Mrs Clay: The Austen Expert's Companion to 'Persuasion' (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780995379077)

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.