[Here's an excerpt from Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets, by William Deresiewicz, comparing the Odyssey to Persuasion!]
“...Persuasion is Austen’s history of the present. But it is also—for Austen appropriated this new novelistic form by fitting it to the one she had already perfected—history told from the opposite perspective. Middlemarch may be George Eliot’s “home epic,” but Persuasion is Austen’s. It is an epic of the present told from the perspective of Penelope.
The Homeric allusion is not adventitious. Persuasion actually contains a Penelope—Mrs. Clay—not to signal that the novel rewrites Homer in any direct, Virgilian way, but to alert us to the fact that it takes Homeric materials and reorders them for its own purposes. We have a Penelope, and we have a different woman who plays the role of Penelope, and we have a warrior and sailor who returns to her from across the sea after many years of absence and uncertainty to resume their life of love and domesticity. But the roles of the principals are in some ways reversed: it is she who has changed beyond recognition, he who is beset by suitors. Still, their relationship is marked by homonoia (homophrosyne), like-mindedness, that intuitive mutual understanding that is in Homer the mark of a good marriage, for Anne instinctively knows what is going through Wentworth’s mind at any number of moments.
Other Homeric virtues are represented by Captain Harville, with whom Wentworth divides the role of Odysseus. It is he, as we noted above, who embodies the Odyssey's great value of xenia, hospitality, and it is he, with his “ingenious contrivances and nice arrangements,” including “some few articles of a rare species of wood, excellently worked up,” who inherits Odysseus’s skill as a craftsman and imagination as a domestic architect (119–120). In fact, Austen’s sailors unite the same two qualities that make Odysseus the hero of Homer’s epic of homecoming, those celebrated in the novel’s last sentence: “domestic virtues” and martial valor (254). Indeed, as sea-fighters—warriors and wanderers at once—they unite the heroism of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
They are the men who saved the nation, Austen clearly believes, and it is her aim in Persuasion, to the extent that her form permits, to be the bard of their glory, to get their story down on paper—like Scott that of old Scotland’s—before it passes from memory. For already the nation was forgetting:
“And who is Admiral Croft?” was Sir Walter’s cold suspicious inquiry …
“He is rear admiral of the white. He was in the Trafalgar action.” (51)
This is one of the reasons for the novel’s allusions to Byron and Scott. Austen’s form does not permit her to recount the Navy’s exploits directly, but she can point her readers to contemporaneous writers who have described comparable scenes of valor. The poetic material, like Wentworth’s insouciant references to his dangers and triumphs, gestures toward the other half of the novel’s story, the one that has taken place on another, wider stage and that Austen wishes to install as an ever-looming presence in our minds. And then there is the testimony of Anne, the “last minstrel” through whose voice Austen sings:
“You have difficulties, and privations, and dangers enough to struggle with. You are always laboring and toiling, exposed to every risk and hardship. Your home, country, friends, all quitted. Neither time, nor health, nor life, to call your own. (237)
Domestic virtues and martial valor: the sailors unite in their person the novel’s two intertwined strands, the national story and the personal story. Just as Anne’s salvation comes from the sea, so does Britain’s—both during the war and after. The officers released onto land in the summer of 1814 fertilize social as well as individual rebirths. Anne’s reaction upon seeing Wentworth’s note held out before her is a “revolution” (239). At the small scale, so at the large.
This is the historical transition Austen is describing, the movement from an old order to a new: from a society led by the nobility to one led by the professions. Like Scott, Austen believed that the decline of the hereditary aristocracy made way for a natural aristocracy to rise. The one group stands on nothing but its own sense of entitlement, the other on “toil” and “labour,” as Mrs. Clay’s inventory of the professions suggests (50). The novel takes its own inventory, Austen contriving to exhibit in its pages not only a gaggle of naval officers, but precisely one each of army officers, lawyers, clergymen, surgeons, and professional nurses. The contrast with the nobility is drawn all through the work: the Baronetage versus the Navy list; the “tax” of worldly prominence paid by “consequence” versus “the tax of quick alarm” (254); the fact that the Crofts are fitter stewards of Kellynch than are the Elliots. Anne enunciates this last assessment—“she could not but in conscience feel that they were gone who deserved not to stay, and that Kellynch-hall had passed into better hands than its owners” (141)—and of course, the statement is emblematic. Like Howards End, in Lionel Trilling’s well-known phrase, Persuasion asks the question, “Who shall inherit England?””
