Persuasion
The Collector's Edition

The most intense of Austen's novels, Persuasion begins by painfully reversing courtship tropes but transforms into a rapturous romantic comedy.

Jane Austen (Author), Janet Todd (Edited by)

9781009432771, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 May 2025

288 pages
20.9 x 13.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.42 kg

A powerful portrait of grief triumphantly overcome, Persuasion is Austen's most passionate work: more than any previous novel, it concentrates on the intense inner life of the heroine. It opens with Anne Elliot lamenting lost love in a painful reversal of the courtship novel; it then transforms into a rapturous romantic comedy. Against a dysfunctional gentry family corroded by snobbishness, the novel pits professional self-made naval men marked by energy and domestic virtues: the heroine's future lies with them rather than with the landed class into which she was born. Persuasion is the only Austen novel that ends with the heroine lacking a settled home. Uniquely in Austen's oeuvre, an earlier part of the text survives. This edition includes a transcript, allowing readers to glimpse Austen's creative process. Prefaces and explanatory endnotes supplied by Janet Todd illuminate the cultural, historical and literary context, bringing Jane Austen's world to life.

Preface
Persuasion
General Notes.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]