Jane Austen Has a LOT To Answer For
The Effect of “Persuasion” on Storytelling
Greetings and hallucinations, ladies and gentle-geeks, and welcome. And please welcome simgesi, who has deigned to join our little group. I hope she doesn’t regret it.
Have you ever loved someone and lost them? Wonder what your life would have been if something hadn’t happened? We have all had these moments of curiosity, of wonder, of self-doubt and regret. I was originally going to review one book, when I realized that Persuasion by Jane Austen has influenced more than one story.
Let’s start from the beginning, shall we? (Warning: Spoilers ahead!)
The original novel, published in 1817 after Austen’s death, tells the story of Anne Elliot, the middle daughter of a class-conscious family. At the age of 27, she’s considered “on the shelf” and not eligible for marriage to anyone. This is after she was persuaded to break off her engagement to then-Lieutenant Frederick Wentworth seven years before, both for the fact that she was young and he was poor and/or of low birth. Now Wentworth has returned as a wealthy naval captain. This was published at a time when marriages were as much business arrangements as love matches. Persuasion is possibly the first instance of “the one that got away”, or even the “second chance at love” that have become popular tropes in fiction, romantic or otherwise, to this day.
By the Book by Julia Sonneborn
At Fairfax College in California, Anne Corey is a respected professor of English Literature, her specialty 19th-century female authors. She’s also trying to get her book published to assure her continued employment, but publishers either haven’t been biting or were bought out and reorganized by bigger publishing houses. Her father has just been moved to an assisted-living facility nearby, her sister Lauren (married with three small children) leaving the bulk of visiting to her. As if this weren’t enough make her worry about her state of mind, her past suddenly reappears. Adam Martinez, her former fiancé, has just arrived as Fairfax’s new president.
All the memories, good and bad, start coming back: the first time she saw him in a lit class; their long study sessions; the cameo ring he used to propose; and the fight that led to their breakup before graduation. Add to this the emails between her and various people and the romance with the Writer-in-Residence, and this is one heck of a way to be introduced to academia.
“For You Alone” by Alethnya
Fanfiction.net author Alethnya wrote this Persuasion-inspired story set in the universe of BBC’s Sherlock. When Sherlock Holmes admits his love for pathologist Molly Hooper, Mycroft Holmes persuades Molly that his brother doesn’t know his own emotions, that he’s confused love with gratitude. In this, he plays to her own insecurities, leading her to break off the relationship and take a job in America for three years. (This was written before Season 4 of Sherlock aired, so it would make for a decent alternative timeline.) Unlike By the Book, the story has quite a bit of angst and not as many laughs. But it’s also perfectly in keeping with the TV show, showing how manipulative Mycroft could be, while showing the effects the broken relationship has on Molly and Sherlock. (You can probably tell I’m a Sherlolly fan.)
Other Media Through the Years
Of course, literature isn’t the only storytelling medium that has employed these ideas.
J. Michael Straczynski’s SF epic Babylon 5 had two over the course of its five-year run. Jeffery Sinclair (Michael O’Hare) and Catherine Sakai (Julia Nickson) have known each other since the military academy, with on-again, off-again affairs over the next 15 years. When she arrives on the space station he commands, they start again. At the end of the season, Sinclair finally blurts out in a fit of nerves, “Look, do you want to get married or not?” Catherine says yes.
Michael Garibaldi (Jerry Doyle) and Lise Hampton (Denise Gentile) have had a similar rocky road. After meeting and falling in love on Mars, Garibaldi is offered head of security of Babylon 5, but Lise refuses to go with him and leave her life behind. Over the following five years, he discovers that she’s been married, divorced, and married again, without even attempting to contact him. This irks him to the point he tells her, “This is the second time you’ve broken my heart, and that’s one more than you’re entitled to.” Of course, this is during a war, so it takes another year, and the death of Lise’s second husband, before they finally reunite and marry.
In 1957’s An Affair to Remember, Nickie (Cary Grant) and Terry (Deborah Kerr) agree to meet at the Empire State Building, but she never shows up due to a traffic accident. Through maximum feasible miscommunication and misunderstanding, Nickie is anywhere from hostile to yearning, while Terry, who’s been using a wheelchair since the accident, allows him to think she didn’t care enough, when she’s really trying to spare him from being trapped into loving a cripple. (Please don’t be offended by the terminology use; this was the language of the decade.)
Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) and Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) have known each other since his student days at the University of Chicago, where her father was one of his teachers. They began a passionate romance when she was 19, but broke it off. They reunite in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but break up again and reunite in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, when she’s been married and widowed with a nearly-grown son (Shia LaBeouf).
In The Vow, Paige (Rachel McAdams) loses her memory in a car accident. Her husband Leo (Channing Tatum) works to have her remember their years together, her love of art, and their desire to start a family before her amnesia. While she never regains her former memories, she rediscovers who she is and falls in love with him again. One of the best things about this movie is that Paige and Leo were based on a real couple. Like her, the wife never regained her memory, but they went on to have two children together. (Make sure to have the tissues nearby; it’s worth the watch!)
Like Paige and Leo, Charles (Hugh Grant) and Carrie (Andie McDowell) in Four Weddings and a Funeral need several chances to get it right. A neat trick considering that two of the weddings in the title are one for each of them — to other people! They meet again and again, never quite making it stick until after the fourth wedding (Charles’). When the groom’s deaf brother tell him he’s making a mistake, marrying someone he doesn’t love, the wedding descends into chaos, the bride storms out, and a newly-divorced Carrie comes to find him.
The photo montage at the end see Charles and Carrie together with a baby, but no wedding picture (unlike many of their friends over the course of the film).
13 Going on 30 (an opinion of some teenagers I don’t agree with) employs time travel for a girl to figure out what’s really important. Jenna’s wish on her thirteenth birthday is to be thirty and cool. When she gets her wish, she is in charge of a women’s fashion magazine, but her personal life is a disaster. Adult Jenna (Jennifer Garner) realizes that the one person she misses is Matt (played as an adult by Mark Ruffalo), the boy she thought ruined her birthday party at the start of the film. She has missed the intervening years, where she has let that one party determine her life, but has the opportunity to fix it when she goes back to being thirteen.
Whew! There are more, but I haven’t seen all of them. You probably haven’t, either. When we do, one thing we should remember is that every trope and cliché has an origin, maybe even a story to go with it. How better to enrich our own enjoyment is to find out what that is? The more you put into a story, whether reading or writing, the more you get out of it.
Thank you for reading my ramblings, my dears, and I hope to hear from you. If you’d like to recommend a book for me to read and review, or even need me as an editor for your own work, please contact me or leave a comment below.
In the meantime, keep reading, keep writing, and never give up making your own magic. Be well, my dears.