At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, "Persuasion" is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all, it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.
| ISBN | 0141439688 | | Volumes | 1 | | ISBN13 | 9780141439686
(What's this?) | | Weight (grammes) | 214 | | Publisher | Penguin Books Ltd | | Published in | London | | Imprint | Penguin Classics | | Series editor | Ingham, Patricia | | Format | Paperback | | Series title | Penguin Classics S. | | Publication date | 27 Mar 2003 | | Previous ISBN | 9780140434675 | | Writer of introduction | Gillian Beer | | Height (mm) | 198 | | Library of Congress | 2003269842 | | Width (mm) | 129 | | DEWEY | 823.7 | | Spine width (mm) | 17 | | DEWEY edition | DC21 | | Academic level | General | | Pages | 288 | | Alternative ISBN | 9781590071311 |
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With age, comes widsom, and although Jane Austen was hardly in her dotage, the writing of 'Persuasion' is infused with the knowledge that true love lasts, and even waits.
There is humour too, with the drawing of some hideously self centred family members, some plotting to gain money, others simply wanting all the attention for themselves. Who could fail to forget Mary and her plantive whinging!
Somehow Anne manages to rise above all of this, never wavering from being good and true (although she has her faults, which endear her the more to her reader), and she gets her reward in the shape of the man she loved and gaved up for the sake of family harmony.
In her last novel Jane Austen reaches perfection. -
Rebecca Whitaker
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