps of the Cobb at Lyme Regis and was concussed. At
first she was feared dead. Her sister Henrietta fainted, Mary had hysterics,
the gentlemen were distraught and only Anne seemed to know what to do. Jane
Austen herself must have been amused by the consternation she had created, for
local workmen and boatmen "collected near them, to be useful if wanted; at
any rate, to enjoy the sight of a dead young lady, nay, two dead young ladies,
for it proved twice as fine as the first report."
On Wednesday, 4 May we meet at my house, 14 Cage Hill, for Michel Faber's Under the Skin; on 1 June at Kent House for Alexander McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Dectective Agency; and on 6 July at Mary Hart's, 15 Mill Hill, for Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea.