Her older friend and mentor, Lady Russell, acting in place of Anne's deceased mother, persuades her to break off the engagement. Sir Walter Elliot, Anne's father and lord of the family estate of Kellynch, and her older sister Elizabeth are dissatisfied with her choice, maintaining that he is not distinguished enough for their family. More than seven years prior to the events in the novel, Anne Elliot falls in love with a handsome young naval officer named Frederick Wentworth, who is intelligent and ambitious, but poor.

As in Northanger Abbey, the superficial social life of Bath, well known to Jane Austen, is portrayed extensively and serves as a background for the second volume. The significance here is that two brothers of Jane Austen used persuasion to later achieve the rank of admiral. Persuasion is connected with Northanger Abbey not only by the fact that the two books were originally bound up in one volume and published together two years later, but also because both stories are set partly in Bath, a fashionable city with which Jane Austen was well acquainted, having lived there from 1801 to 1805.īesides the theme of persuasion, the novel evokes other topics, such as the Royal Navy. Persuasion was published after her death, in December of 1817, although it was dated 1818. She began it soon after she had finished Emma and completed it in August 1816.

Persuasion was the last of Jane Austen's completed novels.

1818 Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage

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