Table of Contents

Preface           

The Text of Persuasion          

            The Original Ending of Persuasion   

Backgrounds and Contexts

            [William Hayley] · [On Old Maids]  

            Jane Austen · Letters about Persuasion

                        To Fanny Knight, March 13, [1817] 

                        To Fanny Knight, March 23, [1817] 

            Henry Austen · Biographical Notice of the Author  

            [Richard Whateley] · [A New Style of Novel]         

            Anonymous · Austen’s Characters    

            Julia Kavanagh · [The Language of Feeling]            

            Goldwin Smith · From Life of Jane Austen   

            Geraldine Edith Mitton · From Jane Austen and Her Times            

Criticism

            A. Walton Litz · New Landscapes    

            Marilyn Butler · [On Persuasion] 

            Ann W. Astell · Anne Elliot’s Education: The Learning of Romance in Persuasion           

            Claudia L. Johnson · Persuasion: The “Unfeudal Tone of the Present Day”          

            Cheryl Ann Weissman · Doubleness and Refrain in Jane Austen’s Persuasion  

            Linda Bree · Belonging to the Conversation in Persuasion

            Sidney Gottlieb · Persuasion and Cinematic Approaches to Jane Austen

            Bharat Tandon · [Language and Action in Persuasion]

            Tara Ghoshal Wallace · Filming Romance: Persuasion

            John Wiltshire · [Anne Elliot’s Consciousness]

            David Monaghan · Movement and a Modern Perspective in Dear and Michell’s

                        Persuasion     

Jane Austen: A Chronology  

Selected Bibliography           

About the Author

Jane Austen (1775–1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature.

Patricia Meyer Spacks, Ph.D. Berkeley, is Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her publications include An Argument of Images: The Poetry of Alexander Pope; The Female Imagination; The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult Imagination; Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels; and Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind.