Deborah Barnum wrote about the publishing history of Northanger Abbey in December, at the beginning of my blog series “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,” and now that we’re about halfway through the series, she’s contributed a guest post on the publishing history of Persuasion.If you missed any of the posts on Northanger Abbey and want to catch up, you can find them all listed here. We’ll spend April, May, and June talking about Persuasion. 

Deb is a former law librarian and she’s currently the owner of Bygone Books, an online shop of collectible books in Burlington, Vermont. She’s the Co-Regional Coordinator for the Vermont Region of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), and she compiles the annual “Jane Austen Bibliography” for Persuasions-Online and the Burney bibliography for The Burney Journal. A long-time JASNA member, she serves on the Publications Committee. She’s also a board member of NAFCHL (North American Friends of Chawton House Library). You can find her online at Jane Austen in Vermont. Welcome back, Deb, and thank you for celebrating Persuasion with us!

Here’s the first paragraph of Deb’s post on Persuasion:

I begin with my own prejudice – Persuasion has long been my favorite Austen novel. One cannot dispute the joy of reading Pride and Prejudice; or the laughter at the pure innocence and brilliance of Northanger Abbey; we can sympathize with the moral steadfastness of Fanny in Mansfield Park, savor the (im)perfections of Emma (both the book and heroine!), and revel in that dawning realization that Sense and Sensibility is so much better than at first thought. But it is Persuasion that holds my abiding affection – a novel of second chances, a novel that seems closest in some inexplicable way to Jane Austen herself, a romance where she actually plays out the agony of lost and found love, and so unlike her, a profession of love that she actually doesn’t back off from and leave the reader to their own imaginings!

But here today, I am only going to talk of how it all came to be…

Read the rest on her blog, Jane Austen in Vermont.

Sixteenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit “Youth and Experience.”  Coming soon: guest posts by L. Bao Bui, Daniel Woolf, and Elisabeth Lenckos.

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