Persuasion

By Jane Austen and Todd Webb

The last novel completed by Jane Austen and widely seen as its most mature work, Persuasion is set during the Napoleonic Wars and several of its characters are, like two of Austen's own brothers, officers in the Royal Navy. It is, of course, a love story, but the heroine is no longer a very young girl. The novel is best remembered for its use of free indirect speech as well as for its attention to contemporary historical events. This edition is accompanied by close to one hundred explanatory notes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Universitas Press
• Release date: Sep 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781988963884

Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775–1817) was an English novelist whose work centred on social commentary and realism. Her works of romantic fiction are set among the landed gentry, and she is one of the most widely read writers in English literature.

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Introduction

Todd Webb

Where to begin? Perhaps with a Frenchman. Not with Napoleon Bonaparte, mind you, whose epoch-defining career coincided with Jane Austen’s adult life and whose downfall shapes the plot of Persuasion. More about him shortly. Instead we will start with a better, kinder man who lived well before Austen’s day. Blaise Pascal was a brilliant polymath who, while producing mathematical and theological works, also had some thoughts about the Art of Persuasion. For Pascal, writing in the seventeenth century, there were basically two types of persuasion: of the reason and of the will––what we might call the head and heart. Wishing to think of themselves as rational beings, most people acknowledge that we ought never to consent to any but demonstrated truths arrived at through thoughtful analysis, Pascal stated; yet it is often the case that people are led to believe not through proof, but through that which is attractive (193) in the moment. For Pascal, there would almost always be a contest between these two types of persuasion, but, every now and then, the urges of a person’s head and heart might unite, leading to a determination to take action so powerful that nothing in nature can outdo them (195).

It is likely impossible to know whether or not Jane Austen read the works of Blaise Pascal––she does not mention him in her surviving letters––and yet his approach to the concept of the art of persuasion does nicely incapsulate the problem faced, and solution achieved by several of the main characters in Persuasion. Austen started writing the novel on 8 August 1815 and, according to her sister Cassandra, finished a final draft just under a year later on 6 August 1816. After that, her health rapidly declined. Austen died in the city of Winchester on 18 July 1817. Persuasion appeared five months later, on 20 December 1817, in a four-volume set, printed alongside Northanger Abbey and a pious biographical note about the dearly departed author written by her brother, Henry.[1] Cassandra Austen later noted that the book’s name had been a good deal discussed between Jane and herself, and that among several possible titles, the one that seemed most likely to be chosen was ‘The Elliots’ (M.A. Austen-Leigh 126) after the family at the centre of the plot. It was likely Henry Austen who chose to ignore his sisters’ wishes, if he even knew about them at the time, and decided to have the novel published as Persuasion, highlighting one of the themes that we will examine in this introduction. We will also look at the way that Jane Austen critiqued the Britain of her time, dealing with aristocratic vanity, the importance of social utility, and the idea of ‘restoration’ in the process.

War, Peace, and the Austen Family

Before we come to those themes, however, it is important to note that, in terms of its plot, characters, and setting, Persuasion is among Jane Austen’s most historically grounded works. As if in acknowledgment of that point, contemporaries, as well as later scholars, have looked closely at Austen’s life in an effort to find the real-life inspiration for the novel’s cast. For instance, Ann Barrett, who knew Austen when she was writing Persuasion, stated categorically that its main protagonist, Anne Elliot, was the author herself; her enthusiasm for the navy, and her perfect unselfishness reflect her completely (J.E. Austen-Leigh 197). Cassandra Austen may have agreed, writing Dear, Dear Jane! This deserves to be written in letters of gold beside a passage in the novel describing how Anne had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older––the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning. Later writers, such as the historian Brian Southam, have argued that the lives of two of Austen’s brothers, Charles and Francis, who both served in the British navy, bear directly on Persuasion (8), while Sheila Johnson Kindred has pointed more particularly to the experience of Fanny Palmer Austen, wife of Charles, as having shaped some aspects of Anne Elliot and the novel’s two naval wives, Mrs. Croft and Mrs. Harville (194). All of this may be true, but it is difficult, in the absence of concrete evidence, to make definite identifications between real people and fictional characters. Perhaps, on the whole, it is safer to examine how Austen’s times influenced her novel in a more general way. In other words, to gain a sense of the war that Britain fought first with revolutionary and then with imperial France, leading to a brief interlude of peace in 1814 and early 1815 during which the action of Persuasion is set, as well as the ways that the Austen family experienced that struggle.

Britain and France already had a lengthy history of being at odds with one another on the international stage when, on 1 February 1793, the deputies of the new republican government of France, the National Convention, declared war on Britain, eleven days after their former king, Louis XVI, was guillotined, having been found guilty of treason against the revolution that his own people began in 1789. The British had experienced regicide and republicanism in the mid-seventeenth century, but that ended with the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660; now, in 1793, a majority of the population turned out solidly against this French challenge to the established norms of what was known as old regime society. British men rushed to join volunteer regiments to protect their country from possible invasion from abroad and subversion at home. On the other side of the English Channel, however, the National Convention refused to be defeated, despite facing the combined challenges of war, civil war, and economic collapse. In response to these crises, the French government appointed a twelve-member Committee of Public Safety made up of committed revolutionaries. Between September 1793 and July 1794, those twelve Jacobin deputies created the world’s first revolutionary dictatorship and mobilized France in an effort to preserve the republic from its own internal and external enemies.[2] The success of this violent but effective effort ensured that the war between Britain and France would continue. That long conflict was a fairly evenly matched affair, at least until its last few years. First under various republican regimes and then, after 1804, under the imperial rule of Napoleon Bonaparte, France dominated mainland Europe. A tremendous run of French victories only ended in 1812 with the disastrous failure of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Everything went wrong for the French war effort after that, as we will see in a moment. Over the same period, Britain helped to fund mostly unsuccessful military campaigns against France on the European continent and sent an army of its own to help fight Napoleon’s forces in Spain, but its main efforts were at sea. There the British navy became the dominant power in the world, after its victory over the combined fleets of France and Spain at the battle of Trafalgar in October 1805 and its defeat of another French squadron off the coast of the Caribbean island of San Domingo in February 1806.

All of that brings us to the period that forms the historical backdrop for Persuasion: the months between the summer of 1814 and the end of February 1815. This is a point known as the first restoration. Some weeks earlier, in the spring of 1814, the allied forces of old regime Europe pushed the Emperor Napoleon’s armies back into France. As the historian Philip Mansel notes, the streets of Paris had been made impassable by the arrival of peasants fleeing the fighting and so chaotic had the situation become that dead civilians and soldiers had to be buried in mass graves or thrown in the Seine river (2). In these desperate circumstances, Napoleon abdicated on 6 April 1814. As the former emperor travelled south to a small island kingdom of Elba, granted to him as a sort of consolation prize by his triumphant opponents, the exiled king of France, Louis XVIII, arrived in Paris after a twenty-three-year long absence as the morbidly obese embodiment of a restored monarchy.[3] At about the same time, while the armies and navies of Europe began to demobilize, Europe’s leading statesmen gathered in the city of Vienna in order to turn the clock back to 1789, attempting to reverse many of the political and social changes unleashed by the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. But cannier politicians, such as Napoleon’s former chief of police Joseph Fouché, suspected that Europe had not seen the end of upheaval. He predicted that the spring of 1815 would bring [Napoleon] Bonaparte back to us, with the swallows and the violets (quoted in Braude 147). Fouché was right: Napoleon and a small force sailed from Elba on 26 February 1815 and landed on the southern coast of France four days later. The war was back on, only to be ended by a second restoration following a general European remobilization and the emperor’s defeat at the battle of Waterloo in June 1815 by Prussian and British-led armies.

Like many people in Britain, Jane Austen and her family followed the ups and downs of the British war effort on both land and sea. For instance, when an army led by Sir John Moore was forced to retreat to the port city of Corunna in Spain, Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra, bemoaning the fate of our poor Army, whose state seems dreadfully critical (Letters 170).[4] Victories were as noteworthy as disasters, of course: when Napoleon abdicated in 1814, Austen’s niece, Fanny Knight, recorded the glorious news of Buonaparte [sic] vanquished and dethroned (quoted in Tomalin 244). For her part, Austen could be cruelly flippant about the army’s losses in achieving such triumphs, remarking, in 1811, how horrible it is to have so many people killed––And what a blessing that one cares for none of them! (Letters 200). She always took the navy more seriously. The reason is easy enough to find: her brothers, Charles and Francis, like other gentlemen of uncertain fortune,[5] had joined that branch of the military in their early teens and became captains of their own ships by the time of Britain’s war against Napoleonic France.

While following her brothers’ careers, Jane Austen discovered a great deal about naval life. She learned that, unlike the army, the navy could at least claim to be a meritocracy. It was possible for the sons of a country clergyman, like Charles and Francis Austen, to become officers. Even Britain’s most celebrated sailor, Horatio Nelson, was the child of a Church of England minister and his various successes in battle earned him elevation to the peerage. But, for better or worse, young men who joined the navy as aristocrats still tended to have an advantage over their middle-class contemporaries, as was the case in most areas of British society. Nelson thought that such class-based favouritism was definitely for the worse. He complained that orders are not for them––at least, I never yet knew one [nobleman] who obeyed, while another admiral who had risen through the ranks, Lord St. Vincent, growled that this vast overflow of young nobility in the Service makes rapid strides to the decay of seamanship, as well as subordination (both quoted in Rodger 513). In the navy, it was ultimately better to be useful, no matter what your social status, than to be high born. And, as the case of Nelson demonstrated, wartime service gave such skilled, middle-class officers an opportunity to get ahead socially and, through the capture of enemy ships, even to make their fortune. Under the prize system, the proceeds from any captured ship were shared among the crew, with the largest pay-out going to the senior officers. The Austen brothers do not seem to have gained much through this practice, financially, even though Francis fought at the battle of San Domingo. But both men had the consolation of loving wives who experienced a life typical of naval spouses. As Jane Austen knew through both direct contact and correspondence, these women sometimes joined their husbands at sea and, at other times, waited anxiously in port cities for them to return from active duty. It could be an adventurous existence, but it was also often a difficult one.

Vain Aristocrats and Useful Sailors

There is disagreement among scholars concerning what Jane Austen wanted to say in her novels about the unsettled times that made up so much of her adult life. In a classic account, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Marilyn Butler argues that Austen was part of an anti-Jacobin tradition given life by the Irish-born politician Edmund Burke’s polemical Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) that denounced the course and perceived excesses of the French Revolution. For Butler, Persuasion fits this pattern, presenting, in Captain Frederick Wentworth, a modern-minded man from the conservative point of view (275) and offering a critique of the British aristocracy’s claim to national leadership that was in line with a familiar kind of conservative social comment (284). From such a perspective, Britain’s aristocrats were no longer fulfilling the leadership role expected of their class, having descended in self-serving vanity, unlike the men of the navy who had proven their use in active defence of their country. As Helena Kelly points out, however, it is equally possible to read this attack on the British aristocracy and celebration of the navy as an effort that was as potentially revolutionary as any of the works produced by the more openly radical writers of Britain during 1790s and early 1800s. The trouble, Kelly argues, is that Austen’s books are so cleverly crafted that unless readers are looking in the right places––reading them in the right way––they simply won’t understand their subversive nature (33). Whichever of those images of Austen we choose to accept, the conservative or the closet rebel, both Butler and Kelly suggest an important point. As was the case with Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice before it, one of Austen’s aims in Persuasion is to present a message about British society through contrasting pairs: in this case, aristocratic vanity versus the private and public utility of the navy.

Austen makes her position on Britain’s aristocracy clear from the opening paragraphs of Persuasion. She introduces Sir Walter Elliot, a baronet obsessed with vanity of person and of situation. His only reading is a copy of John Debrett’s two-volume Baronetage of England (1808). There Sir Walter can repeatedly peruse the history of his family:

Walter Elliot, born March 1, 1760, married, July 15, 1784, Elizabeth, daughter of James Stevenson, Esq. of South Park, in the county of Gloucester; by which lady (who died 1800) he has issue Elizabeth, born June 1, 1785; Anne, born August 9, 1787; a still-born son, Nov. 5, 1789; Mary, born Nov. 20, 1791.

Austen gives a hint here about the trajectory of Sir Walter’s story that readers at the time would have picked up on at once. If Sir Walter’s ideal is to live as his ancestors did when they were first elevated to the dignity of baronet, in the first year of Charles II in 1660, that dream has been complicated by the death of his only son. Instead, the estate of Kellynch Hall will have to pass to a mere William Walter Elliot, Esq., not an aristocrat at all and estranged from Sir Walter. In other words, the ruin of Sir Walter’s hopes began in 1789, the year that saw the beginning of the French Revolution. His fixation on superficial appearances and obsession with social rank can be seen, in this context, as doomed attempts to deny that the old regime of his forebearers has been broken beyond repair. His efforts to run down the genuinely useful men of the navy––declaring that a sailor grows old sooner than any other man, losing his good looks while enduring the rigours of life at sea, and that he objects to the service as being the means of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction, and raising men to honours which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt of––are ultimately as ineffective as were the efforts of the politicians at Vienna to hold back the revolutionary tide flowing across Europe. That is because Sir Walter has badly mismanaged his estate. He must retrench: a process of financial self-denial to which he objects since it could compromise the family’s dignity. As the novel begins, however, whatever dignity the Elliots once possessed has already been dissipated by Sir Walter’s self-centredness. Austen makes this point when she notes that, as he decides to rent Kellynch Hall and retreat to the city of Bath, Sir Walter prepared with condescending bows for all the afflicted tenantry and cottagers who might have had a hint to shew themselves. The departure of the lord of the manor is not a matter of regret among his people, who would never have gathered to see him off of their own accord. The bonds of respect between social superiors and inferiors have been severed. Having determined to leave his family home, Sir Walter gives way to Admiral and Mrs. Croft, a naval couple who represent everything that he is not, as we will see.

The curse of what another character describes as the Elliot pride is not confined to one person or gender. Sir Walter’s eldest and youngest daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, are equally prone to aristocratic vanity, and even the level-headed and much put-upon Anne cannot entirely escape its influence. Elizabeth has no habits of utility abroad, no talents or accomplishments for home, to occupy her empty days. Instead, she follows her father’s lead: in any struggle between propriety and vanity, Austen remarks, vanity got the better of her. When in public, father and daughter demonstrate a heartless elegance that forestalls genuine social interaction. Their main goal in Bath is to latch on to their more noble cousin Lady Dalrymple and her daughter, Miss Carteret, whom Anne describes as nothing, lacking any superiority of manner, accomplishment, or understanding. In the meantime, Mary, wedded to Charles Musgrove, a well-to-do member of the gentry, is an amplification of all the flaws of her family. She is not comic––she is unbearable, the critic Tony Tanner writes, and a most insufferable snob (216). Mary has, indeed, inherited a considerable share of the Elliot self-importance, and, besides being a hypochondriac, is very prone to add to every other distress that of fancying herself neglected and ill-used. She demands constant recognition of her social superiority over her Musgrove in-laws, though it is fairly clear that Austen wants us to see the Musgroves as a family moving with the times: loving, rambunctious, and sometimes over-enthusiastic, but in a state of alteration, perhaps of improvement. So powerful is this overinflated sense of Elliot pride that Anne, whose generous attachment to her fellow beings is not to be compared to the selfish vanity of her elder sister, is not immune to it. She is briefly bewitched by the prospect of marrying Mr. William Elliot and of becoming the new Lady Elliot of Kellynch Hall, like her mother before her. And, when Mr. Elliot’s true character is revealed by Anne’s old school friend, Mrs. Smith, she still has enough family feeling to be humiliated to reflect on the constant deception practiced on her father and Elizabeth.

Having drawn this critical picture of a vain aristocratic class, Austen uses the knowledge she gained through her family’s wartime experiences to create an alternative image of Britain: a navy whose men and women are useful to one another, society, and the national war effort. As Tony Tanner notes, by the time Austen came to write Persuasion, ‘utility’ was becoming a word of approval with her (231). Utility or some version of that word––useful or usefulness, for example––does show up frequently in the novel, describing characteristics notably lacking in Sir Walter and Elizabeth Elliot, Mary Musgrove, and their fellow aristocrats, but possessed by naval officers and their spouses. Tanner is correct when he writes that it is impossible to say if Austen was influenced directly or indirectly by the philosopher of Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham (231).[6] Bentham’s dictum of ‘the greatest good to the greatest number’ does, nevertheless, sum up the way Austen portrays her seafaring men and women: Admiral and Mrs. Croft, Captain and Mrs. Harville, and Captain Frederick Wentworth. Admiral and Mrs. Croft are helpful to one another and to almost everyone they encounter, we are told. Before the peace came in 1814 and Britain’s sailors began to demobilize, Mrs. Croft accompanied her husband back and forth across the Atlantic, finding life on a warship as comfortable . . . as in the best house in England. She is a rational woman, not an aristocratic lady, happy to take the reins from her husband in order to avoid upsets, while her husband, a veteran of the battle of Trafalgar, rejects the vanity of Sir Walter, banishing all the large looking-glasses from the baronet’s dressing room at Kellynch Hall. The Crofts, Anne is forced to admit, turn out to be better hands at looking after the Elliot estate and its people than its owners. The Harvilles are equally good at making a happy life for themselves while being of use to others. They are unaffected, warm, and obliging and the captain has a mind of usefulness and ingenuity, fixing up their small house in the seaside town of Lyme to the best possible account. And, despite the tight quarters, when Louisa Musgrove is injured in a fall, the Harvilles welcome her and her family to their house. As for Captain Wentworth, he fought at the battle of San Domingo and proved himself a capable officer during the rest of the war, defending Britain against Napoleon’s forces while making a handsome fortune of £25,000 from prizes in the process. None of that matters to Sir Walter Elliot, of course. In a typical moment, he comments dismissively that Wentworth’s people are nobodies since they have nothing to do with the earls of Strafford, who share the same family name. As far as we can tell, Sir Walter himself contributed nothing to Britain’s war effort against Napoleon.

Though she uses naval life as a positive counterpoint to Britain’s culture of aristocratic vanity, Austen knew about the rough nature of life at sea. She was too honest a writer to gloss over it entirely, but, even here, such flaws tend to reflect well on her naval characters and the service in general. For example, when Wentworth joins the Musgroves, Crofts, and Anne Elliot for dinner, he remarks that the directors of the navy, the Admiralty, entertain themselves now and then, with sending a few hundred men to sea, in a ship not fit to be employed. But, he adds, they have a great many to provide for. This was true: the British navy, even during the height of the war against Napoleon, was oversupplied with prospective captains. There were simply not enough ships to go around. In this context, as Admiral Croft remarks, Wentworth was a lucky fellow to get any thing so soon, with no more interest than his. He has made his way up the naval ranks on his own merits, in other words, with little or no help from an aristocratic patron.[7] And, having gained his captaincy, Wentworth was able to be of some service to Mrs. Musgrove’s son, Richard ‘Dick’ Musgrove, before the action of the novel begins. Described in one of its more controversial sections as a very troublesome, hopeless fellow, Dick Musgrove died at sea. His passing is marked by the large fat sighings of his mother, but he is otherwise dismissed as a young man whom alive nobody had cared for. This gleefully brutal portrayal of sacrifice and maternal grief has troubled some scholars, but it should not. It is probably a more realistic account of the role that the navy played in the thinking of some families than Austen’s celebration of the domestic felicity of the Crofts and Harvilles. Famously––and perhaps the story was known to Austen herself––when Horatio Nelson first thought about going to sea, his uncle, Captain Maurice Suckling, wrote to the boy’s father, stating let him come; and the first time we go into action, a cannon-ball may knock off his head, and provide for him at once (quoted in Oman 10). Death in battle, Suckling was promising, would relieve young Nelson’s family of one of its financial burdens.[8] The navy’s usefulness to the people of Britain operated on a number of levels, not all of them particularly nice.

As useful as Austen’s naval characters are, despite whatever challenges they might face in the service, when the novel’s crisis comes at the end of the first volume, it is another character altogether who proves their value: Anne Elliot. This episode is worth examining in some detail. A party, including Mary and Charles Musgrove, the sisters Louisa and Henrietta Musgrove, Captain Wentworth, and Anne have travelled to Lyme. There they meet Captain and Mrs. Harville and another of Wentworth’s fellow officers, the lovelorn Captain Benwick. In a moment of unthinking high spirits, Louisa jumps off some steps on the Cobb, a breakwater, expecting Wentworth to catch her. Instead, she falls on the pavement and is taken up lifeless! What ensues is predictable and surprising in equal measure. In the face of possible catastrophe, with workmen and boatmen gathering to enjoy the sight of a dead young lady, Mary Musgrove proves typically useless, screaming and making her husband Charles immoveable by catching hold of him in her panic. Henrietta Musgrove faints and even the usually reliable Wentworth loses his composure and coherence, staggering against the wall for his support, almost lost for words. In a reversal of typical gender norms, it is Anne who summons order from all of this chaos, helping to support Henrietta, calling for a surgeon, sending Benwick to fetch one, while also trying to bring comfort to the others, including Wentworth. In the aftermath of the disaster, with Louisa settled at the Harvilles’ house, Wentworth states emphatically that if Anne will stay, no one so proper, so capable as Anne! Though Mary Musgrove overrules the captain, complaining that she should not be sent away since Anne was nothing to Louisa, while she was her sister, this is a turning point in the novel. Wentworth’s regard for Anne is rekindled by this demonstration of her utility. It is a sign that she is different from the self-obsessed aristocratic class in which she was born––and, just as importantly, that she has matured, become more decisive in her actions, since the summer of 1806 when she allowed her friend Lady Russell and, to a lesser extent, her own family to persuade her to reject Wentworth’s initial marriage proposal.

Anne Elliot and the Art of Persuasion

On one level, Anne Elliot’s story reinforces Austen’s critique of the class-based society of her time. When Wentworth first proposed to Anne in the summer of 1806, he seemed to be too poor, too socially inconsequential, and too uncertain in his future prospects to be worthy of marrying into the family of a baronet. By 1814-15, though his personality has changed in some ways, Wentworth remains much the same honourable man that he was eight years earlier, but now he has gained wealth and status through his naval service. Lady Russell, who wants to see great things for her protégé, Anne, and the rest of the Elliots are finally brought around to seeing the captain’s worth through his hard-won financial security.

Reviews for Persuasion

[kalliegrace · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love Austen, everything I read of hers takes a few dozen pages to get going but then grabs my attention so thoroughly I don't want it to end. This is a very quiet novel, with most of the progression happening in the thoughts of our main character, but it is lovely and gripping just the same.

[japaul22 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I do love this one. I think Captain Wentworth is my favorite of the love interests in Austen's novels. This one has a really different feel from the others (though honestly, the more often I reread her six completed novels, the more I find them all incredibly different from each other). [Persuasion] has a more romantic feel - romantic in terms of the writing style. There is more poetry, more dramatic events, and more internal emotion described. I also noticed how well Austen rekindles the romance between Anne and Wentworth by small looks (or lack of eye contact), small physical interactions, and by what they say to others. I do wish that she'd developed the relationship between Mrs. Clay and Mr. Elliot (the younger) a bit better. I think if she'd been able to do a bit more revision before she died, she would have.

[pgchuis · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Re-read for my OU course. Short and relatively light, despite being seen as her most "mature" work. I like Admiral Croft and his happy marriage - a picture of what Anne and Wentworth can aspire to. Mr Elliot's character is not entirely convincing, I don't think - if he is so concerned to keep an eye on Sir Walter, why doesn't he just marry Elizabeth at the end? I also find it hard to warm to Mrs Smith, who is by turns uncomplaining, happy to exploit Anne's influence when she becomes Mrs Elliot, and then very keen to expose Mr Elliot's wickedness and complain a lot. Mary's character is very entertaining and I think Lady Russell a little underwritten. I'm glad Wentworth and Anne get together again obviously, but their only real one on one conversation prior to this is the one they have at the concert in Bath - obviously a lot of meaningful glances and telepathy involved as well.

[kjuliff-519887 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Those people in the upper echelons of society had too much time on their hands.With no screens, cars and in a time of peace, novels were full of talk of the minutiae of daily life, and the weather.I remember my own first love tearing to small pieces his copy of Pride and Prejudice, in utter disgust, and though I rank Jan5e Austen novel amongst my favorites, I can now, all those years later, see his point.Like Anne Elliot, I left my young lover, only to spend much of the rest of my life regretting it. But at least I had the good sense, and lack of talent not to write about it.Persuasion is much ado about nothing. Every facial nuance, every step, every jaunt into town is described in such meandering detail. I do not want to offend lovers of Ms Austen, but really….It has been decades since my Mr Wentworth tore up Persuasion in fury at what he saw at a Mills and Boon romance. He was. Wrong, and so was I. Not your normal review. But neither was Mr Wentworth’s letter. Mr Wentworth would have been better off had Snapchat been available. And I? Well it took me decades to get around to reading Persuasion, and I have to think I’d have been better off not reading it. Apologies to Austen fans.

[seriousgrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As you probably remember from your high school literature class, there is not a whole lot of excitement happening in Persuasion. This is a character driven story based on personality, dialogue and society. Austen's keen sense of observation was not in what people did, but how they did them.Confessional: sometimes the characters drove me crazy. Maybe it was a Victorian societal thing, but I was annoyed with one character who was disagreeable to be in the confidences of other residents, especially when they constantly bitched to her about others. Mary is annoying with her fashionable hysterics, ailments and imaginary agitations. I liked the more clever persuasions, like when Anne was persuaded to think the engagement an indiscreet and improper mistake. I couldn't help but feel sorry for Anne as isolated and unloved as she was. Jane Austen had a tongue-in-cheek humor. My favorite line was something like, "He took out a gun but never killed. Such a gentleman."

[bodagirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For a long time, I've said that Persuasion was my favorite of Austen's novel, but this reread has made me reevaluate. While Austen is still poking fun at English society, Anne is a very non-modern heroine who comes across as a most tragic character: hemmed in by the society's strictures, taken advantage of by her family, and generally overlooked. She is just waiting for things to happen and is patiently resigned when things don't. Wentworth as a hero is more palatable, but his pride and hurt stymy his growth too much. That letter though! The pacing is uneven - nothing much happening except introducing a lot of side characters who aren't that memorable (I still can't keep Louisa and Henrietta straight), until the last few chapters when most things are resolved with an underwhelming amount of drama. I think P&P is my current favorite, even if it is expected.

[heychowda · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Finished Persuasion tonight on the drive home from work listening to the Audible version. My first encounter with Jane Austen, with the exception of getting about 4 pages in on Sense and Sensibilty a while back before becoming distracted with life .Why have I waited so long?It was lovely. Captain Wentworth's letter alone made the entire journey worthwhile. I think the narrator, Greta Scacchi, enhanced my experience with her pleasing voice.I have paper versions of Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Sense and Sensibilty, as these are all on my bucket list. Deciding which to read first.

[lslabach-623446 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

My all time favorite Jane Austen--so many delicious moments! Sorry, Darcy fans, but Captain Wentworth is who I would choose. Heavy sigh ...

[ms_rowse · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

My most favorite Austen. At least once a year I pull it out to read the letter that Wentworth writes to Anne...it fills me with hope that in my old age I might find someone who loves me.

[raizel_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A nice quote showing Anne's astute observation of the relationship between Admiral Croft and his wife by describing what happens when the Admiral takes her for a drive:"But by coolly giving the reins a better direction herself they happily passed the danger; and by once afterwards judiciously putting out her hand they neither fell into a rut, or ran foul of a dung-cart; and Anne with some amusement at their style of driving, which she imagined no bad representation of he general guidance of their affairs, found herself safely deposited by them at the Cottage." [p. 66]

[stbyra · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I saw the Masterpiece version years before reading this, so was interested to see how they differed. Not much, but then Masterpiece knows how to translate book to screen with the best of them.

[adonisguilfoyle · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Janeites, sit down and grab your smelling salts: I did not like this novel. I've avoided reading Persuasion for years and now I know why - the characters are either unlikeable caricatures or sickly saints and the story is slow, even by Austen standards (and my favourite novel is Emma!) Why are we supposed to care about Anne, exactly? Because she's stuck with her ridiculous family after dumping the love of her life on the advice of a 'friend'? That makes her weak, not admirable, in my view - although Anne certainly needs a fault or two, to make her even slightly appealing. Give me a headstrong Emma Woodhouse or even a puffed up Lizzie Bennet any day. Anne is so pathetic she can't even make a two year old child listen to her!Anne Elliot, a 27 year old spinster who has lost her 'bloom' but is otherwise pretty and kind and intelligent, etc, lives with her vain and pompous father and equally shelf-based elder sister in the family home which they no longer afford to keep. Eight years previous, Anne fell madly in love with the first man to move into the neighbourhood who wasn't a relation, but rejected him after being engaged for only a few months because her father pulled a face and Lady Russell, her late mother's friend, said he wasn't good enough. So the fiance, Frederick Woodworth, went off to sea to make something of himself. When the Elliots are forced to leave home and move to Bath to save money, Anne discovers that her father's new tenants are the sister and brother-in-law of her former beloved, and spends most of the book fretting that she will have to face him again, which of course she does. There are fake suitors, scoundrels, sisters who come between the lead couple (one of whom is so flaming stupid that she jumps off a wall and lands on her head) - all standard Austen fare. I just didn't care. About any of them. Anne and Frederick are built up in an unconvincing 'tell don't show', very un-Austen-like manner - 'He was, at that time, a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit and brilliancy, and Anne an extremely pretty girl with gentleness, modesty, taste and feeling' - and then the reader is expected to pity Anne for being 'persuaded' to choose wealth and prospects over love. Captain Wentworth himself, although famous for the letter he finally writes Anne in the final chapter, is a bit of a nonentity. He returns rich, after eight years at sea, saves Anne from a marauding two year old, receives a glowing reference from a friend a la Darcy's housekeeper, and lets Anne's sister-in-law fall on her head (what grown woman goes around expecting to be 'jumped' down stairs and off walls like a child? No wonder a bang to the head was considered so serious, in her already weakened mental state!) That's the sum total of what Wentworth achieves to win over Anne and the reader. While she just hovers in corners, eavesdropping on people talking about her. I honestly despaired of the pair of them.I did appreciate Austen's increased snark, from Mrs Musgrove and her 'large fat sighings' over her son Richard who only ever earned the name 'Dick', but honestly, the rest bored me to tears, and even at 200 pages compared to Emma at 500, I started skimming through. I'm sure Austenites will be quick to tell me how Persuasion is Austen's most mature and thoughtful novel and I obviously just don't understand, but I hope I never become the type of woman who does understand Anne Elliot,

[alanwpowers · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have taught this novel a dozen times in sophomore literature to my community college students, most of whom are women. From the first paragraph--always a tour-de-force in Austen--the author savages male vanity: here, Sir Walter Elliot's favorite, indeed his only reading, the page in the Baronetage that mentions him. When I began teaching Persuasion in the late seventies, an American version of Sir Walter existed on the Mary Tyler Moore Show in the person of the TV anchor, Ted Knight. Now Ted Knight has "won" our presidency, and appointed a Cabinet of self-conceived Barons."Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character; vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsone in his youth; and, at fifty-four, was still a very fine man. Few women would think more of their personal appearance than he did...He considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and the Sir Walter Elliott, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest repect and devotion."(10, Worlds Classics 1988)Forced to rent a townhouse in Camden-Place, Bath, he laments, "The worst of Bath was, the number of its plain women..Once he had stood in a shop in Bond-street, he had observed eighty-seven women go by, without a tolerable face among them. It had been a frosty morning, to besure, a sharp frost, which hardly one woman in a thousand could stand the test of. But still, there were a dreadful multitude of ugly women in Bath"(134).Sir Walter was forced to Bath by indebting himself. At first he delayed renting out his great house, but finally meets his renter, Admiral Croft. Hilarious, their mutual assessment: Sir Walter concedes the admiral not as weather-beaten as he feared, he went so far as to say that, had his "own man [servant] had the arranging of his hair, he should not be ashamed of being seen with him anywhere." The Admiral, for his part, said, "The baronet will never set the Thames on fire, but there seems no harm in him"(35).Austen's usual irony here has for its source: "Large allowances, she knew, must be made for the ideas of those who spoke," in this case Sir Walter's stupid preoccupation with his appearance and birth, and the Admiral's self-reliance and skill, by which he has raised his social position and wealth almost as an American would.Vanity over reason recurs in Austen, but elsewhere with women protagonists: in "Emma" where the central character encourages misalliances because she understands people so poorly, but thinks she knows them well. And even in Pride and Prejudice, in Ch 36 Elizabeth realizes "Vanity, not love, has been my folly."Sir Walter of course undervalues his thinking daughter Anne Elliot, who in fact undervalues herself, taking the advice of her older, independent mentor. (Her independence is achieved in the usual 19C way, inheritance, here by the husband's death.) The advice is not to marry Wentworth, a mere naval officer. Jane Austen's successful brothers were, incidentally, naval officers.Austen's most acerbic paragraph in all her novels describes a troublesome son who "had been sent to sea, because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been little cared for by his family, though quite as much as he deserved"(52). However, one Musgrove parent recalls him tenderly when they meet the Captain Wentworth who shepherded him until lost. Only a specific glance of the Captain's eye revealed to his former girlfriend Anne how little he wished to recall the troublesome one.In sum, this is a delicious novel for female readers, and not only for them. It is arguably her best novel, published posthumously. Her acute irony unforgettably phrases common evils, like slander, which she calls "the accustomary intervention of kind friends"(14). Images of male vanity surround modern Americans--on TV, in sports, in film--that arguably, Persuasion resonates more in our society than when it was written. In fact, the US recently "elected" (with almost 3 million fewer votes) a vainglorious male, a non-reader like Sir Walter, except for covers of magazines, like the Baronetage, that features this 70 year old adolescentMy edition, ed John Davie, Worlds Clasics, 1988. 251 pp.

[kristykay22 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jane Austen never disappoints but Persuasion, her last novel, published six months after her death, could be my favorite of all. Anne Elliot is the middle daughter of the vain and silly widowed baronet, Sir Walter Elliot. She is steady, smart, and observant, and while her strengths are noticed by others, she is pretty much ignored and dismissed by everyone in her family. Her biggest supporter is Lady Russell, her late mother's best friend, who has taken the role of a second mother to Anne. When the novel begins, Anne is in her late 20s. We learn that eight years ago she had a brief engagement to a young naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, that was quickly ended by her family and Lady Russell, who persuaded Anne to break off the engagement to the poor and unproven young man. Fast forward to the present and Anne's silly father and snobby oldest sister have wasted the family fortune and need to rent out the estate and move to smaller quarters in Bath in order to make ends meet. Anne spends the autumn before joining them with her needy youngest sister and her family and, while there, meets again with the dashing Captain Wentworth, who is now quite wealthy and in the prime of a distinguished naval career. And to further complicate things, William Elliot, the sisters handsome, estranged, cousin (and heir to Sir Walter), is back on the scene, in the good graces of Sir William, and making eyes at Anne. Austen masterfully weaves together the story of 18th century manners, enduring love, and the desires and regrets of past persuasions through the eyes of Anne Elliot. This is a complicated story told simply, and a page turner that also has real depth. I can't believe it was written over 200 years ago and if you haven't dipped into Jane Austen yet, this is a marvelous place to start.

[ma_washigeri · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

And another half star. Absolutely vicious. I think she takes all the characters apart, just some more viciously than others. Some such as Captain Harville and the Crofts get off lightly with a bit of teasing but even the heroine does not escape.

[foggidawn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Eight and a half years ago, Anne Elliot fell in love with a dashing young naval officer, but an influential family friend persuaded her that the match would not suit. Now, he's back in the neighborhood, wealthy, successful and still single, but apparently not interested in her any more. She's still in love with him, though -- despite being courted by another.I hadn't read this since my teen years, so I was due for a reread. I have friends who claim this as their favorite Austen, so I was interested to see if this one would rise in my opinion, what with it's "mature" heroine (*gasp* 27!) and all. It didn't, really. I enjoyed it, of course, but not as much as I like P&P, S&S, or Northanger Abbey. It's still middle of the pack for me, along with Mansfield Park. I feel that Austen really harps on the concept of "persuasion," touching on it many times throughout the book. Anne isn't the strongest character, and I occasionally found her frustrating -- and I really couldn't see the attraction of Captain Wentworth. I'd recommend this to readers who have enjoyed other books by Austen. I know many people love it, so who knows, it might become your favorite! (It's just not mine.)

[patsymurray · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this in an annotated edition which provided some background regarding the Royal Navy, social customs and Bath that enriched the story for me.

[lamour_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Published in 1817 shortly before Austen's death, this novel is a satire on vanity and persuasion. It is also the story of missed opportunities and second chances. Anne Elliot is the middle of two sisters. Elizabeth, the oldest, is only concerned with her status in the community and that of her father who has been given the means to maintain his estate but fails to manage it. In the novel he must rent it out in order to keep it.Anne is the protagonist and eight years earlier turned down the man she loved because her advisor told her he had no money and no prospects. Now he has returned a rich war hero and she is reluctant to approach him to tell him she still loves him. She has another rich gentleman suitor who seems to have it all but her warning bells suggest not all as it seems.As the novel works its way to the denouement, we are treated to many foolish folk who judge others by their social and financial status and not on their character and as a result suffer indignities and failure because of their treatment of others.A little wordy and slow going sometimes but generally a fun read. I did not enjoy this title as much as Pride and Prejudice.

[m.belljackson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Hard to connect or care about the personalities or any of the characters:Anne = weak, timid, always holding back, submissive to other's needs and desires, no backbone -yet loved for her "accomplishments" (which are oddly invisible) - and so fearfulNo wonder Captain Wentworth was attracted to the spirited Louisa.And him = he appears as a 'cad' for his relentless attending to women he did not really want to love,with his last-minute letter a bit of a long plot stretch given his on-going silence.Worse stil is the toleration of the repellant, plot dragging Mary...not that the plot was much going anywhereexcept in the tedious concerns and pretensions of the middle class.Jane should have kept this one in her desk.

[debbiemccauley-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Written in 1816. Anne rejected a suitor eight years ago due to her family and friends not thinking him good enough. Now he is back... A good read.

[westwest-3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In time for the 200th anniversary of her death I decided to read the last Austen novel I had yet to read. Austen's prose is here at her most polished and her sarcasm at it's most subtle and biting, but she proves once again that the ending was not her strength. As progressive and liberal as her characters were, her endings seem very XVIII century, not even XIX century. I was still glad to enjoy Austen's beautiful style.
After reading all the novels here is my ranking:
1) Emma
2) Pride and Prejudice
3) Sense and Sensibility
4) Northanger Abbey
5) Persuasion
6) Mansfield Park

[sandra.pinkerton83 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Lovely and fun book of Victorian era.

[threadnsong · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A lively, short read that is Jane Austen's final complete work. Anne Elliott is older than the norm for marriage, and eight years before this novel begins she was engaged to young Wentworth. Sadly, her best friend (her only friend, let's face it) and the person who stands between Anne and her loveless family has "persuaded" Anne to break off the engagement.Neither party fully recovers and when Sir Elliott finds himself in straightened circumstances and forced to rent out the family estate, Anne finds herself with a larger group of adults in the town of Bath. And who should show up but (now) Captain Wentworth??So while manners must be followed and Empire-era protocols must be observed, Anne is able to thwart the intrusive attentions of Mr. Elliott, save her school friend Mrs. Smith, calm her never-quiet sister Mary, and find herself accepted back into Captain Wentworth's heart. While there are some persons whose later mention I had forgotten from earlier in the book, I was much more easily able to grasp the threads of this story than I had with earlier stories.

[jonfaith · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

When Louisa stumbled, I sighed and, yet, continued through the remainder of the book. I knew that Mr. Scott would be unmasked and that all would be well. The flimsy layers did trouble me greatly. I don't know whether it is national chauvinism or some maudlin coddling but how is it that most consider Austen to be superior to Balzac?

On a personal level, this was likely the only book given to me by the mother of a woman I was seeing.

[kimkimpton · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this book so much more on my second read. In my opinion, it still doesn't beat Pride and Prejudice, but it it a good one!

[danielstj · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I don't get all the literary aplomb about this book. I didn't find it to be anything special.

[antao-3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

(Original Review, 1981-02-25)I think it's evident, once one steps back from an emotional response to the novel, that it would have benefited from some editing and expanding by Austen, had she lived.I can see the flaws in it. It seems disjointed and overly episodic, and I think the excursion to Lyme is a bit forced into the narrative although I believe it’s essential to the novel. The trip to Lyme is essential: the flirtation between Wentworth and Louisa comes to a crash, he can see Anne's steadiness, and we can see her lack of romantic desperation—her grit in the teeth, not of poverty (bad enough), but of loneliness—… and it's all by the sea, place of both voyage and anchorage. On reflection I've found the Mrs. Smith episode slightly unbelievable as well - not in the sense that Anne wouldn't visit her now that she's fallen on hard times, but that she would so serendipitously know all about Anne's scheming suitor (a scene or two of Mrs. Smith, where she and Anne could have some interaction beyond her being an information booth, might've been flesh rather than padding.) Wentworth's letter to Anne, on the other hand. . . what a sublime piece of literature, all on its own; I have to admit also that I felt a bit of a hot flush myself on reading Wentworth's letter to Anne... If I'm in the right frame of mind, I can actually get palpitations reading it :-).I think Austen herself found the ending problematic. She rewrote it at least once--originally, the concluding chapters were fewer and shorter, and the denouement was to have occurred when Anne and Wentworth accidentally end up alone together at her father's house, and explanations ensue. I think what we have now is at least better than that.This theme of a love from the past that recurs over and over and over again in literature, especially from or set in this period, is completely alien to me. I accept that everyone's experience is individual, but I've never had an unrequited love and whenever I've met any of my partners from my youth, even the best ones, I've never felt much in the way of regret, let alone proclaimed: "they must be mine again!"I do like the idea of two people who were "in love" having to come to terms with dealing with each other now. But I've never liked this (or any) of these pop culture memes that make teenage sensations the epitome of human existence and experience! Don't get me wrong, I like romance and I see how themes of escapism can be explored and how a dynamic contrast can be useful in a narrative, but still, find it so weird. It's pretty normal to think of missed opportunities in terms of second chances, not just in romance (in this, you confess to being unusually well-adjusted to your own past), but in education, business, friendship, family connections, and so on. In this case, it might seem a bit Hollywood, that the couple, well-matched when one is convinced to reject the other, are even more perfectly suited after he gets rich and she finds even lonely toil preferable to any other suitor. You sometimes see this criticism of Shakespeare's comedies: so much turmoil results, with a bit of happy accident, in the first day of a happy marriage. But that sense of 'comedy' is a vision of life, of fertility and regeneration, that coexists (for many) alongside the grime and sleaze and villainy that Shakespeare exults weirdly in, and that Austen shows menacing from first page (Sir Walter's stupid vanity) to nearly the last (William Elliot's… well, read it and see).It's not that 'comedy', in the sense of romantic happy endings, is Hollywood, but rather, that 'Hollywood' is mutilation and degradation, a bastardization, of a human instinct for fecundity, even as tragedy is confrontation with the limits of health and strength.It seemed that for the first half of the book not a lot happens other than people moving house, or "popping round for a chat." When Louisa abruptly jumps off the wall and lands on her noggin, the interest perked up a bit, particularly as she seemed to be dead - then it turned out she's just got a concussion. For me, it wasn't until Anne finds out the truth about her cousin from Mrs. Smith that the tension you describe really began for me - then the whole underlying tension between her and Wentworth really starts to go from simmering to boiling.

[philsyphe · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

While I admire Jane Austen’s eloquent language, a gripping plot is not in evidence here. I didn’t expect fast-paced excitement but did hope for something deeper. It's the only Austen novel I've read that features no memorable or larger-than-life characters. Mary was quite amusing with all her complaining, but this wasn't enough to keep me hooked.Apart from a few comedy moments, plus Louisa's accident, I found this story quite a bore. My mind kept wandering and the only reason I didn't give up on it was because I listened to an audiobook version.

[stephlaymon · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jane Austen is known for her romances, but there is far less romance in Persuasion than there is a saga of intricate family dynamics, with a nicely played romance playing in the background. It brings into focus Anne Elliot, now my favorite among all of Jane Austen's characters that I have come to know so far. From the perspective of her immediate family, she is quite insignificant. Her opinion matters not in the least, and they think her useless in nearly every way, but she is just the opposite. Anne is the most decent of all human beings within the book, and is the one who saves her family in times of all sorts of trouble.As always, Austen includes the most unlikable sorts. The ones that are so much fun to dislike, so silly that they are entertaining, and ones who are made to make the main character stand out from their sort. Anne's father is the shallowest of all shallow people, and her sister, Mary, is the most pathetic of jealous, self-centered, selfish, attention seekers one could ever imagine. All of them attempting to hide their flaws under a layer of sophisticated class, which makes it all the more entertaining.One of the last things that I expected to see in an Austen book is a character who has some ideas of progressive thinking like Anne does while retaining her femininity. She has a lovely way of looking at the differences between men and women and seeing how they both have struggles that are exclusive to their sex, as well as strengths that each is gifted with, and sees how a pair is better off for it.

[melissalenhardt · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love this book so much, and Anne Elliot is right up there with Elizabeth Bennet as my favorite Austen character.