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

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

An unusual comedy, in which modern wit and nineteenth-century story-telling blend with a serious reassessment of Austen’s final novel, Persuasion, and the state of mind of its author when she cut it short, to spend her last creative burst on Sanditon.

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.

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