Persuasion

Eight years ago, Anne Elliot was persuaded to break her engagement to Frederick Wentworth — a young naval officer with no fortune and no name, judged by her trusted friend Lady Russell to be an imprudent match. Now Anne is twenty-seven, faded in her own family's eyes, and Wentworth has come home from the wars a captain, rich, admired, and still unmarried. Thrown back into the same small society, the two move around each other in watchful silence, each uncertain of the other's heart.

Persuasion is unlike anything else Austen wrote. Where her other novels are first courtships, this is a story of second chances — of two people who once knew each other perfectly and let the moment slip, and of whether a renunciation made on good advice can ever be undone. It is the most autumnal of her books, steeped in failing light and falling leaves, and the most openly tender.

Told almost entirely through Anne's quiet, scrupulous consciousness, the novel builds to the most famous declaration Austen ever wrote. Overhearing Anne argue that women love longest “when existence or when hope is gone,” Wentworth seizes a pen and writes the words readers have treasured ever since: “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.” These were the very chapters Austen rewrote, dissatisfied with a tamer first ending.

Beneath the love story runs a quiet revolution — the vain, decaying gentry of Sir Walter Elliot giving way to the warm, capable navy families who have earned their place by merit. Written as her own health failed and published only after her death, Persuasion is for many readers the most moving novel Jane Austen ever produced.