Persuasion

I love this book so much because it’s about two people giving their relationship a second chance.

At first it made me feel sad because the heroine Anne Elliot could so easily have been happy with Captain Wentworth when he first proposed. It’s only when he returns to the area years later that she begins to listen to her heart rather than her head.

The years have changed them and they need to rediscover each other before they can be truly happy. It’s a quiet and deeply moving love story.

I can’t remember the first time that I read Persuasion, but I re-read it every year for the depth and empathy with which Austen brings Anne to life, as well as she draws other characters.

At the beginning of the novel Anne Elliot is presented as a young woman who has lost nearly everything – her mother at a tender age, the love of her life, and is about to lose her home. She has a cold and unsympathetic father and sisters and very little else.

The deed is done and she has to move from her home, but… show more.

Persuasion is Austen’s most mature and humane novel, often overlooked for Pride and Prejudice. 

Anne Elliot has lost her looks and her home. She goes to visit her younger sister and then moves permanently to Bath. Into these scenes enters the one man she ever loved and was persuaded not to marry.

He now has a tidy fortune, and Anne watches from the sidelines as he flirts with her sisters-in-law. She keeps a bland demeanor as her heart shatters over and over again, and I admire this, as well as her steadfastness of heart when all hope is lost.… show more.

Customs and social mores may change, but human beings remain much the same. Jane Austen speaks as loudly to today’s reader as she did in her all too brief lifetime.

This is the perfect story of love between two people who have lived long enough to make mistakes and rule them. I can think of no more perfect last chapter. Enjoy!

This is the odd one out in my selection, because it was actually written at the time it was set.

It’s Austen’s only novel featuring more mature people, Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth, the man she was forced to jilt when she was a girl. The slow, measured reunion of two people you would like as your friends has to my mind never been better.

This story showcases two people getting over themselves. This is a theme in many of Austen’s works. She doesn’t believe in the ‘renovate your partner’ thing and honestly, I’ve never seen that work in real life. What we have here, are two people who inspire each other to emotional bravery, constancy, and vulnerability (in the 1800s – I give them a little grace for this).

If you’re not familiar with the story, know that the couple were once engaged, and the lady was persuaded to step away. Eight years pass, and true love holds true indeed – but there are… show more.

There is recourse to the enduring classic and Jane Austen’s Persuasion has to be the favourite. The opening chapters depict the lonely figure of Anne, the middle sister of three, who has lost her bloom, struggling to live well at a time when her future, and her family’s, is precarious has the all the melancholy of lost hope and neglected chances. This is a novel where the spectre of autumn hovers. Yet, as the plot progresses, the spectre lifts and is chased away and Anne moves towards a late blooming. As a young woman, she was persuaded to turn down… show more.

I chose the author’s last complete novel, posthumously published, instead of the more famous Pride & Prejudice, though I allow myself to re-read both once a decade. There’s a poignancy from an author who understands the consequences of missed opportunity. Anne Elliot was unwisely persuaded to reject the man she loved. Several years later she is effectively an old maid, while his fortunes have risen and make him a fine catch. Fate throws them together but old wounds run deep, creating suffering on both sides.

If Pride and Prejudice is the gateway drug, Persuasion is the apex of Austen’s powers and second for that reason. While coping with an illness that would kill her a year later, Austen created in Anne Elliot a non-traditional, non-scrappy heroine who will, despite her own grief and the mendacious efforts of those around her, find the happiest of endings. Persuasion is elegiac, thoughtful, consuming, and sometimes despairing, and the love letter at its end has all the heft and thunderclap of a thousand thrillers.