She seems doomed to spend her life waiting on her buffoonish, appearance-obsessed father and spendthrift elder (and also unmarried) sister, with perhaps the occasional dubious reprieve in the form of a visit to her married younger sister’s home to look after her nieces and nephews.Īnne was engaged once, to a man named Frederick Wentworth when she was 19, but her well-meaning friends and family convinced her to break off the engagement: Wentworth had no money and few prospects, and everyone was convinced that a pretty and wealthy young heiress like Anne could do better. Persuasion’s Anne Elliot is 27 and unmarried, making her by Regency-era standards a spinster - and as we are told in the book’s opening pages that “her bloom had vanished early,” her prospects look dim. It is the last novel she completed before her death, and it’s written in a different mode than the rest of her books: It’s more lyrical than the rest, and a little sadder and less aggressively witty. Persuasion may not have the sparkling charm of Pride and Prejudice or the satirical bite of Emma, but it is Austen’s most deeply felt, melancholy, and beautiful novel. When it comes to Jane Austen’s love scenes, there is the letter scene in Persuasion, and then there is everything else.
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