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

Mrs Clay: The Austen Experts Companion to PersuasionAn unusual comedy in which modern wit and nineteenth-century story-telling blend with a serious reassessment of Austens final novel Persuasion and the state of mind of its author when she cut it short to spend her last creative burst on Sanditon.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. Show less...Language