I recently read Jane Austen’s final completed novel, Persuasion, and while researching a quote from it, I found this page. It has a lot of interesting quotes, but what really caught my interest was this response from the author of the page to a quote criticizing the sedentary lifestyle of Austen’s characters: “It is true that none of them traveled outside of England, but then there were those inconveniences thrown up by the French Army and the Irish patriots.” Until I read this, I hadn’t seriously considered that Austen — and, accordingly, her characters — lived in the period of the Napoleonic Wars, nor could I recall a specific mention of the wars in either of the other Austen novels I’ve read.
(Some spoilers for Persuasion follow.)
Persuasion, as it turns out, is quite explicit in its references to the war with France, in spite of — or perhaps because of — the fact that it was written after the conclusion of the war. One of its primary characters, Captain Wentworth, has this to say on his service in the British Navy:
“I had the good luck, in my passage home the next autumn, to fall in with the very French frigate I wanted… a gale came on, which lasted four days and nights, and which would have done for [my poor old ship] Asp, in half the time; our touch with the Great Nation not having much improved our condition. Four-and-twenty hours more, and I should only have been a gallant Captain Wentworth, in a small paragraph at one corner of the newspapers”
Admiral Croft has a comparatively understated view of the dangers of the war, and says this to his seafaring wife in response to Captain Wentworth’s insistence that “women and children have no right to be comfortable on board” a ship:
“Ah! my dear,” said the Admiral, “when he had got a wife, he will sing a different tune. When he is married, if we have the good luck to live to another war, we shall see him do as you and I, and a great many others, have done.”
(Emphasis mine.)
It’s funny that both of these naval officers reference the “good luck” of having to fight a continental power! Captain Wentworth does so with, to borrow a phrase used elsewhere in the novel, a “playful solemnity” that makes it hard to tell how serious he’s being; the Admiral, who is presumably sheltered from unsupported contact with the enemy, appears to be serious.
A darker cast on war appears in the final lines of the novel. Having married a naval officer, Anne Elliot, the protagonist, has to contend with the specter of war:
His profession was all that could ever make her friends wish [the tenderness of her marriage] less, the dread of a future war all that could dim her sunshine.
The only really sincere view of war in the novel remains unspoken.
If you want, you can find out what men have said about Jane Austen here. If you’d rather find out what Jane Austen said about the Napoleonic Wars, you can read Persuasion online here. It’s in the public domain, so you can also find it for free on Kindle, Google Play, or other e-book services.