Persuasion

Abstract

Persuasion is a post-war novel. In this, it differs quite explicitly from Austen’s other completed works, all of which fall in their various ways under the shadow of the Franco-British wars of 1793–1815. Beginning in ‘the summer of 1814’ (P, 8) and continuing through 1815, the novel is both a reflection and a product of the social changes wrought by the Napoleonic Wars, changes which amounted, in Linda Colley’s words, to ‘nothing less than a redefinition of the nation…. [T]he post-Waterloo period … demonstrated … that in Great Britain, a nation forged more than anything else through military endeavour, the winning of radical constitutional and social change was also intimately bound up with the impact of war.’¹ These are changes which Austen characteristically articulates through the vehicle of property ownership and land-management. Persuasion is a novel of a different and developing conception of Britishness; it is, profoundly, the most modern of Austen’s six canonical novels, one which shows the very beginnings of a new polity in anticipation of the 1832 Reform Act, and beyond that of the gradual widening of the franchise across the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries.