This relatively short novel, her last, was written in the last few years of Jane Austen's life, and published only after her death in 1817 (though she described it, in a letter of March 13, 1116 as "a something ready for publication", she probably would have revised it further, if she had not already been ill with her eventually fatal disease by the time she stopped working on it). It involves an older heroine than any of her other novels do (Anne Elliot is 27), and is also the only novel whose events are explicitly dated to a specific year (1814-1815). Eight years before the novel begins, Anne Elliot (whom Jane Austen described in one of her letters as a "heroine [who] is almost too good for me") had been persuaded by an older friend of the family, in which she is overlooked by her vain and rank-proud baronet father and her cold and selfish elder sister. In its autumnal mood, this novel is more serious intone than most of Jane Austen's other works, an perhaps is the most conventionally "romantic" of them (and thus the one which has given rise to the most speculation about her own affairs of the heart --for example, by Kipling); however, there is still plenty of Jane Austen irony. Persuasion also contains more description of background and natural beauty than the previous novels. In her admiration for the seaside town of Lyme and dislike of Bath, Anne Elliot reflects her creator's preferences.

After she had finished the first version of Persuasion, Jane Austen was dissatisfied with the chapter in which Anne Elliot and the "unconsciously constant" Captain Wentworth are reconciled; she then wrote two replacement chapters which are universally considered much better than the first attempt. The manuscript of the cancelled chapter is the only original manuscript of any part of Jane Austen's published novels, which has survived.

In Persuasion, Jane Austen makes more justice to the impulse exigencies and the feelings than in other of her writings. When she describes Navy's families and the rural houses, transmits a richer feeling of life. The useless sensation of life, the social and familiar order, and a new birth of hope are ones of the most perfect aptitudes of Jane Austen. Persuasion makes a list of new interrogations, wants a new analysis of happiness and life nature, in a way that is very difficult to answer.