Lesson 1: A beginner's guide to Jane Austen & PERSUASION

Happy 250 birthday to the anonymous spinster, Jane Austen

Welcome to Lesson #1, the column for paid subscribers where we discuss the biographic and historical context around this week’s novel.

To discuss Jane Austen’s Persuasion, we have the below sections:

• the life & death of the unmarried queen of romance

• class is in session—and it’s the socioeconomic kind

• a quick pivot for Napoleon

• the writers Jane Austen loved

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From August 8, 1815 to August 8, 1816, Jane Austen wrote Persuasion as her health declined.

At this point in her career, she’s published her most prolific titles: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). These novels were published anonymously. The title page of Sense and Sensibility reads “By A Lady.”

The summer following, on July 18^th, 1817, Jane died at 41 in the arms of her sister, Cassandra. Today’s scholars retroactively diagnose Jane with an endocrine disorder with flu-like symptoms called Addington disease, recognized approximately thirty years after her death.

“She wrote whilst she could hold a pen, and with a pencil when a pen was become too laborious,” her obituary, written by her brother Henry, reads. “The day preceding her death she composed some stanzas replete with fancy and vigour. Her last voluntary speech conveyed thanks to her medical attendant; and to the final question asked of her, purporting to know her wants, she replied, ‘I want nothing but death’” (xxxi).

Portrait of Jane Austen (Source: Britannica)

After she dies, her family writes an obituary to simultaneously announce her death and her authorship. A London publisher includes it as front matter to the 1817 publication of Northanger Abbey.

Included in a boxed set alongside this novel is Persuasion.

Though Jane sought to keep her personal life private, to avoid the critical nature of fame in her life, would she be thrilled to see how her work lives in the art of other poets, novelists, screenwriters, and playwrights 200 years after she’s gone?