“Persuasion” (1817), the final work by Jane Austen, one of the greatest of all English-language novelists, tells the story of Anne Elliot, and her complicated reconnection aged 27 with her former suitor Frederick Wentworth.
Lucy Lord MBE, a decorated obstetrician who is also the founder and executive chair of mental health charity Mind HK, tells Richard Lord how it changed her life.
I was between 14 and 16 when I first read it. My mother was reading Pride and Prejudice, and I picked it up when she’d finished it. I loved it so much that I went through and read all of Jane Austen’s novels really quickly. The first time I read Persuasion, I read it like it was a Mills & Boon.
I didn’t think that deeply about it at that age.
Over the years, I have reread all her novels but my favourite is Persuasion. I started rereading it more and more often. What I saw in it grew with my stages of professional development; every time I’ve read it over the past 50 years, my life has changed a bit.
As I understood more about life, I was more impressed by Jane Austen’s understanding of it – particularly how she understood women, once I started to do obstetrics and spent my life looking after women and most of my time working with women professionally.
Her descriptions of personality traits and disorders are so finely drawn as to be diagnostic. She’s such a keen observer of women’s personalities. What I love is that she’s accurate but still compassionate.
I remember I took Persuasion with me when I went to Vanuatu in 1982; it was the only book I took, which was stupid, because there were no books in Vanuatu then. I was 22, and I was in charge of a hospital consisting of six Nissen huts that was built by the French in the 1930s.
There’s a famous phrase in Persuasion, which is, “All the privilege I claim for my own sex […] is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.” We admitted a patient who had delivered a stillborn baby just before she got to us. She wouldn’t let anyone take the baby away; it took us a long time to get her to give him up.
She was talking about the context of a romantic relationship, but it struck me that Austen said something profound about the evolution of women and their relationship to their children: how important it is that women continue to hope for their child, irrespective of the reality of that child, and do everything they can to protect and preserve it – the need to build this protective matriarchy to look after children.
That developed as my personal goal: to protect and preserve that relationship women have. As an obstetrician, your job doesn’t end if something bad happens; you must stick with that mother who has gone through something terrible.
It also made me realise that women have far more in common than anything that divides them by religion, race, culture or anything else. The experience of childbirth overwhelms all of those things.