Persuasion (Vintage Classics Austen Series)

Jane Austen (Author) Jane Austen was born in Steventon rectory on 16 December 1775. Her family later moved to Bath, then to Southampton and finally to Chawton in Hampshire. She began writing Pride and Prejudice when she was twenty-two years old. It was originally called First Impressions and was initially rejected by the publishers and only published in 1813 after much revision. She published four of her novels in her lifetime, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Jane Austen died on 18th July 1817. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were both published posthumously in 1818. Amanda Vickery (Introducer) Amanda Vickery is the writer and presenter of BBC2's At Home with the Georgians based on her book Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (2009). Amanda is a Professor of Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London. Her first book The Gentleman's Daughter (1998) won the Wolfson, the Whitfield and the Longman-History today prizes. Amanda Vickery is also the editor of Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (2001) and Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830 (2006). Among her radio credits are presenting the popular Radio 4 shows A History of Private Life and Voices from the Old Bailey.

'It is a sort of private novel. In the heroine Anne Elliot, we have glimpses of Austen and what happened to her; the lost romance and the lost youth' Julian Fellowes Eight years ago Anne Elliot bowed to pressure from her family and made the decision not to marry the man she loved, Captain Wentworth. Now circumstances have conspired to bring him back into her social circle and Anne finds her old feelings for him reignited. However, when they meet again Wentworth behaves as if they are strangers and seems more interested in her friend Louisa. In this, her final novel, Jane Austen tells the story of a love that endures the tests of time and society with humour, insight and tenderness. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY LYNNE TRUSS