Jane Austen's beloved and subtly subversive final novel of romantic tension and second chances. Now a motion picture from Netflix starring Dakota Johnson and Henry Golding, and a TikTok Book Club Pick.Persuasion tells the story of Anne Elliot, a woman who – at twenty-seven – is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years ago, she was persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. When Anne and Frederick meet again, he has acquired both, but still feels the sting of her rejection. A brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, Austen’s last completed novel is also a deeply felt and relatable love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.
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Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, a small village in Hampshire, England. As a girl, she wrote stories, including burlesques of popular romances. She lived with her family in Steventon until her father, a clergyman in the Church of England, retired in 1801. After his death, in 1805, she, her mother, and her sister did not have a settled home until 1809, when they moved to Chawton, Hampshire. There she was extraordinarily productive, revising three novels and writing three more from scratch. Published during her lifetime were
Sense and Sensibility (1811),
Pride and Prejudice (1813),
Mansfield Park (1814), and
Emma (1815). Austen died on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, where she was receiving medical treatment, and was buried in that city’s cathedral. Two more novels,
Northanger Abbey and
Persuasion, were published posthumously in 1817 with a biographical notice by her brother Henry Austen, the first formal announcement of her authorship. She also left two earlier compositions: a short epistolary novel,
Lady Susan, and an unfinished novel,
The Watsons. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel,
Sanditon, a fragmentary draft of which survives.
Juliette Wells is Professor of Literary Studies at Goucher College, where she is active in outreach relating to the library’s distinguished Jane Austen Collection. She is the author of three histories of Austen’s readers and fans, most recently
A New Jane Austen: How Americans Brought Us the World’s Greatest Novelist. For Penguin Classics, she edited the 200th-anniversary deluxe editions of Austen’s
Emma and
Persuasion. She was guest co-curator for the Morgan Library & Museum’s 2025 exhibition
A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250.
“Critics, especially [recently], value
Persuasion highly, as the author’s ‘most deeply felt fiction,’ ‘the novel which in the end the experienced reader of Jane Austen puts at the head of the list....' Anne wins back Wentworth and wins over the reader; we may, like him, end up thinking Anne’s character ‘perfection itself.’” –from the Introduction by Judith Terry
