To Reimagine Perfection
It took me years to get around to reading Persuasion. The first Jane Austen novel I ever read was, naturally, Pride and Prejudice. Then Emma, my least favorite. It is still a monumental piece of literature, just not my style. Sense and Sensibility has become more frustrating to me as I have aged, I feel more strongly for the wronged characters, but I may come around again. I quite like Lady Susan and find Northanger Abbey charming.
A boyfriend’s mother had bought me the entire set, rightly predicting that this was the sort of thing you get for a person like me. But I had held off on Persuasion. Each book in the collection grew more shabby, but years went by and Persuasion’s glossy black spine stayed perfectly rectangular with no evidence of wear. I’m glad I had read it yet. I wasn’t ready. It wasn’t until I had completed a messy but desperately needed breakup that I took the book out of the little case set, and opened to the first page.
Like most people who read, I disassociate when I’m absorbed by a book. I lose myself and my surroundings and am very difficult to speak to. When I picked up Persuasion for the first time, I was alone on a shabby couch in my sublet, an artist’s loft in New Mexico. It was cold, extremely cold, and I bundled under two blankets and read.
My tea went cold. My limbs stiffened. I carried the book with me to the bathroom, to the kitchen, to bed when it was way too late. I laid sideways, struggling to keep awake, as I tried to read but give my body the rest it desperately needed. I did eventually sleep, and woke to finish it in the blue grey light of a snowy morning.
It was the perfect book for me at that moment. My low wage hourly job scanning documents for a surgical center was both metaphorically and literally nightmare inducing. I had dropped out of college, I was away from my family, in a strange place with no friends and no past, not sure where my future was headed. And that book, so much about growth, regret, and longing, did not mirror my feelings; it complemented them.
I haven’t re-read the paperback in a long time. My life is too complicated to undergo rigor mortis with a paperback. I’ve listened to the audiobook performances of Persuasion by several amazing narrators, but I prefer my girl Juliet Stevenson’s above all others.
And I returned to Persuasion, indirectly, for NaNoWriMo in 2020. Instead of my usual dark psychological mystery science fiction with brooding women who fight against society, I tried my hand at a love story. I hit my word goal and then put it aside.
In 2022, I re-read the piece after I had finished The Control Problem and I realized what was best about it was better told in Persuasion. Lyme and the Musgroves was Ireland, and Kellynch and Bath were Manhattan. It was incomplete in the ways a rushed attempt to write an entire novel must be, but there was something to it. It would be a challenge, to take inspiration from one of the greatest novels ever written and turn it into something new. And if I am coming from a place of love, how can I go wrong?
This spring, after momentum for The Control Problem died down, I decided to start work on my Irish-American version of Persuasion. I added the things you must add to a modern retelling; instead of holding onto Captain Wentworth’s letters and retaining news clippings of the navy’s accomplishments, she lurks on the social media profiles. Her father is not nobility, he’s a nepobaby capitalist. All the while, I was always reading, listening to, or watching versions of Persuasion.* I bought a new paperback copy and read it as a writer, noting the shifts in perspective and the frequency of character appearances. I inserted references for close readers, small asides to them that whisper hey, remember this bit?
In the end, the novel still has me in it. There’s some science fiction, some bending of reality, a few twists, but I tried to take Persuasion and re-imagine it with my own little message of longing and hope. I hope the world enjoys what I had to say.
*Except for that one. You know the one. We won’t go into that.
