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Program Title
Credits Executive Producer: Rebecca Eaton, George Faber Producer: Fiona Finlay Director: Roger Michell Intro PERSUASION/Intro by Russell Baker Once upon a time, there were rigid rules and rituals of courtship between men and women, and because of them, love was a favorite subject for storytellers. Not anymore. The modern style in matters of love can be summed up in that old 1960s expression, "let it all hang out." People meet, declare their feelings for one another, and -- before you can say "they lived happily ever after" -- they're rumpling the sheets. Tonight we go back 200 years to a time when no civilized man -- certainly no civilized woman -- let anything hang out. Our story is Jane Austen's "Persuasion." This, incidentally, is the first Masterpiece Theatre ever produced as a big screen movie. To start we meet Sir Walter Elliott, a prodigious snob -- such a snob, in fact, that he looks down on his own daughter. For a long time he's been living beyond his means -- and the story begins when he learns he'll have to rent out his great country house and move to Bath. He has three daughters, only one of them married -- married beneath herself in Sir Walter's view. The other two, Elizabeth and Anne, are living at home. Sir Walter can tolerate Elizabeth. She's as snobby as he is. Anne, however, is dispensable. She is 27 years old and unmarried. Rather plain. And worse -- likely to become a spinster. So he leaves Anne behind to close everything up when he and Elizabeth go off to Bath. Now -- you need to know that when Anne was 19 -- eight years ago -- she was engaged to a poor naval officer, Captain Wentworth. A well-intentioned friend persuaded her to break that engagement on grounds that an obscure navy man wasn't much of a catch. Now, eight years later, Anne is in for a shock. The people renting her father's estate are related to Captain Wentworth. He's had a heroic war career and come back rich. Now he is coming to visit the neighborhood. It is the early nineteenth century. The Napoleonic Wars have been going on for years, but England is enjoying a moment of peace. Fighting admirals are renting country estates and heroic captains have come ashore -- ripe for marriage to women clever enough to win them. Complete in one installment, Jane Austen's "Persuasion." Extro PERSUASION/Extro by Russell Baker Jane Austen was born in 1775 into a large, remarkably happy family. She had six brothers and an older sister. Her father was a provincial clergyman without much money. Her mother's social position was a bit more elegant. She had a duke somewhere in her family tree, but it didn't weigh her down. She darned the family's clothes. She wrote rather clever light verse. The children invented their own amusements. They entertained family and neighbors by writing and staging plays. Jane read intensely -- the way children nowadays watch television. When she was still very young she began writing for the pure joy of it. She had a gift for humor and satire. She led a quiet life, but lived in turbulent times. The American Revolution happened during her childhood. After that came the French Revolution, then the Napoleonic Wars. Two of her brothers fought heroically in the British navy. The French husband of one of her cousins went to the guillotine. Her books deal with none of this. She wrote only about what she knew first hand: English society at the end of the eighteenth century. From that she produced six novels as fine as any ever written. She was only 41 when she died after a long debilitating illness. Nobody is sure what it was. Addison's disease possibly...maybe cancer. She was working on "Persuasion" when the illness began. It was the last novel she completed, and some critics think it a "dark" book. It's hard to see why. Maybe they're trying to see a portrait of Jane Austen herself in the plain, repressed Anne Elliott who seems destined to grow old without love. Jane the novelist saves Anne from this fate, but Jane Austen herself never married. Was there a Captain Wentworth in her own life? No one can say. When she died, her sister destroyed her letters and personal papers. When she was 25 she seems to have fallen in love with a young clergyman she knew for a few brief weeks, but he died shortly afterward. It's fairly certain that she accepted one marriage proposal, this from a son of the landed gentry. He proposed in the evening, she said yes, and next morning she broke the engagement. He was 21 years old. She was 27. Twenty-seven is also Anne Elliott's age when Captain Wentworth re-enters her life. For Masterpiece Theatre, I'm Russell Baker. Goodnight.
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