Persuasion
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Jane Austen's final completed novel: the story of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, their broken engagement and their chance meeting 8 years later.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Jane Austen’s last complete novel, which was published just before Christmas in 1817, five months after her death. It is the story of Anne Elliot, now 27 and (so we are told), losing her bloom, and of her feelings for Captain Wentworth who she was engaged to, 8 years before – an engagement she broke off under pressure from her father and godmother. When Wentworth, by chance, comes back into Anne Elliot's life, he is still angry with her and neither she nor Austen's readers can know whether it is now too late for their thwarted love to have a second chance.
The image above is from a 1995 Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ adaptation of the novel, with Amanda Root and CiarΓ΅n Hinds
With
Karen O’Brien
Vice-Chancellor of Durham University
Fiona Stafford
Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford
And
Paddy Bullard
Associate Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Reading
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Last on
LINKS AND FURTHER READING
READING LIST
Jane Austen (eds. Janet Todd and Antje Blank), Persuasion (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Janine Barchas, Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012)
E. J. Clery, Jane Austen: The Banker’s Sister (Biteback Publishing, 2017)
Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (Cambridge University Press, 2010, 2nd edn)
Jocelyn Harris, A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s Persuasion (University of Delaware Press, 2007)
Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen:Β Women, Politics and the Novel (University of Chicago Press 1988)
Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (eds.), A Companion to Jane Austen (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
Freya Johnson, Jane Austen: Early and Late (Princeton University Press, 2021)
Tom Keymer, Jane Austen: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2022)
Peter Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford University Press, 1996)
Brian Southam, Jane Austen and the Navy (Hambledon Continuum, 2003)
Fiona Stafford, Jane Austen: A Brief Life (Yale University Press, 2017)
Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (Viking, 1997)
Cheryl Ann Weissman, 'Doubleness and Refrain in Jane Austen's Persuasion' (Kenyon Review, vol 10, no 4, 1988)
John Wiltshire, The Hidden Jane Austen (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
RELATED LINKS
Broadcasts
- Thu 22 Dec 2022 09:00Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4
- Thu 22 Dec 2022 21:30Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4
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