I’m rather preoccupied with performance. A side-effect of writing on Shakespeare, I suppose, and of being a woman, and of having migrated from state-school-slang to the grandeur of Oxford lexis. You see, you just can’t capture ‘wys’ in RP, or even utter it in a building like Exam Schools, where the weight of gender and class hang above like a painted ceiling. 

I was always a bit too posh to properly integrate in my friends’ dialogues in secondary school – my ‘t’s were rare but persisting; my mother drilled into me the importance of proper grammar; I used longer words and rarely mixed up ‘was’ and ‘were’.

Thinking about it, this has all arisen from two Hinge-related events. The first: I’ve sent a two minute long voice note to a guy on Hinge and he’s responded to nothing I’ve actually said, but instead told me I have a “gorgeous voice.” I tell this to my friend in disbelief and she laughs, “Briony, I’m sure you weren’t using your P-Town accent.” Instinctively I have fallen back on my familiar rhythms with her, but constructed myself a new language to speak to this stranger. 

The second: that a man I’ve seen only thrice has changed his profile so rather than looking for a short-term relationship, he now seeks something “casual, unless you’re incredibly cool”. A kick in the teeth to me – decidedly uncool, according to him. And what does that even mean? When I think of cool I think of a girl with dyed-red hair playing guitar with a cigarette dangling from her lips, something in her eyes that blurs the line between “fuck” and “fight.”

I do not, pointedly, think of him, and there’s really something quite unreasonable about asking for coolness in others when you yourself do not embody it. 

But coolness, really, is just another performance. Girls so beautiful they seem untouchable laugh and cry; Mr Tall Dark and Handsome’s been covered in vomit before. We put on performances to make ourselves seem polished, put together, impervious to the world’s misfortunes and embarrassments and in doing so distance ourselves from each other. And often, as performers, we fail to recognise both that we may actually be successful, and secondly that everyone else is constructing the same images. Such reflections make me think of Persuasion. Shamefully, I’m repeating a text – a rubric violation if my tutors ever saw one.

But Austen’s too good, too brilliant, too fantastic, too intelligent, for me to only speak about her once. 

I’m writing this after a class on Persuasion and Maria, two excellent texts in their own right, and have been incensed to defend Anne and Wentworth’s romance. I’ve just listened to questions over how believable it is, whether Wentworth’s choosing Anne because he knows she’s in love with him and doesn’t have any other options, and I quite frankly want to smash my head into a wall. Of course he loves her! That’s the whole point. Of the novel, of life, of the world—if he doesn’t love her then what is even going on in the novel, in the fabric of time and space? 

But I’ll endeavour to provide a more measured defense. 

My tutor remarked, in her brilliantly off-hand insightful way that has us all scrambling to scribble it down, that the end of Persuasion reveals true characters. We see them brush off their performances, their hidden secrets, their privacy. Because I think it’s easy to forget how private Anne is, when we have such a beautiful insight into her mind—it’s unfathomable to us that Wentworth takes so long to understand her. 

But he does, he understands and he sees her, through all the persuasions on and against them, and through the performances she puts on. He realises that what he’s been searching for in all these other women that he thinks she lacks is really so inherent in her that we really must wonder how anyone could have missed it. It’s so fascinating that she starts to see his true feelings when they’re at the theatre; performance and privacy enrich and inspire the events of the novel. When Anne reads his famous letter, she is both reading a private letter and a public declaration. After all, what is marriage if not a social statement and a personal promise?

For a novel so preoccupied with the inner musings of two individuals, they spend a significant part of the novel at a distance from each other emotionally. They misinterpret, misrepresent, misunderstand. And I, the devoted reader, wonder if my friends from eight years ago would recognise me now. I’ve dyed my hair, lost 12 kilos, changed my style. My nails are often fake, my eyelashes always thick with mascara. I have a Longchamp bag and use whitening toothpaste. Do they remember me as I was, with my pretty manners and my lisp?

Now I fall into the familiar patterns of my speech from home, that I utterly resisted when I was amongst them. I phone my friend and tell her how ‘we was’ doing this and address her as ‘babes.’ I let the lullaby of chavdom sing me to sleep. And then I walk out of the door, into a city of proper pronunciation, and I shamefully dress my language with consonants, attempting to hide my own sense of inferiority with polished words and pretty prose. 

Every day I think of a poem I’ll never write— ‘A Former Chav sends her Love to Oxford.’ But why am I thinking about this? Shakespeare didn’t speak in RP, and while his manipulation of language is extraordinary, it certainly wasn’t constricted to a certain class, and Austen was most cruel to those listed in Debretts. 

Maybe because Persuasion has made me think about how I am persuaded. Persuaded into conformity, into consumer cultures, into slangs and cults and traditions, and my only form of resistance, in a system that kills as much as it encourages individuality, is to go back to what I know. Like a child told no, I only want what I want when I cannot have it.

And, for the record, Persuasion is plausible if not realistic, but seriously, let’s suspend disbelief. It’s a romance novel, you can’t read it and complain there’s a happy ending. Isn’t that the point of the novel, of the poem, of the lyric and the ballad—to dream, to dare to hope, to dare to want? Austen shows us the depths of love; in Wentworth, in Darcy, in Knightley. She asks us to consider what we would do for love, to be thought of well. She asks, how do we exist when the person we love thinks badly of us?

How do we exist when the only person you want to truly see you, understand you, is incapable or unwilling to comprehend you? When so much of our lives rely on perception—social media, exams or work performance reviews, printed out pictures and flashback memories—how do we bear it? If, like Georgiana Darcy, our shyness is perceived as rudeness? Like Anne, willingness to listen to counsel is misinterpreted as a weakness of character? And who are we, when we submit to the mortifying ordeal of being seen? 

I can talk in a different register, manipulate the falsettos of my voice; I can wear pearls in my hair and dress in clothes I saw on Pinterest to carefully curate my personality, but I am only attempting to persuade the world to think favourably of me. I am only enacting a grand deception; a performance of everything, right down to my pronunciation. 

Anne isn’t perfect. Neither are any of Austen’s heroines. They are proud and prejudiced, too sensible or not sensible enough. My grandmother always reminds me that Austen said, when writing Emma, that she was going to create a protagonist no one would like but herself. I think the point is that we like Emma regardless. As we like Lizzy, Anne, Fanny, Elinor, Catherine, Kitty (I have a soft spot for silly little sisters, don’t read too much into it).

Austen gives us women who are flawed and marvellous and so familiar to us; we see in them every woman. And I think Anne, long-suffering, long-loving Anne, is the most special to me. She’s a quieter type of heroine, but no less important. 

In fact, I think what everyone should take from Austen’s novels is that all women are important, with lives that are no less important and extraordinary. I fall back through the pages and let the voices of girls my age, girls who existed long before me and will exist long after, whisper their secrets and their longings—a declaration of want, which is not only validated, but fulfilled.

How extraordinary. How marvellous. How Austen.