This chapter considers the role of the essay in debates over the ‘rise of English’ in the nineteenth century. It firstly explores the crossover between academia and publishing, focusing on David Masson and George Saintsbury, whose well-regarded literary essays led to professorial appointments at London and Edinburgh. It then considers how University Extension lecturer John Churton Collins turned to periodical essays to garner support for the introduction of English literature at Oxford and Cambridge. Collins’s diatribes argued that the literary essay itself was at risk of extinction if journalists and critics continued to be deprived of professional training. Finally, this chapter considers the inclusion of essayists on English literature syllabuses during the fin de siècle. Figures such as Joseph Addison, William Hazlitt, and John Dryden, along with later writers including Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and Charles Lamb were prominently featured, suggesting that essayists were regarded as the sine qua non of literary study at that time.

Chapter 7, “Persuasion, Conviction, and Care: Jane Austen’s Keeping,” develops Cavell’s striking interest in Michel Foucault’s final works on “care of the self.” Cavell, in his autobiography Little Did I Know, marks his engagement with Foucault’s concept of parrhesia, or truth-telling, as it developed from a seminar Cavell co-taught at The University of Chicago. As a fictional investigation of the conviction-persuasion distinction, Persuasion suggests rethinking the idea of being convinced through a practice of reason-giving whose grounds are to provide advance rationale for their validity of support. Rather, in Foucauldian practice Cavell finds “a place and an instrument of confrontation.” Anne Elliot, the protagonist of Persuasion, undertakes a turn from the obedient subject of persuasion to a linguistic and social agent of conviction. I conclude the book’s reading of Cavell’s Austen under the aegis of “vulnerable conformity” by underlining a shift in the meaning of conformity as such, drawing from George Saintsbury’s 1894 essay on Austen’s “keeping” as an alternative to heroic investment.