Liberty in Jane Austens Persuasion
By (author) Kathryn E. Davis
Publication date:
20 October 2016Length of book:
194 pagesPublisher
Lehigh University PressISBN-13: 9781611462272
Liberty in Jane Austen’s Persuasion is a meditation on Persuasion as a text in which Jane Austen, writing in the Age of Revolution, enters the conversation of her epoch. Poets, philosophers, theologians and political thinkers of the long eighteenth century, including William Cowper, George Gordon Byron, Samuel Johnson, Hugh Blair, Thomas Sherlock, Edmund Burke, and Charles Pasley, endeavored definitively to determine what it means for a human being to be free. Persuasion is Austen’s elegant, artful and complex addition to this conversation. In this study, Kathryn Davis proposes that Austen's last complete novel offers an apologia for human liberty primarily understood as self-governance. Austen’s characters struggle to attain liberty, not from an oppressive political regime or stifling social conventions, but for a type of excellence that is available to each human being. The novel's presentation of moral virtue has wider cultural significance as a force that shapes both the “little social commonwealth[s]” inhabited by characters of Austen’s own making and, possibly, the identity of the nation whose sovereign read Persuasion.
In an age where single-author studies are rarely encouraged by publishers, Kathryn E. Davis’s concise Liberty in Jane Austen’s “Persuasion”demonstrates the undoubted value of this particular genre of monograph. Instead of focusing on the verbal art of Jane Austen’s oeuvre as a whole, Davis selects Austen’s final complete novel, Persuasion (1817), for analysis. The result is a theoretically informed specialist study that adds significantly to the growing body of research on Austen’s work. It reveals its author’s skill to unravel the complex nuances of Austen’s language.... Liberty in Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” is a welcome and significant addition to Austen criticism, and it offers a degree of nuance in its readings that testifies not only to Austen’s skill at crafting the novel but also to the author’s ability to decode the multifarious and often complex meanings of Austen’s work.