Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 The Juvenilia: Untying the Knots
- 2 Lady Susan and Northanger Abbey: Riot in the Brain
- 3 Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice: Allowing for Difference
- 4 Mansfield Park: Emancipating ‘Puny’ Fanny Price
- 5 Emma: The Art of Quarrelling
- 6 Persuasion: Developing an ‘Elasticity of Mind’
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
6 - Persuasion: Developing an ‘Elasticity of Mind’
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 The Juvenilia: Untying the Knots
- 2 Lady Susan and Northanger Abbey: Riot in the Brain
- 3 Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice: Allowing for Difference
- 4 Mansfield Park: Emancipating ‘Puny’ Fanny Price
- 5 Emma: The Art of Quarrelling
- 6 Persuasion: Developing an ‘Elasticity of Mind’
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Austen's last finished novel, Persuasion, was published together with North-anger Abbey in 1818. While the latter was one of the early writings to which Austen added an advertisement in 1816, Persuasion's composition was begun in August 1815. On 13 March 1817, Austen wrote to her niece Fanny Knight confidentially: ‘Miss Catherine is put upon the shelve for the present, and I do not know that she will ever come out; – but I have a something ready for Publication, which may perhaps appear about a twelvemonth hence’ (Letters333). ‘Miss Catherine’ stands for Northanger Abbey that in fact did come out with Persuasion and they were both published in 1818, about a year after the novelist's death, just as she had predicted it. This first edition brings Austen's youngest and most mature female representations curiously close together: Catherine is only seventeen years old, while Anne Elliot is past twenty-seven. At Anne's age, Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice escapes spinsterhood by marrying Mr Collins. From this perspective, Anne Elliot delineates the female protagonist as a grownup woman, who has passed the age of the heroine of the Bildungsroman. Emma already embodied a new kind of autonomy that, although grounded in the communal, promoted the ability to question the other and oneself as the foundation of egalitarianism. Until Persuasion, Austen focuses on female growth and interaction with otherness, female consciousness-raising and forms of autonomy that include human ties.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Jane Austen's Civilized WomenMorality, Gender and the Civilizing Process, pp. 155 - 180Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014