Persuasion gets the Page 99 Test
The Page 99 Test blog recruited Deirdre Lynch, editor of the Oxford World’s Edition of Persuasion and the book Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees, to give Persuasion the Page 99 Test: “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” (Ford Madox Ford) Professor Lynch used the Oxford World’s Edition of the novel for the test.
As it happens, p. 99 takes us straight to the opening of the novel’s second volume and so to a moment when, as seasoned readers of early-nineteenth-century fiction, we are expecting to gear up for transition. We’re at chapter 1 again, and primed for a fresh start. Persuasion, however, investigates the situation of a woman who — older than is the norm for an Austen protagonist — feels as if change is no longer possible. Persuaded to break off her engagement with Captain Wentworth eight years before the novel opens, Anne Elliot looks initially to be a heroine who already may have missed her only chance at a story, who is forced accordingly to live off and in memory. With the end of a long war, Wentworth returns to England and back into her social circle, but Anne won’t let herself re-open the book on the past and let herself hope: “Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.” Still, Volume 1 ends with signs of change. The characters visit the seaside, Anne, revived by the change of scene, seems to start to live in the present — and then, suddenly, there comes an accident of unexpected, frightening seriousness: Louisa Musgrove (the woman Wentworth appears to be courting) falls from atop a breakwater. As careful readers, witnessing this accident, we will have noticed how at this moment of panic, Wentworth, usually in command, now helpless, turns to Anne for assistance.
We wonder what Page 99 was in the little duodecimo volumes of the original? Hmmm.
March 30th, 2007 at 11:38 pm
Deirdre Le Faye’s use of the page 99 test reminds me of Jan Fergus’s “pick a word from EMMA”-test that I’ve seen her do at JASNA events: people pick one word at random from the novel, and we see how Austen never had a wasted word. Quite an achievement!