Persuasion

About the book

Austen’s last completed novel, published in 1817 six months after her death, begins eight years after Anne Elliot was persuaded to break her engagement to a naval officer with no money and no prospects. Frederick Wentworth has since made a fortune in the war, the war is over, and Sir Walter Elliot’s debts have forced him to let Kellynch Hall to the captain’s sister. Anne is twenty-seven, treated as useful by a family that never asks her opinion, and obliged to be in rooms where Wentworth is agreeable to everyone except her. It is the quietest of the novels and the one with the most regret in it. Austen wrote it as the Navy was demobilising and the landed gentry was mortgaging itself, and it prefers the men who earned what they have to the men who inherited it — a judgement Sir Walter and his baronetage are there to make unmistakable.

Characters

• Anne Elliot — Protagonist

  Twenty-seven, overlooked by her family, and still holding the opinion she was talked out of at nineteen.

• Captain Wentworth — Naval officer

  Refused eight years ago for having no fortune, returned with one and in no hurry to forgive.

• Sir Walter Elliot — Anne’s father

  A baronet whose reading is the peerage and whose vanity has mortgaged the estate out from under him.

• Lady Russell — Family friend

  Anne’s godmother, who gave the advice that broke the engagement and still believes it was right.

• Mary Musgrove — Anne’s sister

  Married into a cheerful neighbouring family and permanently unwell whenever attention is elsewhere.

• Louisa Musgrove — Mary’s sister-in-law

  High-spirited and admired by Wentworth, until a fall on the Cobb at Lyme changes everything.

• William Elliot — Heir presumptive

  The cousin who will inherit Kellynch, suddenly attentive to the family he had cut for years.

• Mrs Smith — Old schoolfriend

  An impoverished widow in Bath whose knowledge of the family’s affairs turns out to be exact.

About the author

JA

Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775–1817) was an English novelist whose six completed books turned the ordinary business of courtship, money and family into some of the most exacting social comedy in the language. She wrote about a narrow world — the minor landed gentry of southern England — with an irony precise enough that readers still argue about where her sympathies lie. Her handling of a character's thoughts in the narrator's own voice shaped how novels have reported an inner life ever since. Her novels appeared anonymously in her lifetime, credited only to "A Lady"; they include Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Persuasion.