This is Not Anne Elliot

So I was looking up editions of Persuasion on the internet. Never you mind why. This, for the record, is “my” Persuasion:

Or at least, the one I’ve had since 2009, when I went to the Jane Austen’s letters exhibit in New York City. Before that I had a variety of others (including one with a salmon pink cover) and then for a few years, had only the one in my leather bound “complete works of Jane Austen” collection. But this one has a large, large index with all kinds of historical factoids (and a long digression that uses the dialogue to suss out exactly how incompetent the Musgrove sailor was on Wentworth’s ship, which is amusing).

I also own this Persuasion:

And another one that I can’t find the cover to online (it’s the “Annotated” Persuasion).

Harper Teen did their Twilight thing on it a few years back, complete with Twilighty title font:

But my absolute favorite is this one I just found:

How awesome is that? Because Anne would TOTALLY paint her fingernails red. That is SUCH a 1800s-daughter-of-a-baronet thing to do, you know? And the lipstick. And the cribbed-from-wicked-lovely pose.

The best part of this version — I know, better even than the fingernails — is hard to read in this picture, but allow me to share a detail shot:

Yes, that’s right. “Copyrighted material.”

Um… do they mean the picture? Is there an essay or an annotation or something in there written recently? Because they certainly can’t mean the text. Jane Austen is no longer under copyright, which, in the U.S., is defined as life of the author plus seventy-five years. That’s why there are so many bajillions of versions of Persuasion floating around. Because any publisher can put it up at any time.

Even with blood red fingernails on the cover.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for the final cover of my take on Persuasion, which is written entirely by me, and so actually is under copyright. But, hey, I’m feeling magnanimous today, so how about a snippet?

For four years she’d waited for Kai to come back, too, but he never had. Nor had he ever sent word of his whereabouts. In her dreams, she liked to imagine he’d ended up like one of the admiral’s men, content and employed. With his mechanical talent, he’d have made an excellent skilled laborer. But she’d heard too many stories of the things that happened to Post runaways. She’d heard of the dangers in Post enclaves. The brothels and the workhouses, the organ trade and the people who sold their bodies for illegal experimentation.
Elliot let her hand drop and curl inward. She brushed her left fingers over the back of her right hand, touching each knuckle, tracing the path of each vein. She couldn’t bear to think of Kai like that.