Persuasion by Jane Austen

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This book tells the story of 27 year old Anne Elliot about eight years after the breaking of her engagement with Captain Frederick Wentworth at the insistence of her friend and mother figure Lady Russell, who claimed that he was unworthy of such an engagement despite their strong feelings. Now, with 8 years passed, Captain Wentworth resurfaces after having acquired some wealth from his service to the Navy, and Anne is now come face-to-face with the mistakes of her past and now the awkward and complicated situation of their reacquaintance.

While Austen is one of my most favorite authors and I dearly love all her books, I must confess that this one is not among my most favorite Jane Austen stories. Having read this, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice, I can say that this one seemed to me the slowest to build momentum and did not quite stir me as much as the other two. With the two main characters being a little older than those in the other two books, I imagine that the increased maturity brings with it a very different kind of pacing and perspective than the whirlwind that was Pride and Prejudice.

While the focus of this novel, as with all of Austen's stories, is chiefly on the perspective of the heroine, the supporting characters and their zealous assertions of Anne's character throughout the novel do much to frame Anne's character in one light, while her own actions and decisions throughout the novel prove to characterize herself in a different light.

Persuasion, like all of Austen's novels, took liberties in satirizing, and thus challenging, the nature of the social order of the Regency era that her heroines are at the mercy of. Persuasion accomplishes this in a much quieter and mature way than her other novels, but its brilliance doesn't shine any less.