Product Description

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 fortunenor 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6625 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

About the Author
Jane Austen (1775-1817) was extremely modest about her own genius but has become one of English literature's most famous women writers. She is the author of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey. Gillian Beer is King Edward Professor of English at the University of Cambridge and President of Clare Hall.

Customer Reviews

Her greatest work
Less well-known than "Emma", "Pride and Prejudice" or "Sense and Sensibility", this is an absolute gem of a novel, and my favourite of all of Jane Austen's works. It has all the flair and comic brio of her other, more celebrated work, but a sadness and delicacy of tone that elevates it to a different level. Anne is a magnificent character, with an intelligence steeped in experience coupled with a good and true heart, and is at the centre of a novel that offers absolutely everything that you could wish for in a novel. Perfect. Absolutely perfect.

A more resigned, mature Austen writing
This was the last of Austen's novels that I read, and accordingly, one of the last that Austen herself wrote, at a time when she was ill and resigned to bed months before her death. It was published posthumously, together with Northanger Abbey, an early novel that she wrote.

Reflecting this corresponding state in herself somehow, the book carries a tone of gravity and experienced maturity that Anne Elliot, the heroine, portrays with a love that is only reconciled many years after its initial formation and breakup. At 28, she is definitely the oldest of Austen's heroines, and thus we see a more constrained, yet delicate relationship between her and Frank Wentworth.

True to say, I enjoyed this book, as all other Austen's novels. One can readily notice the difference in tone and character from her earlier, more popular novels so do not be disheartened if it is not the usual sprightly plot or the young, gregarious heroine.

My fave Jane Novel
I know most people like P&P best, but if you're a Jane Austen fan, or just someone who's seen the ever popular film adaptations of her work, I think you'll find this one a real page turner. With the speed of a more contemporary romance, it rollicks and flows through one drama after the next, all with miss Austen's incomparable wit and vivacity. If you are sticking to the more popular titles only (Pride & Prej and Emma) then expand your horizons and fall in love with these characters. Great, great read.