Though the grande armée was long defeated, and Napoleon on the first day of his voyage to St Helena when Jane Austen began writing on 8 August 1815, Persuasion is of all her novels the one most directly concerned with the effects of war. Patriotism has many moods, and the peacefulness of Emma, with its rural and indefinitely dated setting, is arguably as expressive of national feeling as the urgency of Mansfield Park with its explicit reminders of the ongoing campaign. But the plot of Persuasion points to a unique engagement with history, for it brings active service into the sphere of courtship for the first time. Its complicating presence there is already foreshadowed in Mansfield Park by the relationship between Fanny Price and her sailor brother William, whose limited time together is cut short by the summons to duty, and toned by the dread of parting. Wartime intimacies between naval men and women were inevitably broken in one way or another, and this is reflected in the multiple narratives of Persuasion, where events are kept to the period before Waterloo, the rupture between Commander Wentworth and Anne Elliot dating to some months after the naval action off St Domingo in 1806, and their renewed engagement and marriage to the early part of 1815, with the possibility of further action still pending.