Mrs Clay: The Austen Expert's Companion to 'Persuasion'

An unusual comedy blending modern wit and nineteenth-century story-telling with a serious reassessment of Austens final novel Persuasion.Like any decent nineteenth-century novel Mrs Clay delivers vividly-drawn characters to like and loathe pauses for moral reflection and a satisfying Wildean conclusion: The good end happily the bad unhappily: that is what fiction means. Behind the humour though is a passionately-argued reworking of Persuasions themes of endurance choice and responsibility-- and behind them the figure of Austen herself as she wrote her last novel: already ill with family finances vanishing and existing-- like Persuasions heroine and Mrs Clays own-- in a climate of ethical fashion as judgemental as it was changeable where their few choices (so hard to make so painful in regret)-- were in any case only between one indeterminate destination and another.