Persuasion (novel)

Jane Austen published four novels, during her lifetime, and Persuasion, and one additional novel, Northanger Abbey, were published shortly after her death. These two novels were the first to be published under her own name.

Some commentators see Persuasion, the last novel she completed, as her most mature work.

Like her earlier novels Ann Elliot's relationship ends with a marriage proposal -- routine in novels of the time. Unlike her earlier novels, which featured young heroines, Anne is 27, and her relatives all treat her as if she will live the rest of her life as a spinster. Ann had fallen in love, eight years earlier, with Frederick Wentworth, a young officer in the Royal Navy. Her friends and relations had pressured her to break off her relationship with him, because of the mismatch in wealth between her father, a baronet, with a landed estate, and Wentworth, a naval officer who lived solely on his pay.

A naval officer, in the early nineteenth century, earned meager wages, and would never become rich, unless he commanded a ship, in wartime, that was in the right time and the right place to capture prizes, enemy ships which could then be sold at a prize court. Captains commanding Naval ships that captured prizes were entitled to one quarter of the net value of the sale.

Eight years after meeting and rejecting Wentworth, her father's profligate spending has forced him to move and rent more modest accommodation, in Bath, while leasing his estate. Ann is dismayed to learn that the new tenant is the Admiral Croft, Wentworth's former commander, and brother-in-law. Croft is newly wealthy, as an Admiral is entitled to one eighth the value of the prizes captured by ships under his command, and the ships under his command captured multiple valuable prizes. In particular, Wentworth's captured prizes have made him wealthy.

Ann and Wentworth do meet, and her younger sister Mary's in-laws try to get Wentworth interested in marrying their beautiful young daughters.