Persuasion: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) Paperback - 2011

As a girl Jane Austen wrote stories, including burlesques of popular romances. Her works were only published after much revision, four novels being published in her lifetime. These are Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Two other novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published posthumously in 1818 with a biographical notice by her brother, Henry Austen, the first formal announcement of her authorship. Persuasion was written in a race against failing health in 1815-16. She also left two earlier compositions, a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan, and an unfinished novel, The Watsons. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel, Sanditon, a fragmentary draft of which survives.
Colm Tóibín was born in Ireland and lives in Dublin. He is one of Ireland's best known journalists. He is the author of The South, winner of the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Prize. In 1995, he was awarded the Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Prize. He is also the author of The Heather Blazing and The Story of the Night.

Juliette Wells is associate professor and chair of the English department at Goucher College. She is the author of Everybody's Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination and edited the 200th-anniversary Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Emma.