Jane Austen's Persuasion is a satirical romp through the cold and arrogant lives of the aristocracy as seen through the eyes of a self-sufficient and free thinking woman, who must realize the false values in her life and learn enough to reconcile...

Courtship is the behaviour in which, normally, the male attempts to persuade the female into a romantic relationship or marriage. In ‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen, as well as ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ by Thomas Hardy, courtship is displayed in a...

‘Persuasion’, written by Jane Austen in 1817, is a novel which grapples with the key social and cultural issues of living in a patriarchal society, in which social class is viewed to be very important. Due to this, we are able to draw contrasts...

Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion explores the varied behaviour of the English upper classes in the 19th century. Through the lens of protagonist Anne Elliot’s experiences and relationships, Austen suggests certain standards of behaviour and...

Society is notably poor at judging people’s character. Good people can be disregarded for petty reasons and deplorable people can be supported for equally poor reasons. Such contrasts are common in Persuasion with characters like Sir Walter, Mr....

“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older--the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.” With these words, Jane Austen crystallizes one of the central questions of her novel Persuasion--whether it is...

Love, marriage, and the impact of gender are themes frequently taken up by Jane Austen, but it can be difficult to find where she stands on such topics, given the varying perspectives of her characters. While as readers we are often aligned with...

In elucidating a strong sense of time’s passing in ‘Persuasion’, Austen evokes the seething pain and angst that Elizabeth’s approach to ‘the years of danger’ affords in an era in which marriage and status were ultimately keystones of a successful...

Nearly two centuries later, Judith Butler would describe gender identity as “a stylized repetition of acts…which are internally discontinuous…[so that] the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative...

Jane Austen’s novels perform multiple functions individually as moral tales. However, they also occasionally work together to explore propriety in early nineteenth century England. Proper behavior for women often centered on their interactions...

While concerns about the high costs associated with halting the printing of Persuasion’s original ending are understandable, Austen’s revised version better showcases the stylistic talents to which her readers have become accustomed. The original...

Though very little is told in terms of her backstory, Lady Russell is nonetheless one of those characters that almost covertly dictate the course of the novel in a quite radical manner. More precisely, the widow exerts a very high degree of...

Many times, in Austen novels, the conflict revolves around some sort of miscommunication between characters.Though it makes for an interesting read, it begs the question of how these numerous misunderstandings came to be in the first place. In my...

In the novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, she displays a stark contrast between two characters in the story. Austen does so by discussing the theme of pride throughout the novel. The concept of pride can be defined in two ways: positive and...

Some of the greatest novels in history were masterfully written with twists and turns often achieved through the existence of complex characters that are either unpredictable or clever at disguising their true motives or desires. Just as a child...

In the society described in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, money was as much a social currency as it was a means of exchange for goods and services. Money was often commensurate with social rank, yet there was a feeling against parvenus who...

The concept of "design" and calculation plays a prominent role in Pride and Prejudice. Design is used as an indicator of values, particularly in marriage, and presents the characters with a challenge in balancing scheming and morality in its use....

The world of Pride and Prejudice revolved around the relationships between its men and women. Austen made this theme obvious from the opening sentence. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune,...

Two English literary works, one a comedy and the other a tragedy, by two different authors of separate centuries, both have their fair share of characters who illustrate the admirable and the not-so-admirable of dispositions. Jane Austen's...

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife" (Austen 1). From the first, very famous sentence of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen introduces to her readers a satirical view...

While the novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen does not openly display Marx's idea of the oppressed and the oppressor, it does clearly demonstrate Marx's ideas of society as a history of class struggle. Austen portrays class divisions and...

Place: The particular portion of space occupied by or allocated to a person or thing.

It is interesting to observe Dictionary.com's definition of the word "place" in relation to "person". Especially when it comes to Pride and Prejudice, where...

In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen creates her protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, to be a strikingly unconventional female with respect to her time. Elizabeth tends to relate less to her female companions, and instead needs to define herself by her...

Female speech in Jane Austen's novels is heavily dictated by the whims of her male characters, and although "[f]emale speech is never entirely repressed in Austen's fiction, [it] is dictated so as to mirror or otherwise reassure masculine desire"...