Melissa Sodeman, from “Domestic Mobility in Persuasion and Sanditon”

In this article, Melissa Sodeman analyzes Austen’s late fiction in terms of evolving concepts of the domestic. The excerpt below is focused on Persuasion, and on Anne Elliot’s movements: initially settled at home on the family’s landed estate, she transitions to a more itinerant life, first in Bath and then as a Naval officer’s wife. Sodeman argues that this increased mobility reflects a larger movement in which private and domestic relationships are increasingly bound together with larger public and national concerns. For Anne Elliot, this opening up of physical and psychological space is a positive development away from a comparatively cloistered domesticity.

Melissa Sodeman, from “Domestic Mobility in Persuasion and Sandition”