Austen's Influence

            In reading Persuasion we have discussed how the novel’s shorter length along with its abundance of characters result in a faster pace and a need to pack explanations and meaning into fewer words than in novels like Mansfield Park or Emma. This style, which Jane mentioned in her post on Volume I last week, persists throughout the novel. For example, when Anne runs into Captain Wentworth in Bath, Austen tells us that “[t]he character of his manner was embarrassment. She could not have called it either cold of friendly, or any thing so certainly as embarrassed” (194). Austen is forceful and to the point as she straightforwardly tells the reader how Captain Wentworth is feeling. Although this reading experience feels quite different from many of the other novels we have read, I wanted to point out the way in which it also raises an interesting parallel with Austen’s other works in terms of her narrative voice coming through. In Northanger Abbey, for example, Austen directly influences the way the reader receives the novel as she criticizes the Gothic form. In novels like Sense and Sensibility, we talked about how it can be difficult at certain points to distinguish Austen’s own voice from her narrator’s voice. We questioned how many of the opinions offered actually belong to the author and how many come from the narrator’s character. The personal viewpoints presented in these other novels are certainly less condensed than they are in Persuasion, which can make them feel less powerful, but Austen’s methods of shaping the reader’s perception of her characters is a thread that we can trace throughout her body of work.