The real Persuasion : portrait of a real-life Jane Austen heroine /Peter James Bowman.

"This is the story of Anne Elliot in Jane Austen's Persuasion. It is also the story - true this time - of Katherine Bisshopp, the clever, beautiful daughter of an old Sussex family. Drawing on Katherine's letters and journals and other family papers, this book relates the joys and anxieties of her youth, her harrowing eleven-year courtship with George Pechell, and their happy and prosperous union, which produced two daughters and a son. Splinter chapters draw parallels with Jane Austen's portrait of society and reveal the extraordinary coincidences of character and circumstance between Katherine Bisshopp and Anne Elliot, while the real woman's experiences after her marriage are seen as a possible future for the fictional heroine. The reality of history and the deeper truth of literature together yield a detailed picture of the age."--provided by the Publisher