Liberty in Jane Austen's 'Persuasion'

The myth commonly held by early twentieth-century critics respecting Jane Austen's political apathy has long since been debunked. It is now taken for granted within the scholarly community that contemporary events of "great pitch and moment" had a discernable affect on Austen's novels. Jane Austen lived in the Age of Revolution, and any reader who does not perceive her investment in the crucial questions of her age has not read carefully enough. Yet what to make of these discernable traces remains a very open question. I here propose that the bridge between her thought on the Age of Revolution and the cosmos she has created within her novels is to be found in her notion of liberty. What does it mean to an Austen character to be free? In what does human freedom consist? How do various characters pursue liberty, and to what degree (according to the narrator) of success? I contend that liberty, properly understood, is a good upheld by Jane Austen as increasingly more precious throughout each of her novels. Through both positive and negative examples, she presents interior liberty as the necessary prerequisite for happiness in each of her characters, and this is nowhere more apparent than in her final complete novel, Persuasion..;In Persuasion, Austen makes the very simple point that true human liberty writ large requires, first and foremost, liberty of soul within individuals. Austen's is a Christian notion of liberty: I propose that readers who deny Austen her cultural and religious context fail properly to understand her craft. No critic has attempted to demonstrate, through a thorough analysis of a single novel, Austen's "living argument" (Emsley 3) for liberty properly understood as self-governance. I endeavor to show the connection between Austen's presentation of moral virtue and the effect such a presentation could have in shaping both the "little social commonwealth[s]" (P 46) inhabited by characters of Austen's own making and, possibly, the identity of the nation whose sovereign read Persuasion..