Persuasion

"Persuasion is Jane Austen's final completed work. It differs from her earlier novels in its innovative treatment of passion and echoes them in its development of those themes of memory and time, public and private history, inner and outer lives, emotion and restraint that marked all her mature works. This edition places the novel in its historical setting, the few months between Napoleon's escape from Elba and the battle of Waterloo, and it relates its elegiac mood to the later moment when Jane Austen was writing: the period of disillusion following British victory. The volume provides comprehensive explanatory notes, an extensive critical introduction covering the context and publication history of the work, a chronology of Jane Austen's life, an authoritative textual apparatus, and a facsimile of the two 'cancelled chapters', the only extant manuscript of a completed novel. The edition is thus an indispensable resource for all scholars and readers of Jane Austen."--BOOK JACKET.