Introduction

Summary

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

On 7 April 1815 the London publisher John Murray invited into his rooms in 50 Albemarle Street several literary figures, among whom were two of his most successful authors, Lord Byron and Walter Scott. With his Scottish narrative poems Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810), Scott, the elder by seventeen years, had begun the Romantic vogue that Byron exploited in his exotic and sensationally popular Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (cantos 1 and 2, 1812) and Turkish Tales (1813–14). With Waverley in 1814, Scott achieved further fame as a novelist, fusing private romantic story with historical events and characters: Byron considered it ‘the best & most interesting novel I have redde since—I don't know when’.

The celebrated Scott and Byron would have been surprised to learn that the slim novels of another of Murray's writers, who never visited Albemarle Street or met either of them, would in the next centuries become more popular than any of their works. Byron is unlikely to have read Jane Austen, but Scott, urged by Murray to give his new author the benefit of a serious review, was both impressed and influenced by her, while Jane Austen herself showed in Persuasion, begun shortly after this famous literary gathering, that her connection with Murray and his writers was more than financial. She was never part of a literary and intellectual circle, but she responded avidly to contemporary writing. She mentioned both Scott's and Byron's poems in Persuasion, and, when Scott successfully moved into fiction, she grumbled to her niece, ‘It is not fair.—He has Fame & Profit enough as a Poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths.’

Jane Austen's career as a novelist coincided with the twenty-two-year Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Just before she began Persuasion the wars ended after one of the most remarkable reprises in western history. On 11 April 1814 the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte had unconditionally surrendered and been exiled to Elba; the Bourbon monarch Louis XVIII was restored in Paris.