In the following essay, Duckworth explores the "new direction" Austen takes in Persuasion toward social status and heritage as compared to her earlier novels.
The success with which Emma accommodates its imaginative heroine in a traditional community invites us to read Jane Austen's conservative commitment as a sincere response rather than a conventional cover or camouflage. Unlike Emma, however, Persuasion (1818) does not bring its heroine to a defined social place and role; and in the last novel the attitude to social heritage differs subtly, if not in the end radically, from that communicated in the earlier novels. Though Anne Elliot becomes the wife of Captain Wentworth and the delighted mistress of a "very pretty landaulette," she has (as her status-obsessed sister Mary observes with satisfaction) "no Uppercrosshall before her, no landed estate, no.....
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