THE FOLIO SOCIETY

Persuasion is Jane Austen’s last novel. She began writing it in 1815, but by the time of its completion, she was already unwell, a fact echoed in her description of the gentle heroine, Anne, who fears that she is ‘faded and thin’. In Anne’s eventual, triumphant restoration to beauty one can sense perhaps a wistful note, for alongside Austen’s sharp-eyed prose there is an elegiac tone to Persuasion that makes it many a reader’s favourite.

Eight years before the story begins, Anne has been persuaded by her overbearing and lineage-obsessed family to end her engagement to a promising but penniless young man. Years later, Captain Wentworth is a successful naval officer, an eligible parti and as handsome as ever. Anne, however, is painfully conscious of what the passage of time has meant to her when she overhears Captain Wentworth remark that, ‘he never saw anyone so changed’. Yet as the novel unfolds in Lyme and Bath, it gradually develops into Austen’s deepest, most tenderly explored love story. The characters are unforgettable, from the rich comedy of vain Sir Walter, hypochondriac Mary and bluff Admiral Croft, to the deeply rooted strength of Anne’s character which makes her one of Austen’s most interesting heroines.

Beautifully illustrated, this fine new edition is introduced by Deirdre Le Faye, who has included a wonderfully indignant extract from the British Critic review of 1818. Its writer was shocked by the dangerous moral ‘that young people should always marry according to their own inclinations and upon their own judgment’. As Jane Austen herself said, ‘This may be bad morality... but I believe it to be truth’.