Persuasion by Jane Austen

In Persuasion, Jane Austen grants second chances to her heroine, her hero, and the nation. By revising her own manuscript, she even extended that mercy to herself. History, geography, and literary allusions enlarge the novel, for crucial dates from the Napoleonic Wars structure her story; the Romanticism of sublime Lyme Regis triumphs over the stifling melancholy of Bath; the complex, charismatic Captain Wentworth draws elements of his character from Lord Nelson, Lord Byron, Captain Cook, and one of Austen’s beloved, doomed Stuarts – the glamorous, reckless duke of Monmouth. Symbolically, too, autumn gives way to spring; grief gives way to rapturous new beginnings. As Virginia Woolf observed, Austen is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed. Uniquely, among her published works, the original draft of her last two chapters survives. Together with the final version, they show how she went wrong then triumphantly right. In 1817, however, she died far too young.