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Persuaded

There's this ongoing kinda-debate in the romance/lit world as to whether or not Jane Austen wrote romance novels. From all that I've seen:

1. The people who believe that Austen wrote Romance are romance-readers themselves, one and all, and oh you snobby literati should get OVER yourselves because Jane was the first and best and CLEARLY Mr. Darcy is an alpha-asshole hero all the way so get off your high horse - and on and on.

2. The people who clutch the pearls and gasp, insisting that Austen most emphatically did NOT write romance novels, and who have pretty much NEVER EVEN FREAKING READ ROMANCE NOVELS and couldn't define the genre if their cushy little guest professorship (and that scholarly-looking stick up their collective ass) depended on it.

Being neither of the above, I am nevertheless a total snob AND a romance-reader. So here we go. Wheee!

I re-read Austen's Persuasion recently. I think it's my favorite of hers, or at least my most oft-read. So before I tell you where I come out on the Did Austen Write Romance debate, let me just make the following observations:

• I actually yelled at the author. Yes, at Jane Austen. Yes. I was as shocked as anyone. But gaaaah, about the 20th time that Anne gets all preoccupied with Wentworth and inwardly sighs and thinks oh! if only! (stupid wistful sentiments with exclamation points after them, argh, so uncredibly trite, she might as well write Mrs. Captain Frederick Wentworth on her Trapper Keeper in bubble letters, for godsakes), I just lost a bit of patience with our sighing heroine. I was Annoyed.

• Anne's little sister Mary is scarily like my own little sister. Scarily. And because of that, I didn't believe Anne's patience for an instant. She never snaps at Mary. I don't buy it. Or maybe I just don't want to believe anyone could be so inhumanly saint-like. Bleh.

And two points that I'll expand on:

• I absolutely love that Austen didn't show us the couple in their younger days, that first blush of romance that was thwarted.

• That letter? That Wentworth leaves for Anne at the end? Brill. BRILL. It's 100% mushy sentimental romantic girlycrap BRILLIANCE and I LOVE IT.

So in reading Persuasion, I asked myself if I considered it Romance. And I'm sticking to the very traditional definition of Romance as a story where the primary focus of the novel - the whole point of it - is to follow the progression of a romantic relationship between a couple who wind up happily together at the end. And my apologies to the literary snobs out there, but this totally fits the bill.

Persuasion is a romance novel. No, there's no nekked nookie complete with desriptions of the wet-flesh-sounds lovingly rendered in purple prose. There are no pirate-rogues after anybody's maidenhead. The cover is a classy detail of some oil painting and does not involve chest hair blowing in the breeze. Though I read ever word, I have no idea if Anne Eliot's ta-ta's are the stuff of slavering legend or if Wentworth's manroot throbbed when she walked by (though I suspect it did, I mean he was a sailor, for cryeye). But it's about a girl and a guy who are in love and manage to get together in spite of all the formidable obstacles, and who live happily ever after. That's what it is. That's what it's about. It's full of social satire and all that, too, but those other elements are only lovely trimmings. The point of the book is their romance.

Witness: That letter at the end. It makes me bawl, every time. I actually have a physical reaction to it - my heart speeds up and I get all fluttery and sniffly because awww and ooooohh and sniffsniff and gah, I'm all choked up just thinking about it. (Sidenote: I am SUCH a girl, but it takes really really high-caliber sap to get to me that way.) It's the climax of the novel and it's a downright orgy of romantic feeling. It's emotional porn for women. It's exactly what every modern romance novel strives to be, and some of them (too few) manage it with the same impact - and grace - as Austen did.

Also: All that wistful sighing from Saint Anne Eliot. She's pining all along. He's, like, her world. And she gets him in the end. Which, again, is the whole point of the story: them finding love together.

There are some things that I think would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to get away with in a modern Romance. For instance, no WAY would a modern telling of the tale be so closed-mouth about the younger-years romance. You'd have to show it in flashback, or (at the very least) give the characters some strong and clear memories of their earlier romance, making the reader a voyeur to them, to see what they used to be. Instead, Austen just tells us that they had a strong understanding of one another, a very deep attachment. That's it. Now I happen to loooove that, but no way would that fly these days.

You'd also have to give a little something more from the hero's POV - though that's a relatively recent development in modern Romance. The romances I grew up with almost never had the hero's POV. And actually, this book reminds me a lot of those Harlequins I read in my teen years: no sex; no hero POV; a Long Talk at the end to resolve things, wind it all up, and tell us what he was thinking all along.

Formerly, I was of the belief that Jane Austen did NOT write Romance, give me a break, alla youse. I hereby change my tune. BUT here's the caveat, if caveat is the word I'm looking for: Persuasion is a romance novel, but that doesn't make all of her novels Romance. At all. Sense and Sensibility? Not Romance. Nope. I have only the vaguest memories of Pride and Prejudice, but I tend toward a big fat No on that one, too. Maybe Mansfield Park, I'd have to read it again. It's been way too long on all the others for me to judge.

So there. Have at me. I really want to know, too - do you think Austen wrote Romance or not? And why? Speak!