Persuasion
by Jane Austen
Summary
Eight years before the novel opens, Anne Elliot was persuaded by her family and her trusted friend Lady Russell to break her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a naval officer with no fortune and only his confidence to recommend him. She has regretted it ever since. Now she is twenty seven, unvalued by a vain spendthrift father and cold elder sister, and the family's debts force them to rent the estate, to the sister of a certain Captain Wentworth, home from the wars rich with prize money and openly looking for a wife, any wife, so long as she is not Anne Elliot. The novel holds the two of them in the same rooms, unable to speak and unable to stop listening, through a visit to Lyme where an accident rearranges everything, and on to Bath, where a letter written while overhearing a conversation carries one of the most direct declarations in English fiction: you pierce my soul.
This is Austen's last completed novel and it reads like late work in the best sense, quieter, more autumnal, more inward than the others. Anne is her only heroine past what the book calls the bloom of youth, and the comedy, still present and still sharp, gives ground to something closer to longing. Many readers who meet Austen through the earlier books end here, and end convinced this is the deepest of the six.
It was published in December 1817, five months after Austen's death, paired with Northanger Abbey; the title was chosen by her brother Henry, and she is said to have called it The Elliots.
Historical Context & Significance
Austen wrote Persuasion in declining health in about a year, beginning it while Emma was in the press and finishing a first draft in July 1816, and the surviving manuscript chapters, rare for her, show the ending rebuilt: she cancelled her first version of the reconciliation and wrote the overheard conversation and the letter, one of the most fortunate second thoughts in fiction. John Murray printed 1,750 copies of the joint edition with Northanger Abbey, which sold quickly, and her brother's biographical notice attached to it told the public for the first time who the author of Pride and Prejudice had been.
The novel's stock has climbed for two centuries, and it is now routinely called her most maturely written book. Its portrait of the Navy, self made men rising by merit past a decaying gentry, gives it more open social argument than any other Austen novel, and adaptations arrive steadily.