Sisterly Bonds Beyond the Grave: The Ethical Implications of Posthumously Publishing Jane Austen’s Persuasion

By the time that Jane Austen died in 1817, she had only published four novels. After her death, her family retained her other writings. Later that year, they published one of Austen’s finished manuscripts which became the novel Persuasion. This act of posthumous publication invokes inquiries into whether the action was ethical. In order to better understand the ethics of publishing Persuasion posthumously, one can look at information from Jane Austen’s life and ideas around posthumous actions. Even though Persuasion by Jane Austen was published posthumously, Austen’s choice to leave the manuscript with her sister and her completion of the novel supports the idea that the publication was warranted. Although discussion of the topic should be more nuanced than it currently is. This argument about the circumstances surrounding the publication of Persuasion involves five main topics: Jane Austen’s life and relationship to her family; the events surrounding Jane Austen’s illness and death; the novels Jane Austen was able to publish while she was alive; the context of the creation, content, and publication of Persuasion; and the ethics of posthumous publishing.