'Persuasion, The Companion Edition' Presents Austen's Last Finished Novel in the Text of the 1818 First Edition

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

"Persuasion, The Companion Edition" Presents Austen's Last Finished Novel in the Text of the 1818 First Edition

Restored by collation against the 1818 Murray printing, with ten readings restored, a Who's Who, four explainers, and thirty-two discussion questions fenced volume by volume

NEW YORK, Oct. 30, 2026, In late December 1817, six months after Jane Austen's death, John Murray published her last finished novel as the third and fourth volumes of a four-volume set whose first two volumes held the youthful *Northanger Abbey*. The title page is dated 1818; her brother Henry's Biographical Notice named her as an author in print for the first time; and even the title *Persuasion* is thought to be his choice. A new Companion Classics edition, Persuasion, The Companion Edition, presents the complete novel, 83,246 words, all twenty-four chapters, unabridged, in the text of that first edition, taken from Project Gutenberg eBook #105 and collated chapter by chapter against Internet Archive scans of the 1818 printing. Ten first-edition readings that later texts smoothed away are restored where Austen's first readers found them, among them the clause later printings lost at the novel's most famous moment, when Wentworth crosses to the writing table "and standing with his back towards Mrs Musgrove" draws out the letter that changes everything.

The novel of second chances is here in the words of 1818: a baronet reading his own entry in the *Baronetage* while his debts quietly foreclose on his hall; a daughter of twenty-seven, "only Anne" in her own family, who at nineteen was persuaded to refuse the man she loved; a wartime navy coming ashore in the peace of 1814, its captains rich with prize money and looking for homes, one of them the very officer Anne refused, returned to let himself, of all houses, into her father's; and a heroine who must learn whether constancy can survive eight years of being unheard. The edition prints the published 1818 text throughout: the different ending Austen drafted and cancelled, the only surviving manuscript of a finished Austen novel, is discussed in the companion material, not substituted for the ending she chose.

Companion Material

Around the novel, the companion material, all of it original to this edition, includes an introduction telling how the book came to be, the year's drafting, the cancelled ending and the letter that replaced it, the posthumous publication and the naming of its author; a Who's Who of nineteen entries, from Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth to Mrs. Smith and the Dalrymple cousins; four explainers, covering the wartime navy and the peace that beached it (prize money, half-pay, and promotion), the Elliots' finances and the entail that puts Kellynch in a tenant's hands rather than a buyer's, Bath society and its exact machinery of cards, calls, and concerts, and the novel's money, Wentworth's twenty-five thousand pounds against Anne's ten thousand that she cannot yet touch; a guide to the set pieces and the letter, from the *Baronetage*'s opening page to the fall on the Cobb at Lyme; a short life of Jane Austen; a guide to period money and customs; a reading schedule; and thirty-two discussion questions, spoiler-fenced volume by volume, so a book club can reach the Wentworth letter in Chapter 23 exactly when Austen timed it.

Book Club Kit

Alongside the book, the Persuasion, Book Club Kit offers the edition's discussion material as a printable PDF (24 pages, US Letter) for reading groups: a two-meeting reading plan (Volume I, Chapters 1-12; Volume II, Chapters 13-24); the edition's Who's Who and its four explainers in full; all thirty-two discussion questions re-arranged into the two meetings so nobody reads a spoiler before its volume; and the signature activity "The Letter, Rewritten," which asks every reader to write the letter Anne would have written from the writing table in Chapter 23, and then to defend, in the closing debate, whether she was right to submit at nineteen. The kit is available for $7 through the editor's Payhip store: https://payhip.com/horaceharriottjr

Availability

Persuasion, The Companion Edition is available now as an eBook ($9.99) through Payhip: https://payhip.com/horaceharriottjr, and in The Classics and Companions Shop on the editor's Linktree. Print editions follow on Amazon (paperback, $14.99; hardcover, $24.99). The text is public domain worldwide (Jane Austen died in 1817); all companion material is original to this edition. This is an independent publication, not affiliated with or endorsed by any Austen estate, museum, or modern adaptation.

About the editor

Horace Harriott Jr. is a New York-based author and editor of more than two dozen books, including The Side Hustle Handbook, Master Playbook and The Ultimate Commissary Cookbook. This edition is part of his Companion Classics series of reading-together editions of public-domain classics.

About the book

Persuasion, The Companion Edition, Jane Austen (author), Horace Harriott Jr. (editor). Companion Classics, independently published, October 2026. Text: the first edition (John Murray, London, published December 1817, title page dated 1818; Persuasion only, vols. III-IV of the set with Northanger Abbey), via Project Gutenberg eBook #105, collated against IA scans of the 1818 printing; ten readings restored; two volumes, twenty-four chapters; 83,246 words; interior proof 330 pages, 6 x 9 in.