Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth publish The Lyrical Ballads.

1801 Jane’s father, the Reverend George Austen, retires, and with the Napoleonic Wars looming in the background of British consciousness, he and his wife and two daughters leave the quiet country life of Steventon for the bustling, fashionable town of Bath. Many of the characters and depictions of society in Jane Austen’s subsequent novels are shaped by her experiences in Bath.

1803 Austen receives her first publication offer for her novel “Susan,” but the manuscript is subsequently returned by the publisher; it will later be revised and released as Northanger Abbey. The United States buys Louisiana from France. Ralph Waldo Emerson is born.

1804 Napoleon crowns himself emperor of France. Spain de clares war on Britain.

1805 Jane’s father dies. Jane and her mother and sister sub sequently move to Southampton. Sir Walter Scott pub lishes his Lay of the Last Minstrel.

1809 After several years of traveling and short-term stays in various towns, the Austen women settle in Chawton Cot tage in Hampshire; in the parlor of this house Austen quietly composes her most famous works. Charles Darwin and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, are born.

1811 Austen begins Mansfield Park in February. In November Sense and Sensibility, the romantic misadventures of two sisters, is published with the notation “By a Lady”; all of Austen’s subsequent novels are also brought out anony mously. George III is declared insane, and the morally corrupt Prince of Wales (the future King George IV) be comes regent.

1812 Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm and the first parts of

Lord Byron’s Childe Harold are published. The United States declares war on Great Britain.

1813 Pride and Prejudice is published; it describes the conflict between the high-spirited daughter of a country gentle man and a wealthy landowner. Napoleon is exiled to Elba, and the Bourbons are restored to power.

1814 Mansfield Park is published; it is the story of the difficult though ultimately rewarded life of a poor relation who lives in the house of her wealthy uncle.

1815 Austen’s comic novel Emma is published, centering on the heroine’s misguided attempts at matchmaking. Na poleon is defeated at Waterloo. Charlotte Brontë is born.

1817 Austen begins the satiric novel Sanditon, but abandons it because of declining health. She dies on July 18 in Win chester and is buried in Winchester Cathedral.

1818 Northanger Abbey, a social satire with overtones of (paro died) terror, and Persuasion, about a reawakened love, are published under Austen’s brother Henry’s supervi sion.

Introduction

You could not shock her more than she

shocks me;

Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.

It makes me most uncomfortable to see

An English spinster of the middle class

Describe the amorous effects of “brass,”

Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety

The economic basis of society.

—W. H. Auden

Just as Jane Austen is the favorite author of many discerning readers, Persuasion is the most highly esteemed novel of many Austenites. It has the deep irony, the scathing wit, the droll and finely drawn characters of Austen’s other novels, all attributes long beloved of her readers. But it is conventionally said that as her last novel, the novel of her middle age, it additionally has a greater maturity and wisdom than the “light, bright and sparkling” earlier novels, to use Austen’s own famous description of Pride and Prejudice, her most popular work. In other words, Persuasion has often been seen as the thinking reader’s Pride and Prejudice.

But Persuasion is less “light” in more than one sense; Anne Elliot, its heroine, is introduced as more unhappy and constrained by her situation than any heroine of Austen’s since Fanny Price of Mansfield Park. In contrast to Elizabeth Bennet’s or Emma Woodhouse’s sparkle and volubility, Anne’s “spirits were not high” (p. 14), and remain low for much of the novel. But whereas Fanny Price, like Anne ignored and held in low esteem by family members, is perfectly poised to be rescued by love, in fact Anne is barely a Cinderella figure, and not only because she is wellborn, of a better social rank than even the heroine of Emma. In fact, Anne Elliot has more in common with Charlotte Brontë’s Victorian heroine Jane Eyre in that she seems at first distinctly ineligible for the role of a beloved, appearing to the world as apparently unlovable and without much physical charm. Anne, however, has none of Jane Eyre’s ready temper, tongue, and fire; she tends to think and feel alone and in silence—except, of course, that we, her readers, share the literary mind she inhabits and see the world with her through her finely