This collection of essays examines Austen in relation to her business. Many of these essays, including those by Julia Prewitt Brown, Margaret Drabble, Jan Fergus, Isobel Grundy, Gary Kelly, and Elaine Showalter, were first delivered as papers at the Lake Louise conference on "Persuasion". The collection's culmination is a short story by Margaret Drabble that aims to bring Austen's "Elliots of Kellynch Hall" into the 20th century.

Here we come to know Jane Austen by the company she keeps: her predecessors Fielding, Sterne, Lennox, and Burney, her contemporary Scott, and her successors Waugh and Amis--comic novelists all. And comedy is the connection between these twelve elegant essays by the distinguished academic Bruce Stovel, who most lovingly engages Austen herself through his studies of her comic novels, her art of conversation, her pleasure principle, and her prayers. Edited by Nora Foster Stovel, the collection includes an introduction by Juliet McMaster and an afterword by Isobel Grundy.