Persuaded : Austen's Looking Glass
Who is your Austen doppelgänger?
I hardly need to proclaim how beloved Jane is to modern readers. With over 30 million copies of her works sold, thousands of editions in existence, several film adaptations, and reinterpreted spin-offs, it’s clear that these novels remain relevant.
We read Austen’s witty commentary on sibling relationships, female friendships, duty, town gossips, family pressure, and romantic love, and we feel seen within her pages. It’s as if she’s interpreting the unspoken wisdom of our hearts into something tangible in our hands.
I was first drawn to Austen for the protagonists she paints so clearly—masterful renditions. We aren’t at all surprised to see them fall off the page and onto our screens, into referenced sage advice, and in our mirrors as we gaze upon ourselves and ponder how much of Elizabeth Bennet might live in that reflection.
I see the thin and sallow face of Anne in the opening act of Persuasion. Her wisps of hair fall before my mind’s eye as though she is a real person I know well enough to dine with, to dance beside, to cry for.
The craft of Austen’s writing creates characters that aren’t chameleons for us to fall into as a crowd, but to pick who we would befriend, who reflects our inner dialogue and self-views enough that we claim him or her for ourselves. It is the same reason I cannot abide Emma in her monikered novel (don’t come at me!), but ache for every sore circumstance with Anne in Persuasion.
These can be polarizing characters, yet we each seem to find our favorite, our penned doppelganger. We learn with them in their mistakes, understand their faults, celebrate their triumphs and growth, and burn with them in the injustices of their lives.
Jane’s audience proves this. She kept track of her social circle’s opinions of her works, scribbling exhaustive notes on every reaction. So and so preferred one novel to another. One friend could not stand a certain main character but loved the previous novel’s. This acquaintance felt the same but in reverse.
Austen absorbed the responses, seeming to find amusement or perhaps curiosity in how each reader ranked her different works.
Today, it would be easy to declare that Pride and Prejudice is her most successful story, having sold 20 million copies alone. But readers, can you imagine if we had no Sense & Sensibility? No Northanger Abbey or Emma? No Persuasion?! I cannot and shudder at the mere mention.
The beauty of the latter work, the story of a young woman who regains agency and learns to make choices based on her own desires and moral understanding rather than the world’s, spoke to me as none of the others.
Anne is the reflection I see when I gaze through Austen’s looking glass.
So, the real question stands. Who do you see in Jane’s literary mirror?
Are you unswervingly loyal to your family of lovable buffoons like Elizabeth Bennet? Are you listening to a sad Taylor Swift song on repeat and crying in your car like Benwick would? Do you overthink every cold or flu symptom and go on WebMD like Mary would? Are you aging like fine wine as Elizabeth Elliot did, the woman of whom Jane wrote, “It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before…” (let’s all add ten to that number and cross our fingers and toes)? Are you unable to hold your tongue when you see a truth, no matter how offensive, like Darcy?
Who is your character-doppelganger and why does his or her reflection so closely resemble yours?
This week I’m grateful for…
Every newsletter, I’ll be sharing something(s) that is currently bringing me joy. This week, that’s my cross-stitched pillows from World Market. I’ve tried cross-stitching and don’t have the neck muscles for those long hours of looking into my lap, so I greatly appreciate the strong napes and thread-and-needle accomplishments of others. I have an especially precious holiday pillow that conveys a scene from The Nutcracker I packed away in early January. The stitched soldier mice are too adorable.
The information about Jane’s life comes from her biographies, including The Life and Works of Jane Austen, by Devoney Looser, and The Real Jane Austen, A Life in Small Things, by Paula Byrne, as well as numerous internet deep dives.
Oh goodness, I feel I must go through and reread all of Jane Austen to decide who I am. Who are you? This was such a fun read!
I’m not sure who I am. I definitely worry like Mary Bennet but am shy Jane Bennet. Who do you think I am from her novels, Camilla?