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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
The accident of death makes Persuasion Jane Austen's final novel. It deserves its position by its innovative treatment of passion and rhetorical style as well as its development of those themes of memory and time, public and private history, inner and outer lives, language and literature, emotion and restraint that have marked all Austen's previous works. In its wistful longing to privatise a public state, it relates most to the concerns of Mansfield Park, while its depiction of emotional tumult recalls Sense and Sensibility.
Persuasion opens with ‘tangled, useless histories of the family in the first fifty pages’, as an exasperated Maria Edgeworth commented. This past meticulously roots the heroine within her noble family's genealogy, only progressively to reveal it as meaningless to her. Like the preceding novels, Persuasion considers home and homecoming, but, where they move towards a new or renewed symbolic and physical home for the heroine, this last completed work begins with her ejection and ends with her understanding that home is not a place at all but an ambience and an acceptance of change. Considering the Burkean association of the nation with the hereditary estate, the perception qualifies the patriotism of British victory which also emerges from the novel.
Jane Austen began work on Persuasion in August 1815, just as Napoleon sailed to exile in St Helena following his defeat at Waterloo.
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