Liberty in Jane Austen's Persuasion

Liberty in Jane Austen s Persuasionis a meditation onPersuasionas a text in which Jane Austen, writing in the Age of Revolution, enterstheconversation of her epoch. Poets, philosophers, theologians and political thinkers of the long eighteenth century, including William Cowper, George Gordon Byron, Samuel Johnson, Hugh Blair, Thomas Sherlock, Charles Pasley, and Edmund Burke, endeavored definitively to determine what it means for a human being to be free.Persuasionis Austen s elegant, artful and complex addition to this conversation. In this study, Kathryn Davisproposes that Austen's last complete novel offers anapologiafor human liberty primarily understood as self-governance.Austen s characters struggle to attain liberty, not from an oppressive political regime or stifling social conventions, but for a type of excellence that is available to each human being. The novel'spresentation of moral virtue has wider cultural significance as a force that shapes both the little social commonwealth s