Persuasion

by Austen, Jane; Bree, Linda

• ISBN13: 9781551111315
• ISBN10: 1551111314
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-08-01
• Publisher: Broadview Pr

Summary

Persuasion celebrates romantic constancy in an era of turbulent change. Written as the Napoleonic Wars were ending, the novel examines how a woman can at once remain faithful to her past and still move forward into the future. Anne Elliot seems to have given up on present happiness and has resigned herself to living off her memories. More than seven years earlier she complied with duty: persuaded to view the match as imprudent and improper, she broke off her engagement to a naval captain with neither fortune, ancestry, nor prospects. However, when peacetime arrives and brings the Navy home, and Anne encounters Captain Wentworth once more, she starts to believe in second chances. Jane Austen's last completed novel features a heroine much older and wiser than her predecessors in earlier books, and presents a more intimate and sober tale of a love found long after such happiness had been deemed hopeless. This edition includes an appendix giving the original ending of Persuasion.

Table of Contents

Introduction	7	(38)
Acknowledgements	38	(1)
A Brief Chronology	39	(2)
Jane Austen
A Note on the Text	41	(4)
PERSUASION
Volume I	45	(100)
Volume II	145	(114)
Appendix A. The cancelled chapters of Persuasion	259	(11)
Appendix B. Biographical notice of the Author	270	(5)
Appendix C. Extracts from Jane Austen's letters	275	(6)
Appendix D. From Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex	281	(5)
Appendix E. From Priscilla Wakefield, Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex	286	(3)
Appendix F. From the Annual Register, London 1806	289	(5)
Appendix G. From James Thomson, The Seasons: A Poem	294	(3)
Appendix H. From Walter Scott, Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field	297	(4)
Appendix I. From Lord Byron, The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale	301	(3)
Select Bibliography	304