Persuasion Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 67 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Persuasion.
Related Topics

Persuasion Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 67 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Persuasion.
This section contains 5,286 words
(approx. 14 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Persuasion Study Guide
In the following essay excerpt, Waldron examines Austen's moral intentions in Persuasion.

Of all six completed novels Persuasion most resists a late twentieth-century reader's attempts to exonerate Austen from charges of prescriptiveness and didacticism. If Anne Elliot was 'almost too good' for the author, a reading based on an assumption of Austen's attachment to conventional contemporary wisdom will certainly leave her too good for us. Marilyn Butler, among others, avers that 'Anne comes near to being dangerously perfect' and much modern criticism finds her somewhat tediously fault-free. Curiously, though, it is the one work of Austen's which attracted prompt contemporary criticism on moral grounds; in 1818 the following was included in a review in The British Critic:

[The novel] contains parts of very great merit; among
them, however, we certainly should not number its
moral, which seems to be, that young people should
always marry according to their...


(read more)

This section contains 5,286 words
(approx. 14 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Persuasion Study Guide
Copyrights
Gale
Persuasion from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.