Are you open to persuasion?

No, this is not a quiz to discover the flexibility of your personality!

We just want you to enjoy exploring how to get the most of Austen’s final (completed) novel, Persuasion.

Crossref-it.info has recently launched an online study guide where you can get to grips with (among other things) how the theme of the novel’s title runs through the text. The heroine, Anne Eliot, has to learn how to deal with the efforts of others to run her life, and work out who/what to listen to when making decisions. These are issues many of us may be confronting right now…

Spring has sprung

And that means that as you look around you, you realise that all sorts of other things have appeared without you noticing. The natural world has woken up, with leaves unfurling, fresh shoots sprouting from the earth and suddenly flowers following the longer, warmer beams of the sun. As Larkin put it so evocatively in The Trees:

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
…………
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

(To read more, check out the recently released Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems (Faber),
which contains all the published and unpublished verse, plus comprehensive notes.)

Literary developments

In the literary world, as well as the new crossref-it Persuasion guide, a few more events have
come to fruition:

• The bi-centenary of Charles Dickens’ birth has been celebrated (on 7th February)
• John Burnside has won the 2011 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry with Black Cat Bone (probably coming to an Eng. Lit syllabus near you in the next few years)
• Various literary works have made it on to the big screen, such as:
  • The Woman in Black (Susan Hill)
  • War Horse (Michael Morpurgo)
  • Coriolanus (Shakespeare)
• If you are studying anything by Angela Carter this year, try and grab a library copy of the new study of her and her work which appeared in Feb, A Card from Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp (Bloomsbury)
• Meanwhile, if Webster is on your syllabus, look out for the new production of The Duchess of Malfi at Kevin Spacey's Old Vic in London, which starts on 28th March (tomorrow).

The natural world and the world of literature are alive and active. Look around you and enjoy!