''In Persuasion, Jane Austen is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed'' Virginia Woolf

Jane Austen''s moving late novel of missed opportunities and second chances centres on Anne Elliot, no longer young and with few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she was persuaded by others to break off her engagement to poor, handsome naval captain Frederick Wentworth. What happens when they meet again is movingly told in Austen''s last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, and a mature, tender love story tinged with heartache.

Edited with an Introduction by Gillian Beer