Persuasion by Jane Austen - Summary

Jane Austen, Persuasion (1818) is her last and most 'romantic' novel, attuned to Romantic nature sensibilities and responsive to the language of landscape aesthetics (Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, p. 10).
Austen was familiar with the late 18th-century standards of nature representation.
Landscape as Structure of Feeling: Nature is no longer a mere backdrop; landscape is a structure of feeling that can express and modify the minds of those who view it (Walton-Litz, Jane Austen, p. 153).
Austen's last works are part of the new movement in English literature, using natural settings to convey the movements of an individual imagination.

Key Texts:
- Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004)
- Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (2004)
Emotions:
- Emotions are extra-subjective, elastic, mutational, volatile, labile, transitional, and transmissible, rather than static and confined to separate individuals.
- Emotions move through space and time.
Experiencing Emotions:
- Emotions are not solely contained within us but exist outside and around us, belonging to public places and spaces rather than our private minds.
- Emotions are not only an indication of subjectivity but also an expression of something extra-subjective (pp. ix-x).
Locale of Emotions:
- The experiential locales of emotions are found in the circumambient world, on the edges of individual human subjects' lives and in between these subjects (p. 3).
Transmission of Emotions:
- Transmissibility requires at least two places: a place of origin and a place of destination. These places can be momentary and multiplied by the co-presence of many possible places of transmission.
- Places are provided by persons (embodied interpersonal affective engagement) and nonhuman elements like a sublime landscape (p. 167).

Lyme Regis, with its remarkable situation, principal street hurrying into the water, the walk to the Cobb, and the beautiful line of cliffs, captivates the stranger's eye.
The surrounding scenes, such as Charmouth with its high grounds and sweet retired bay, and Pinny with its green chasms and romantic rocks, enhance the worth of Lyme.
Lyme Regis functions as an affective milieu within the novel.

Contagion of Passions: Passions are contagious, passing easily from one person to another and producing correspondent movements in all human breasts (Hume, A Treatise, p. 433).
Romantic Era Emotions: The romantic period increasingly claimed emotions as guarantors of individuality but also characterized feelings as transpersonal entities that wander extravagantly from one person to another (Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, p. 3).
Example from the Text:
- Captain Wentworth removes young Walter from Anne’s back due to her distress.
- Anne’s sensations on this discovery made her perfectly speechless.

Mutability of outer and inner world
Origins of Sensation: Persuasion explores the origins of sensation, memory, and nostalgia (Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, p. 10).
Anne’s Melancholy: Anne’s