Persuasion

Persuasion is the last completed novel by Jane Austen, written in 1815 and 1816 and published posthumously in December 1817. It is one of her two posthumous publications, along with Northanger Abbey, and is generally considered her most mature work. The novel is shorter than her major middle period books and has a quieter tone, with a heroine in her late twenties looking back on a romance that ended eight years before the action of the book begins.

Anne Elliot is the middle daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, a vain and irresponsible baronet whose mismanagement of his estate has forced the family to rent out their country house and move to cheaper rooms in Bath. Eight years earlier Anne had been engaged to Frederick Wentworth, a young naval officer with no fortune. Her family and her trusted older friend Lady Russell persuaded her to break the engagement, on the ground that Wentworth’s prospects were too uncertain to justify the match. Wentworth went to sea and made his fortune in the wars against Napoleon. Now, with the war ended, Captain Wentworth has returned to England a wealthy and successful man and is staying with friends in the neighbourhood of the Elliots’ rented house. The novel works through the slow renewal of acquaintance between Anne and Wentworth across several months in the country and finally in Bath.

What makes Persuasion her most mature novel is the autumnal mood and the willingness to take a heroine seriously who has already passed the conventional period of romantic interest. Anne is twenty seven when the action begins. She has spent eight years quietly running her father’s affairs and helping her married sisters with their families. Her beauty is described as faded and her prospects as essentially gone. The novel asks whether a second chance is possible at all in the slow inevitable arithmetic of nineteenth century female life, and the answer it gives is the most quietly affirming thing Austen ever wrote.

The novel runs about two hundred and fifty pages. For readers who have worked through Pride and Prejudice and Emma, Persuasion is the natural late Austen. It pairs naturally with Northanger Abbey, with which it was originally published, and with the late letters that have survived from the same period.