Austen’s Persuasion

Abstract

Abstract Jane Austen recognized that the popular new genre, the novel, was an innovative technology of persuasion. She demonstrates this not only in her last-completed novel, Persuasion, but throughout her career starting with Lady Susan. Austen’s protagonists display skill at conversation—more than at classical forms of rhetoric—which reveals the social power of talk and civil discourse. I argue that Austen favors what feminist theorists have called “conversational” and “invitational” rhetoric, using persuasion in her novels to suggest how a print genre can successfully invite readers to foster civility in its broadest sense: of moral behavior, critical commentary, and psychological and social change. Ultimately, Austen allows her bright heroines to keep talking despite their mistakes; she endorses the power of dialogue over incivility, and of true conversation over what today is termed canceling or calling out.