Liberty in Jane Austen's Persuasion is a meditation on Persuasion as a text in which Jane Austen, writing in the Age of Revolution, enters the conversation 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, Edmund Burke, and Charles Pasley, endeavored definitively to determine what it means for a human being to be free. Persuasion is Austen's elegant, artful and complex addition to this conversation. In this study, Kathryn Davis proposes that Austen's...

This book presents Austen as a novelist who put her distinctive voice and extraordinary imagination to the service of poets and philosophers. The study explores Austen's account of liberty understood as self-governance and suggests interior liberty as the necessary prerequisite for political liberty.