Persuasion - Notes from Norton Book

Preface:

Austens last complete novel

Began work on novel in 1815, finished alterations of final chapters July 18, 1816,
precisely a year before she died
Some critics have found the novel a melancholy strain, attributable, in their view, to
the authors illness
1st commentators saw in the book the sadness of mortality, commenting on its
elegiac tone and on a new kind of seriousness
Literacy Historians have noted a attitudes and assumptions associated with
Romanticism
Social critics have seen a new emphasis on the life and values of the Royal Navy
Austen drew a knowledge/inspiration from her 2 admiral brothers
Austen appears to criticise the aristocracy and welcome the accession to social
power of a new class
For Austen marriage constituted the happy ending of a womans youth
Austen had previously demonstrated a comedic scepticism about marriage as
constituting inevitable female bliss
Persuasion helps to elucidate that scepticism