ABSTRACT
In this essay, Michael D. Lewis explores how friendship interested Austen from the start to the end of her writings. He considers Persuasion in relation to these questions that persist across centuries, even millennia, arguing that friendship is most robust and transgressive in Austen’s final novel. The essay reviews major critical treatments of the novel, summarising what they argue about personal relationships, political issues, and the relation between the two and then moves to a reading of Persuasion that demonstrates how friendship fills the void left by family, as Anne Elliot receives intense feeling and equitable exchange from those remarkably unlike her aristocratic family, thereby gesturing toward new relations—personal, political, literary.
