The last novel completed by Jane Austen before she died, unmarried, in her early forties, Persuasion is often thought to be the story of the author's own lost love. After years apart, the book's heroine, Anne Elliot, encounters the man she was once engaged to when he was a young naval officer, Frederick Wentworth. Now a captain, Wentworth is courting the rash young Louisa Musgrove. The happy ending is not one in which Austen would ever play a part.
"There's no one to touch Jane [Austen] when you're in a tight place."
Rudyard Kipling
"[Austen] is a prose Shakespeare. She has a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings."
