Persuasion

Abstract

In Persuasion (1818),⁷⁷ Austen’s last finished novel, the author carefully describes the bad oikonomia of the Kellynch estate, which she effectively disestablishes, before describing a series of marriage alliances that attach themselves to, and contribute to, the good oikonomia of the Uppercross estate. In and around Uppercross, Austen establishes an extended family of landed and naval interests, which combine to represent an adapting social and economic and moral order that was making the transition from agrarian capitalism to global capitalism in the long eighteenth century. The novel is half the length of Mansfield Park and Emma, and two-thirds the length of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. I believe the author’s didactic commentary on these marriage alliances would have been more strongly established had Persuasion been longer, and had it not been written in a period of declining health. Even so, the novel is complete and the logic of its marriage alliances suggests that Persuasion is about the decline of one estate that is disordered; and about the rise of another estate that is actively reordering itself according to the logic of British Empiricism, the morality of Georgian Anglicanism, and the imperatives of unregulated capitalism.