Persuasion was Jane Austen’s last completed novel and was published posthumously in December 1817. Its hero and heroine, Frederick Wentworth and Anne Elliot, meet again eight years after Anne has been persuaded by her class-conscious family and friends to break off her engagement to Frederick, a handsome young naval officer without rank or fortune. Given this context, the love at the centre of Persuasion has a different quality from that of the loves found in Austen’s earlier novels: it is not a first romantic love, but a thoughtful and ripe one that comes to fruition only after years of suffering and self-searching.

Anne is the second of three daughters of the widowed Baronet Sir Walter Elliot of Kelly

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Published 20 January 2005

Citation: Bautz, Annika. "Persuasion". The Literary Encyclopedia. 20 January 2005.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2837, accessed 9 February 2010.]