Mrs Clay: The Austen Expert’s Companion to ‘Persuasion

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An unusual comedy, blending modern wit and nineteenth-century story-telling with a serious reassessment of Austen’s final novel, Persuasion.

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 Persuasion’s 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 Persuasion’s heroine, and Mrs Clay’s 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.