Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal and Persuasions On-Line: ‘Formed for [an] Elegant and Rational Society’

In this essay, Susan Allen Ford provides a history of Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, showing how the change from a newsletter for members to a journal that serves a complex audience that is both academic and non-academic was a gradual, though not an entirely smooth, process. If in its beginnings the editorial position was defined partly in resistance to the academic world, the early years of the journal reveal an attempt to figure out what readers wanted and needed as the organisation was built. She explores also how what came to be imagined for both the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) and its journal was oxymoronic: sportive thought or serious fun. She finds that even though Persuasions became more academic in nature over the years, it has always, because of its wide and complex audience, avoided highly theoretical and jargon-laden approaches. Many developments in academic literary criticism over the forty-odd years of Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line have proved well suited to the interests of JASNA members.