Anna Walker

For me, Austen's death before the publication of the novel makes its portrait of a woman looking back at her life with regret all the more striking.

John, do you think Austen was in a particularly reflective mood when she wrote this novel?

Well, looking to another source then, Freya, you're currently writing a book on Austen's letters.

Does her correspondence generally paint a portrait of a happy woman?

Are there any examples you can give us?

And she does seem to get great pleasure from advising her niece on writing, doesn't she?

One thing I love about Persuasion is the depth of its emotional storytelling and how we get a sense of the emotional state of almost all the principal characters.

Austen is well known for her use of free and direct style, which shares a character's thoughts or feelings without explicitly stating that it's doing so.

John, how does free and direct style help Austen to achieve this emotional depth in Persuasion?

The lengths we will go to to make ourselves feel better about a romance that hasn't gone to plan.

Well, at the start of Persuasion, when we learn that Anne was once engaged to Frederick Wentworth...

austin writes a few months had seen the beginning and the end of their acquaintance but not with a few months ended anne's share of suffering from it her attachment and regrets had for a long time clouded every enjoyment of youth and an early loss of bloom and spirits had been their lasting effect john does that echo attitudes towards emotion at the time in general what was the sort of understanding of happiness and depression in austin saying how was that different to how we think about emotions

And one emotion that we do recognise that is named throughout the book is regret, one of the strongest themes of the novel, of course.

Freya, do you think that's an emotion Jane was personally familiar with?

One sort of emotional similarity perhaps we can see between Anne and Jane is the emotional resilience.

We certainly see evidence in her letters of her ability to persevere through personal difficulties.

John, she certainly faced her share, didn't she?

Loss of her father, financial instability.

Freya, you've studied a lot of Austen's teenage writing as well.

What kind of differences are we seeing at this point of maturity in Austen's writing compared to her sort of juvenilia, as it's called?