Jane Austen "Persuasion" Syntax Analysis

Solution 1:

You're right, it's a conditional, and specifically a counterfactual conditional. Today we mostly introduce counterfactual conditionals with if or even if, but we can also accomplish this through inversion:

If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs...if we had some eggs.

can also be expressed with

Had we some ham, we could have ham and eggs...had we some eggs.

That version sounds somewhat old-fashioned or formal, but of course Jane Austen tends to sound somewhat old-fashioned and formal to a modern ear (if delightfully so).

It's tricky to see that this is what her "hads" are doing, because there are a lot of words and a whole sub-clause between the first "had" and the thing she is theorizing about having. It might be clearer if it were re-written a bit to conform to modern expectations:

had the usual share, had even more than the usual share of all such solicitudes and suspense been theirs,

can be rewritten

if the usual share—if even more than the usual share—of solicitudes and suspense had been theirs,

The other part that is a bit tricky about understanding this sentence is that the clauses after the semicolon have something of a garden-path quality to the modern ear:

and this, she fully believed, had the usual share

to a modern ear sounds like it should mean something like

and she fully believed that this [whatever "this" is] had the usual share (of something)

In other words, we are primed to expect that "fully believed" refers to "this" having the "usual share" of something. But here "this" refers to the entirety of what came before the semicolon (that she would have been happier if she hadn't called off the engagement), and the belief refers to this hypothesis, with "had" leading into a hypothetical condition that could apply to the hypothesis. Today we might write it more like

and she fully believed that this would be true, even if the usual share

So all together we have something like

and she fully believed that she would have been happier staying engaged, even if she and Captain Wentworth had had the usual share, or even more than the usual share, of worry and uncertainty that a long engagement can bring (without even considering the fact that, as things turned out, they wouldn't have had much worry or waiting at all).

_{The punctuation is a little different than what we might expect, partly because punctuation in Jane Austen's time wasn't exactly what it is today. The rules were still in flux, and sometimes Austen's punctuation was more rhetorical (indicating where a speaker would pause and for how long) rather than syntactical (dividing sentences and clauses in a hierarchical manner).}

Solution 2:

I think we are missing a comma. Put one after "share", so we have: "... had even more than the usual share, of all such ...". That sounds much better, to me. Now this phrase revises and amplifies the preceding occurrence of "the usual share". So all together, it says that she would have been happier if the usual (nay, if even more than the usual) share of all such solicitudes and suspense been theirs. Austin edits "usual" to "more than usual", as a sort of afterthought, to show that she is thinking things through as she puts the words down on paper. What a syntactician she is!

"Usual share" means "as much as what one would ordinarily expect in these circumstances".