Persuasion is Jane Austen's last completed novel. She began it soon after she had finished Emmaand completed it in August 1816. She died, at age 41, in 1817; Persuasion was published in December of that year. Persuasion is linked to Northanger Abbey not only by the fact that the two books were originally bound up in one volume and published together, but also because both stories are set partly in Bath, a fashionable city with which Austen was well acquainted, having lived there from 1801 to 1805.