Debate fills the penultimate chapter of Persuasion. Anne Elliot, faced with Captain Harville's accusations about the inconstancy of women, his threat to call up ‘fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument’ from histories, stories, songs, and proverbs, replies firmly, ‘if you please, no reference to examples in books’. They are all written by men, who, she says, ‘have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove any thing’. But the one who said this first was Chaucer's Wife of Bath. Driven distracted by Jankyn's collection of stories and proverbs about wicked women, she insisted that all depends upon who tells the story:

Anne Elliot and the Wife of Bath might seem a capricious, even ludicrous pairing, but the similarity suggests that Jane Austen read Chaucer with attention.

What are we to do with this allusion? It does seem that Jane Austen often knew novels, plays, or poems virtually by heart, entering into their imagined worlds until they were as real to her as life itself.