It is unnecessary and, as has been seen, would probably be incorrect, to say that Jane Austen ever described love from any experience except what her genius gave her, but I think Persuasion would be far stronger testimony to her having once loved than Mansfield Park is.įanny Price’s apparently hopeless attachment is followed through its course with the affectionate but critical interest of one who regards a touching phase of human nature. It is, I think, the only one of those stories to which the epithet “beautiful” can appropriately be given not that it differs in style from her earlier works or contains any intentional sentiment beyond what all her stories have, but it possesses throughout a sort of tender, pathetic grace that appears nowhere else.Ī reviewer who criticized Mansfield Park in 1821 asserted that the details of Fanny Price’s attachment could scarcely have come from any writer but a woman who had herself lived through such an attachment. In approaching Persuasion, we have to deal with the last, and, in my opinion, the greatest of Jane Austen’s works, for though Emma usually holds the first place in her writings, and although there are unquestionably one or two weak points in Persuasion from which Emma is free, I cannot but heartily state that “ Persuasion is the most beautiful of all Jane Austen’s stories.” The following excerpt is in the public domain.Īrguably the greatest of Jane Austen’s works The 1889 publication of Malden’s Jane Austen was part of an Eminent Women series published by W.H. Austen Leigh for their kind permission to make use of the Memoir and Letters of their gifted relative, which have been her principal authorities for this work.” Malden said of her sources, “The writer wishes to express her obligations to Lord Brabourne and Mr. Persuasion, the last novel Austen wrote, and Northanger Abbey, her first completed novel, were both published six months after her death in 1817.
The following analysis and plot summary of Persuasion focuses on the novel that many have judged to be Austen’s most mature and accomplished work. Jane Austen by Sarah Fanny Malden (1889) offers a detailed 19th-century view of Jane Austen’s life and works.
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