“Thou hast thy music too”:The Autumnal Duet in Jane Austen’s Persuasion

Jane Austen’s posthumously published novel Persuasion has been regarded as a foreshadowing of Romanticism, especially in its autumnal tone that has inherent intimacy with John Keats’s To Autumn and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind. Blending the stylistic disparities in the two Romanticist poems, Persuasion ’s autumnal sensation changes its colors from being tinged with Keats’s melancholy to the touch of Shelley’s animation. The integration of both tones has created a unique autumnal duet that is remindful of its Romanticist followers.