Thus, we begin our journey by reading a book about a man who is reading a book. Of course, Austen weaves an additional layer of irony in that she, a staunch defender of the literary form of the novel, is writing about the relationship between reader and literature. With the French Revolution in and the Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the century, the social, political, and moral order of Europe was undergoing a gradual, yet cataclysmic shift, and Austen, writing a few years after the beginning of these events was able to examine this shift retrospectively and comment on it.
Although England retained its monarchy, these events did irreparable damage to the old order—damage that shook the ground just enough so that the fortresses and the barricades crumbled a little and Austen could see over the edge of the world she had always known, into the expansive unknown across the sea.
As her realization of the world expanded, so too did her understanding of the power of reading and literature. In Emma , Mansfield Park , Pride and Prejudice , Sense and Sensibility , and Northanger Abbey reading, at least the reading of certain works, is a means of improvement—reading strengthens the convictions and dictates the behavior of the heroines. This depth is presented to the reader in the frightening conclusion that the world of a book is smaller than the real world.
If reading is a way in which the characters in previous Austen novels come to know the world around them, order their principles, and gain sound advice, Persuasion adds a new level of urgency to this familiar problem of epistemology by telling us that the world is far more vast than any self-contained world of principals, moral convictions, history, or beautiful emotions comprised within the pages of a book.
When Captain Wentworth returns, reviving the acute emotional stress of earlier days, Anne quickly encounters the uncomfortable dissonance between literature and real life. The quiet, declining world that Anne reads about and in which she tries to find solace and emotional expression, can only be applicable in this liminal phase of her life. Anne is not alone in her desire to occupy the beautiful but melancholic world created by the romantic poets.
For Benwick, as for Anne, the words of the romantic poets mirror the primal emotions and aches of their souls. The power of these words to motivate the actual events of their lives, however, proves itself to be limited. Rather, the plot of Persuasion and the revelation of the human nature that motivates many of the events in the novel contradict this idea that reading such works can create heroic people.
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Let Elena Sheppard know, elena policymic. I get asked fairly regularly what my favorite book is. Persuasion is my one of my favorites for several reasons. Persuasion is a good reminder that true love is worth fighting for and no one can tell you who or what is worth your time, but you.
View all 18 comments. Jane Austen never disappoints me! This was the first time I've read this book, and, since it's one of her less popular novels, I didn't know what to expect. However, I quickly was swept up into the story and felt all of Anne's emotions like they were my own. I really enjoyed how, unlike the other Austen novels I've read, this one focuses on love lost and how, over time, people change in some ways but remain the same in other ways.
Anne and Captain Wentworth aren't my favorite Austen characters, but I still very much enjoyed how they were forced to face many obstacles, reflect, and mature before getting their happily ever after. My only complaint is that I wish we got to know more about Captain Wentworth, so I could feel the love for him as strongly as Anne does. View all 12 comments. Feb 02, Sean Barrs rated it it was amazing Shelves: 5-star-reads , classics , love-and-romance , romantic-movement.
Jane Austen is ruthless and brilliant; she is sarcastic, subtle and superbly witty. She writes in such a matter of fact way that the absurdity of her characters is in plain sight.
Sir Walter Elliot is a complete fool. The man is completely bankrupt, but he completely refuses to cut down on his ridiculously high expenditure or sell of any of his lands. He is so obsessed with his outer image that he risks all to keep it in a state Jane Austen is ruthless and brilliant; she is sarcastic, subtle and superbly witty. He is so obsessed with his outer image that he risks all to keep it in a state of, what he perceives as, perfection. Then there is the way he perceives his daughters.
Elizabeth is vain and stupid like her farther, but, to him, she is wonderful. The protagonist Anne, on the other hand, is intelligent, kind and occasionally speaks her mind; thus, her father and sister view her as furniture. She is pushed aside and rarely listened to. The initially quiet heroine is overshadowed by her overbearing farther and the ridiculous nature of society. As a result, he spends hours reading and editing the entries, and turns to it when in need of comfort.
There is also a degree of significance in the fact that all the edits Sir Walter makes are past instances, there are no new entries to signify the recent decrease in monetary fortune.
This is both comic and contemptible because when his estate is falling into ruin, he only cares about its outward appearance making him a caricature of the old class; it, suggests that they, perhaps, need to go or at the very least change. This is where the new, more attractive, navel gentlemen come in.
The idea of what constituted gentlemen was becoming more flexible during the Romantic era and nineteenth century.
Previously, the higher societies predominantly consisted of those who received their status at birth: the landed gentry. The idea of what makes a gentleman was moving forward with the changing opportunities afforded by the Napoleonic wars.
The war meant that men from common birth like Admiral Croft and Captains Wentworth and Benwick, could climb the social ladder due to fortune and title granted by successful soldering. They could enter it with a degree of equality. But Sir Walter, as caricature of the old class, opposes this notion vehemently. This can be seen with, you guessed it, is obsession with outer appearance. He artificially attempts to cling to his youth, which can be seen when he converses with Anne later in the novel.
He has a surprisingly large amount of knowledge about skin treatments that defy age. His self-absorbency with his physical appearance is symbolic of his perceived appearance within society. To him, a gentleman is supposed to possess certain outward qualities. He finds the idea of Admiral Croft disturbing, common and ungentlemanly.
Yet, his position in society is higher and more esteemed. The navy is deserves his respect; they helped to facilitate an England that remained under English rule and not one under the thumb of Napoleon Bonaparte.
She is arguing for the benefits of a system like the navy; it promotes its members based upon merit and due distinction. This is in direct contrast to the old system that Sir Walter reveres. It is a symbolic demotion, one that leaves the self-made man living in deserved splendour. Anne is not a fool. She was persuaded once, but she now sees with clarity and focus. She can see the worth of the two men and knows which one is worth her time.
Sir Walter Elliot remains in a position of higher social rank, but his so called social inferiors are afforded with gentlemen like qualities, ones that he so clearly lacks.
They are admitted to high social circles despite their birth. They possess more honour, sense and purpose than the old class of gentlemen that Sir Walter represents. Therefore, when a man such a Sir Walter, one who is vein and self-obsessed, is resistant to the idea of social mobility, it becomes rather difficult not to be persuaded by the benefits of its progress that Austen evokes. Her novels are so subtly clever with hidden suggestions.
I really admire what she does. I attest that each Austen novel needs to be read at least twice, perhaps even thrice, to get the full effect of what she does. I missed so much of it on my initial reading.
I need to go and read more Austen novels! Facebook Twitter Insta Academia View all 30 comments. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. Perhaps many this year have inwardly uttered similar sighs, more or less confined to their house, weeks without a chance to see friends or loved ones turning into months, perhaps even missing the everyday routine of having a chat at the coffee machine in the office.
Things can get pretty dark without seeing a perspective. Readers however can rely on a priceless panacea : when our own thoughts, emotions or tribulations simply are gett We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. During the first lockdown Persuasion was such a book for me. How not to care for Anne Elliot? She turned out an ideal heroine, making me forget for a few hours my own woes purely by empathizing with hers and eventually exulting in the happiness that will be her part.
A delectable novel, incarnate grace. View all 47 comments. Dec 19, Tharindu Dissanayake rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites , favorites-fiction. I never imagined any of Austen's books coming any closer to the place I hold Pride and Prejudice, but Persuasion made me make more space in that place for one more book. I found, Persuasion to be just as good, if not better in almost all aspects. I loved every little bit of it and haven't skipped one word. Persuasion's way of empathizing with the protagonist felt to be in a much deeper level, while most experiences of Anne Elliot are easily relatable for the reader - fore those were a lot real and less fictional.
However, the majority of other characters does share the characteristics of pride, vanity and prejudice which all other books did have in common. I don't understand how it was possible for the author to do so, but everything is narrated perfectly. In retrospect, had I disliked any part or even most of the story, even then, I sure would've loved this book, for, the way each sentence is written is amazing, and it will keep the reader immersed thoroughly.
Now add it to the fact the story itself being great, and it is not a surprise that we have one of the best books of all time. Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation;" "There are so many who forget to think seriously till it is almost too late. View all 13 comments. It was published at the end of , six months after her death. The story concerns Anne Elliot, a young Englishwoman of 27 years, whose family is moving to lower their expenses and get out of debt.
They rent their home to an Admiral and his wife. This sets the scene for many humorous encounters as well as a second, well-considered chance at love and marriage for Anne in her second "bloom". View 1 comment. Everything seems to combine to prevent Anne and Captain Wentworth from ever being able to come to an understanding again: his bitter feelings, her faded looks mostly through unhappiness; she's only 28 or 29 , and other, younger girls vying for his attention, 4.
Everything seems to combine to prevent Anne and Captain Wentworth from ever being able to come to an understanding again: his bitter feelings, her faded looks mostly through unhappiness; she's only 28 or 29 , and other, younger girls vying for his attention, which he's only too happy to give them. Austen's intelligence, dry wit and humor are evidenced on every page. The melancholy, autumnal feel of the first part of the book, when all you can see is Anne's blighted hopes and how she is disregarded and mistreated by almost everyone around her, is wrenching.
Then, like springtime, comes the slow, gradual return of joy and hope to Anne's life. I loved the energy and achievements of the military characters, as opposed to the stagnant, superficial aristocracy. And mostly: That Letter. The characters tend to be a little bit one-dimensional: Anne Elliot is so unfailingly noble and kind and self-sacrificing; her family members are so invariably shallow and hard-hearted and self-centered.
I got quite tired of Anne's nerves or whatever getting overwrought and her needing to retire to meditate in solitude to recover her self-possession; it happened All. Anyone who thinks Fanny in Mansfield Park is a bit of a stick in the mud needs to take a closer look at Anne. And the last line of the book is still vaguely anticlimactic to me; I keep thinking Jane might have come up with a better ending if she'd had more time to polish the book.
Still, there's so much to love in Persuasion , and the good far outweighs the bad for me. And I'm a romantic and a hopeful person at heart, so the persistence of love through the years, and the ability of the characters with a little luck to work through injured pride on the one side, and unsupportive family and friends on the other, and find lasting happiness together, warms my heart.
View all 54 comments. Anne fucked up, and turned down the love of her life. Not that she'd really admit it. Even at the end! She was all, I was right to listen to advice from my elders , but she did admit that they should have revisited the he's not eligable situation a lot sooner. Also, she was kind of doing the best she could with what she had to work with back in the day.
And honestly, how was she at such a young age to know the difference between a guy who says he's going to work hard and make it big and does , and Anne fucked up, and turned down the love of her life. And honestly, how was she at such a young age to know the difference between a guy who says he's going to work hard and make it big and does , and a guy who says he's going to work hard and make it big, but turns out to be a lazy doofus?
Because we all know that one poor idiot who didn't ask enough questions, thought that love was the only thing you needed, and trusted in her man's good sense too much.
Anne did lose the love of her life due to caution. She also didn't end up with some hippie stoner who sat on her couch all day and talked about his plans to teach the cat to play the harmonica. Life's a balancing act, ladies. I like this one.
Anne isn't some twit who sits around blubbering about it, but you also get that she loved Frederick very much. It's the age-old story of the one that got away and you're genuinely rooting for her the entire time.
I gotta admit, I wasn't all that crazy about him at the beginning of the book when it looked like he was flirting with the cute young ladies in front of her.
But then I realized that she had broken his seafaring heart into sad little pieces, and maybe he deserved a bit of payback. Ok, so the most memorable part of the story to me was this scene where this married couple were driving along in their carriage and she kept telling him how to drive.
Just goes to show you, underneath it all, things aren't really much different. And it's nice to know that people have always been kind of nuts. Recommended for Austen fans. Greta Scacchi was the narrator of the audiobook I listened to and she did a lovely job if you're interested in listening rather than reading.
View all 25 comments. I'm not a huge reader of classics-- a fact i'm working on rectifying-- so when I wasn't very much enjoying the first two chapters, I got nervous. But as soon as I pushed through to the heart of the storyline, I began to crave in-class discussions over this book. I absolutely loved Anne as a main character, and Captain Wentworth was such a fitting companion for her that I was hooked, dying to find 4.
I absolutely loved Anne as a main character, and Captain Wentworth was such a fitting companion for her that I was hooked, dying to find out how their lives played out. This book made me feel a lot of things-- especially the feeling that comes with crying at 4 AM about fictional men-- and I'm thoroughly surprised that such an old book still remains touching and relatable.
I just wish that Austen implemented more dialogue in her writing, which is why I took off half a star; I feel like sometimes the book was bogged down with too many paragraphs of thought and not enough spoken word. View all 8 comments. While ploughing through Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport recently, the frequent references to Jane Austen's Persuasion prompted me to take this neat book down from its place on a high shelf alongside its five sisters and keep it within view as a kind of incentive to finish Ellmann's page tome.
As it turned out, I didn't need an incentive to finish Ducks because it self-propelled in the second half, but even so, I still offered myself the pleasure of re-reading Persuasion once I'd finished While ploughing through Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport recently, the frequent references to Jane Austen's Persuasion prompted me to take this neat book down from its place on a high shelf alongside its five sisters and keep it within view as a kind of incentive to finish Ellmann's page tome.
As it turned out, I didn't need an incentive to finish Ducks because it self-propelled in the second half, but even so, I still offered myself the pleasure of re-reading Persuasion once I'd finished it. There's nothing I like better than when one book leads naturally to another without me having to scratch my head and wonder what might make a good follow-on to what I've been immersed in. The narrator of Ducks is well versed in all of Jane Austen's novels. She ponders on the dilemma of Marianne and Willoughby from Sense and Sensibility when confronted with an issue between her temperamental daughter and a good-for-nothing boyfriend.
She mentions Emma Woodhouse a few times, and several characters from Pride and Prejudice too—indeed Mrs Bennett's famous line, "You have no compassion for my poor nerves" becomes a kind of unspoken mantra in Ellmann's book. But the Austen character who is most often referenced is Anne Elliot, the main character of Persuasion. Ellmann's narrator identifies strongly with Anne. They both spent their childhoods in beautiful houses which their families no longer have access to. They are both very attached to the memory of their mothers whom they lost in their early teens, and the loss of the mother continues to influence their lives in different ways.
Of course the two books are very different in other respects, Ellmann's being a wide-ranging commentary on world issues of today including vast numbers of references to film, literature and poetry while Austen's is a very contained account of a little slice of English life in the early s, with very few literary references. The two such references I found are brief and easily glossed over—if I noticed them in previous reads, I moved on from them just as quickly. But I'm a different reader now and I love to find hints of other works in the literature I read.
The first reference I spotted was to 18th century poet, Mathew Prior's Henry and Emma which tells of a test of loyalty which a lover imposes on his loved one: Emma must overcome a series of challenges in order to prove her constancy to Henry. Austen inserts the reference to Prior's poem just when Anne Elliot is being asked by the man she has loved for years to nurse back to health the girl he now seems to be in love with, so the story of Henry setting trials for Emma seems very apt indeed.
And as we read on through Anne Elliot's story, we see the parallel more and more as Anne's constancy is further tested. The second literary reference I came across is less significant to the plot and more connected to Austen's people watching skills, which is the aspect of her writing I admire the most.
How perceptive of people's foibles she must have been to be able to transfer to the page brief character sketches which manage to contain a host of subtle information especially relating to the more ludicrous traits of the personalities of her characters. In her other novels, there are portraits of ridiculous figures aplenty: Mrs Bennet, Mr Collins, Miss Bates, Mr Woodhouse, and several others I could mention, but surely none are so comically outrageous as super-conceited Sir Walter Eliot and his equally puffed-up daughters Elizabeth and Mary.
The very modest Anne is sorely tried, as if she needed the extra challenge, in having them for family! However, there is one occasion when Anne makes an effort to put herself forward in the pushy manner of her family, but she is immediately self-aware enough to laugh at herself for the attempt : She could not do so, without comparing herself with Miss Larolles, the inimitable Miss Larolles.
As there is no character called Miss Larolles in this book, and Jane Austen doesn't elaborate further, I guessed the inimitable Miss Larolles must be a literary figure who would be familiar to Austen's readers. And so she is, as I found when I looked her up.
She is a very ridiculous character from Fanny Burney's Cecilia , which was written about thirty five years before Austen wrote Persuasion. Burney's is a long book, quite as long as Ducks, Newburyport , but I'm happily reading it at the moment, finding other parallels with Austen's books, and relieved once again that one book has led me directly to another. View all 82 comments. Are second chances possible? Readers of this marvelous book by Jane Austen her last completed, will find out Anne Elliot 19, tense and insecure, had broken an engagement to Frederick Wentworth 23, the family objected to the poor sailor with no apparent prospects, her father Sir Walter Elliot, baronet, a proud man with a luxury loving streak, his late wife, had kept him in check living in Kellynch- Hall, Somersetshire, the widower was greatly supported by his eldest daughter, selfish Elizab Are second chances possible?
Anne Elliot 19, tense and insecure, had broken an engagement to Frederick Wentworth 23, the family objected to the poor sailor with no apparent prospects, her father Sir Walter Elliot, baronet, a proud man with a luxury loving streak, his late wife, had kept him in check living in Kellynch- Hall, Somersetshire, the widower was greatly supported by his eldest daughter, selfish Elizabeth now 29, the two are very much alike, handsome, arrogant, cold, looking down at people they think are beneath them, she is the prettiest of his three children, the youngest Mary frequently claiming illness to get attention, would marry easy going Charles Musgrove, scolding him for his perceived neglect, and be unable to control the children.
Even Anne's only friend, intelligent, influential, Lady Russell had not looked kindly to the marriage. Eight years have passed, the then teenager is now 27, much more sure of herself and her emotions Anne is, nevertheless always ignored by others, regrets turning down Wentworth who has become a captain with his own ship, war spoils have made him rich, when peace is finally declared, Napoleon in exile he is free to come home Extravagant Sir Walter just can't stop himself from spending all his money, a position to maintain in society, dignity demands living like the superior being he thinks he is, the baronet believes and is entitled to this.
But going broke fast, Lady Russell and his lawyer friend Mr. Sheperd, urges something , to fix the problem swiftly or ruined soon, Mr. Elliot; the haughty man refuses at first, however reality finally sets in. Sir Walter has to rent Kellynch -Hall quietly to pay the creditors, the shame must be hidden though.
Moving to the elegant resort town of Bath with Elizabeth, the most famous in England, seeing important members of the upper class, more his style and enjoys it immensely. Admiral Croft, Captain Wentworth's wise brother- in - law, his pleasant sister Sophia as bright as her husband, married the now retired naval officer, courageously following him from ship to ship, takes ironically Sir Walter's, the insolvent baronet fabulous mansion , with war's end there are a lot of unemployed sailors around.
The meetings between Anne, she stayed behind, for a few months and Frederick, are quite uncomfortable you can imagine but with their families and friends so entangled, it can not be avoided. The former couple are nervous, what can they talk about at dinners and parties, traveling to visit a friend, living by the riveting sea, their eyes pretending not to notice each other, which is silly, both are tongue tied and embarrassed, speak very little between themselves, afraid to make the the first move, but in a room full of noisy, interesting people, many are admirers of Frederick and Anne, still only the two, are important to the duo.
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