1055 JANE AUSTEN’S CAPE CONNECTION

Finuala Dowling, poet and novelist

Jane Austen died two hundred years ago on 18 July 1817. In her last completed novel, Persuasion, a character who has spent some time at the Cape proves pivotal to the plot. This lunchtime lecture unravels what Austen may have known about the Cape, and the small but significant role this knowledge played in the fiction of a writer whose posthumous fame has almost equalled Shakespeare’s.

Recommended reading

Austen, J.  Persuasion. (Any edition.)