Persuasion is now probably the favourite Austen book after Pride
and Prejudice. It tells the story of a life that might have been
wasted, but is redeemed by love. It is a story by anyone who
believes in second chances, or, in Tony Tanner's words "to anyone
who has experienced the sense of an irreparably ruined owing to an
irrevocable mistaken decision". While Pride and Prejudice was
written when Austen was a young, marriageable woman, Persuasion was
written when she was in her forties, and it features a heroine who,
at twenty-seven, could in those days be destined, like Austen
herself, to life as a spinster. As John Wiltshire, one of the best
modern critics of Austen shows in this guide, the atmosphere of the
two books is quite different, like the social world they depict -
one "light and bright and sparkling" as Jane Austen herself called
it, the other more sombre, shadowed by several deaths, and
sometimes gentle and sometimes savage in its irony. But Persuasion
has endeared itself to readers because the romance it celebrates
takes place so convincingly within a constricting and believable
social world. It's a love story for adults. Anne Elliot is quiet,
accommodating, kind and thoughtful, but Jane Austen avoids making
her a picture of perfection by inviting the reader into her
consciousness. We see that she is watchful of herself, critical of
herself, aware of her own self-deceptions, but at the same time
subject to impulses and longings, to the dreams and sexual desires
we all share.
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