In a round-up of recent “sex novels and novellas” in last week’s New Yorker, Joan Acocella refers to a moment in Jane Austen’s Persuasion as “one of the most erotic episodes in Western literature.” In that scene, Anne Elliot is tending to an ill nephew in the presence of Captain Wentworth (a former suitor, returned), and Charles Hayter (who sees the valiant Wentworth as a threat to his station), when another nephew enters the room, bent on attention:
There being nothing to be eat, he could only have some play; and as his aunt would not let him teaze his sick brother, he began to fasten himself upon her, as she knelt, in such a way that, busy as she was about Charles, she could not shake him off. She spoke to him—ordered, intreated, and insisted in vain. Once she did contrive to push him away, but the boy had the greater pleasure in getting upon her back again directly.
“Walter,” said she, “get down this moment. You are extremely troublesome. I am very angry with you.”
“Walter,” cried Charles Hayter, “why do you not do as you are bid? Do not you hear your aunt speak? Come to me, Walter, come to cousin Charles.”
But not a bit did Walter stir.
In another moment, however, she found herself in the state of being released from him; some one was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much, that his little sturdy hands were unfastened from around her neck, and he was resolutely borne away, before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done it.
Her sensations on the discovery made her perfectly speechless. She could not even thank him. She could only hang over little Charles, with most disordered feelings. His kindness in stepping forward to her relief—the manner—the silence in which it had passed—the little particulars of the circumstance—with the conviction soon forced on her by the noise he was studiously making with the child, that he meant to avoid hearing her thanks, and rather sought to testify that her conversation was the last of his wants, produced such a confusion of varying, but very painful agitation, as she could not recover from, till enabled by the entrance of Mary and the Miss Musgroves to make over her little patient to their cares, and leave the room. She could not stay. It might have been an opportunity of watching the loves and jealousies of the four; they were now all together, but she could stay for none of it. It was evident that Charles Hayter was not well inclined towards Captain Wentworth. She had a strong impression of his having said, in a vext tone of voice, after Captain Wentworth’s interference, “You ought to have minded me, Walter; I told you not to teaze your aunt;” and could comprehend his regretting that Captain Wentworth should do what he ought to have done himself. But neither Charles Hayter’s feelings, nor any body’s feelings, could interest her, till she had a little better arranged her own. She was ashamed of herself, quite ashamed of being so nervous, so overcome by such a trifle; but so it was; and it required a long application of solitude and reflection to recover her.
To modern readers, versed in the Nicholson Bakers and Helen DeWitts that are Acocella’s real subject, it’s an exceptionally subtle scene. Which, of course, is her point in praising it.
Robert Morrison’s new annotated edition of Persuasion—from which the above passage is excerpted—presents this moment along with Charles Edmond Brock’s illustration of it, dated 1898:
Morrison shares notable commentary on the scene from Austen’s time and from our own. He gives us the famous comments of Austen’s fellow novelist Maria Edgeworth, in a letter to her aunt from just after the publication of Persuasion: “The love and the lover admirably well drawn; don’t you see Captain Wentworth, or rather don’t you in her place feel him, taking the boisterous child off her back as she kneels by the sick boy on the sofa?” Morrison also shares from Penny Gay’s 2002 work Jane Austen and the Theatre, in which Gay “points to the ways in which this scene draws on the conventions and improprieties of melodrama.” Morrison quotes from Gay: “As readers we are privileged to see these moments empathetically rather than as simple voyeurs: it is as though ‘Anne Elliot’ is being performed by a great actress, who allows us to see and share her succession of feelings. . . . The sexual connotations of ‘done’ in the context of Anne’s febrile responses cannot be ignored. His body has been in close contact with hers.”
The emotion of the scene is surely one reason Morrison considers Persuasion to be Austen’s most modern and compelling love story, and even her greatest novel.