Persuasion

Eight years ago, Anne Elliot, then nineteen, was persuaded by her trusted godmother to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a young naval officer with no fortune. Now her vain, extravagant father, Sir Walter, must let the family home to an admiral to pay his debts, and the admiral's wife turns out to be Wentworth's sister. Wentworth returns from the Napoleonic wars a rich captain, looking for a wife, and seems to choose the lively Louisa Musgrove, while Anne, overlooked by her family, watches in silence. A fall on the sea wall at Lyme and a season in Bath change everything, until Wentworth writes a letter: 'You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.'

Jane Austen wrote her last completed novel in 1815 and 1816 as her health was failing, and it was published after her death, at the end of 1817, with Northanger Abbey. Its quieter, autumnal mood, its heroine of twenty-seven and its admiration for the navy, in which two of Austen's brothers served, make it the most moving of her books for many readers.

Jane Austen (1775–1817) grew up in a crowded rectory in the Hampshire village of Steventon, the seventh of eight children, writing comic sketches to amuse her family. She never married, lived quietly in Bath and then in a cottage at Chawton, and published her novels anonymously, signed only 'By a Lady'. She died in Winchester at forty-one.

Her six novels, from Pride and Prejudice to Emma and Persuasion, turn the small world of country families, marriages and money into sharp, funny studies of character. Her ironic narration, slipping in and out of her heroines' thoughts, changed the way novels are written.