Persuasion

Description

The accident of death makes Persuasion Jane Austen's final novel. It deserves its position by its innovative treatment of passion and rhetorical style and 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 work. Where the other works move towards a new symbolic and physical home for the heroine, Persuasion begins with her ejection and ends with her understanding that home is not a place at all but an ambiance and an acceptance of change. This volume, first published in 2006, provides comprehensive explanatory notes, an extensive critical introduction covering the context and publication history of the work, a chronology of Austen's life and an authoritative textual apparatus. This edition is an indispensable resource for all scholars and readers of Austen.

Janet Todd is Herbert JC Grierson Professor of English Literature at the University of Aberdeen. Antje Blank is Research Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Aberdeen.

"The excellent recent Cambridge University Press edition...is in all a work of outstanding scholarship. In addition to the text of the novel, it includes an extensive 62 page Introduction, a seven page Chronology, 59 pages of Explanatory Notes, the 'Biographical Notice of the Author' by Austen's brother Henry (which had appeared in the original publication), a transcript of the cancelled chapters of Persuasion plus a facsimile of the manuscript of the cancelled chapters. Jane Austen scholars, in particular, will be grateful for this abundance of material gathered together in one place, and will appreciate the opportunity to compare the cancelled chapters with the final published text." Sensibilities, Beth Hanley