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

‘Mrs Clay’ blends modern wit and nineteenth-century story-telling with a highly original criticism of Austen’s last completed novel, ‘Persuasion’, and Austen’s own state of mind as she completed it. Like any proper novel of the period, ‘Mrs Clay’ delivers vividly-drawn characters, regular pauses for moral reflection, more plot twists than you would think possible in a book so scrupulously faithful to Austen’s original text, and a satisfyingly Wildean conclusion: The good end happily, the bad, unhappily: that is what ‘fiction’ means. Behind the humour, though, is a novel, well-argued revisiting 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 herself existing- like Mrs Clay’s heroine, and her own- in a climate of ethical fashion as judgemental as it was at that time changeable, in which her few choices (so hard to make, so painful in regret) were in any case only between one indeterminate destination and another.