Jane Austen

Persuasion Jane Austen

This is the story of a second chance, the reawakening of love between Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth, whom eight years earlier she had been persuaded not to marry, due to his lowly station in life. Wentworth returns from the Napoleonic Wars with prize money and the social acceptability of naval rank. He is now an eligible suitor acceptable to Anne's snobbish father and his circle, and Anne discovers the continuing strength of her love for him. Daughter of a clergyman and the seventh of eight children, Jane Austen was born on December the 16th, 1775, at the village parsonage of Steventon in Hampshire, England. Like the five Bennett sisters in Pride and Prejudice, she spent her young womanhood among her family, her bosom friend, her older sister Cassandra. Jane began to write early for her own and her family's amusement, and had the young author's usual struggle for wider acceptance. Her first real novel, Sense and Sensibility, was written before she was twenty, but was rejected by a publisher, revised several times and finally published when she was thirty-six. Pride and Prejudice, written at twenty-one under the title First Impressions was also rejected, rewritten, and finally published when Jane was thirty-eight. Two years later came the publication of Emma, often considered her finest novel. Three more novels, Northanger Abbey -- an early satire on the Gothic novel -- Persuasion, and Mansfield Park, were not published until after her death. Living an uneventful life herself, Jane never married or ventured far from drawing rooms. She depicted the daily lives of provincial middle class families with a wry observation, a delicate irony, and good humored wit that have established her as a supreme exponent of the comedy of manners and one of the best known and best loved novelists of all time. When Jane was 26 her father retired and the family moved to Bath, the famous regency resort which appears in several of her novels. When she was thirty her father died and his widow and unmarried daughters became dependent, as was common in the 19th century, on the charity and hospitality of other family members. They moved from small town to small town, Jane still writing up to the time of her death. She died in the cathedral town of Winchester after a year's illness, in 1817. She was forty-three.