Book reviews - Jane Austen, Persuasion
★★★
Persuasion is the third Austen novel I’ve read, and like its predecessors (Emma, Pride and Prejudice), it follows a familiar pattern: a young, intelligent, and attractive Regency-era woman is seeking a proper match, and after various vicissitudes and red herrings, lands upon the correct choice. It’s the universal stuff of comedy, and it continues to bewitch the imagination of readers to this day, although, admittedly, romance tends to appeal more to female than male readers.
Yet while Persuasion follows the same general structure, in many ways it is distinctly different, with a tonal shift that separates it from the sparkling irony and vivaciousness of Austen’s earlier novels. This was her final completed work, and it shows: it is subtler, more mature, and deeply introspective. The cost of this shift is, perhaps, a loss of surface charm and dazzle -both in the novel and its heroine- but perhaps in exchange for it we get a greater emotional and moral depth. Still, I’m not surprised this novel has historically been less popular than the others.
Plot Summary (SPOILERS—Skip to the next section for thematic and personal commentary)
Persuasion tells the story of Anne Elliot, a woman "past her bloom" at 27, who lives with the quiet pain of having once been persuaded to reject the man she loved, Frederick Wentworth. At the age of 19, Anne had broken off her engagement to him due to the advice of Lady Russell, a close family friend and maternal figure of sorts for Anne (her mother died young), who believed his lack of rank and fortune made him an unsuitable match. Though Anne accepted the advice with resignation, she never stopped loving him.
The novel opens at Kellynch Hall, the Elliot family estate, where Anne lives with her vain, foppish and status-obsessed father, Sir Walter, and her equally superficial eldest sister, Elizabeth (side note: Austen’s novels seem to have a thing against sisters. I wonder if there’s something biographical about this). Her other sister, Mary, is no better (a self-important hypochondriac who is married and lives nearby, in the village of Uppercross). All three tend to dismiss Anne and ignore her sound advice, relegating her to the margins of family life.
Financial troubles force the Elliots to let Kellynch Hall and decide to relocate to Bath. The new tenants are Admiral and Mrs. Croft, who, crucially, turns out to be Wentworth’s sister. Anne, meanwhile, is sent to stay for a time with Mary and her husband, Charles (who btw had wanted to marry Anne) and gets to enjoy the louder and livelier Musgrove family, which includes not only Mary, Charles and their children but also, living close by, Charles’s parents and his two sisters. There she encounters Captain Wentworth again, now wealthy, successful, and widely admired. He appears to have moved on and flirts openly with both of the Musgrove girls, and particularly with Louisa. Anne, meanwhile, has to bear the reunion with composure and dignity, silently enduring the emotional strain.
Gradually, however, Wentworth begins to notice Anne's quiet strength, especially when contrasted with Louisa’s impulsiveness. A turning point comes during a trip to Lyme Regis, where Louisa insists on jumping from some stone steps and suffers a serious fall. Anne takes charge in the crisis, impressing Wentworth and his friends. One of them, the melancholic Captain Benwick, mourning his fiancée, also responds to Anne’s empathy. Wentworth himself seems to be warming up to Anne, appreciating that her steadiness and judgment are far rarer qualities than Louisa’s decisiveness.
In the second half of the novel, the Elliots are living in Bath, where Anne rejoins the core family (and is not particularly missed or well received). There she meets (again; he had ogled at her a bit in Lyme) William Elliot, her cousin and heir to the family estate. He is charming and seemingly honorable, and even begins to court her. But soon enough Mrs. Smith, an old and ailing friend of Anne’s, reveals that he is in fact manipulative, self-serving, and financially predatory: one of a kind with the slimy and superficial philanderers that appear to tempt Jane Austen’s heroines. Captain Wentworth also arrives in Bath, and tension builds between him and Anne as each struggles to conceal their deep feelings. During a key conversation between Anne and Captain Harville about gender and constancy in love, Wentworth overhears Anne passionately defending women’s emotional fidelity. Moved by her words, he writes her a now-famous letter: “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.”
The letter opens the floodgates. Misunderstandings are cleared, love is revived, and Anne and Wentworth are finally engaged again, this time with quiet certainty, and no persuasion but Anne’s own. Lady Russell, previously skeptical, gives her blessing.
The novel ends on a gentle note of triumph. This is not the exuberance of youthful romance, but the hard-won, quiet joy of a love that has endured the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
The Importance of Second Chances
At its core, Persuasion is a novel about regret, constancy, and the long arc of emotional maturity. Unlike the vivacious heroines of Emma or Pride and Prejudice, Anne is reserved, self-effacing, and often ignored by those around her. It is precisely this inwardness, her capacity for endurance, reflection, and moral clarity, that gives the novel its unique tone.
The theme of persuasion runs deep: external pressure versus internal conviction, social wisdom versus private desire. Was Anne right to yield to Lady Russell’s advice? Is sacrificing personal happiness for prudence ever noble and virtuous? Austen doesn't resolve these questions definitively, but lets them linger in the fabric of the story.
Captain Wentworth, too, is perhaps more complex than Austen’s usual romantic leads. His pride, ambition, and eventual emotional growth mirror Anne’s quieter evolution. The contrast between the superficial landed gentry (the Elliots) and the meritocratic, principled naval officers is also present as a subtle but unmistakable political commentary: Austen quietly praises earned success and integrity over inherited privilege.
Personal Impressions
Like many readers, I found Persuasion somewhat less immediately enjoyable than Austen’s more popular works (it is also highly significant that it hasn’t enjoyed of film or tv adaptations, although I’ve just read there’s a netflix movie with Dakota Johnson in the role of Anne). Part of this, I suspect, is personal, and part of it cultural. As a male reader, I couldn’t help sympathizing with Wentworth more than Anne, and expecting her to suffer some non-trivial suffering before being forgiven. I admit that is not me being fair, and in the last pages I warmed up more towards her, but it’s hard not to feel that she owes him something more than quiet endurance. Rational though her past decision may have been, it feels (to our modern tastes) emotionally unsatisfying.
Indeed, from a modern perspective, dating in Austen's world feels disconcerting, a transactional social game in which women are pressured to “catch” the best available man. Of course, Austen’s protagonists consistently prioritize emotional and intellectual compatibility, but it’s always and too conveniently coupled with their paramours just happening to be successful and rich in the end. One does have to make the effort to remember that early 19th century England was a very inegalitarian society: women had hardly any rights and no autonomy or economic freedom. Callous as it might seem, it is difficult not to feel that Lady Russell advice of restraint is not a good heuristic for a young and impressionable woman who may experience very tragic and permanent consequences from making a wrong marriage choice.
More than that, contemporary readers expect active agency and defiance from heroines. Anne never quite renounces her earlier caution - in fact, she defends it, and takes pride in it. Her climactic speech does not say, “I was wrong to let myself be persuaded,” but rather affirms that her original decision, painful as it was, was also conscientious and morally sound. And this will feel cold to readers raised on stories of bold romantic risk and dramatic reversals, and for inhabitants in a world like ours in which the strangleholds of tradition and restraint have almost completely vanished. In a sense, the values and ideas of Persuasion are conservative, whoever much the author might make fun of Anne’s relatives. And our age has seen a decline of conservatism and conservative values to their almost extinction.
Still, part of the value of literature lies in its ability to confront us with unfamiliar, real and imaginary, present and past moral worlds. Persuasion asks us to sympathize with a kind of quiet strength we may not naturally admire. It invites us to inhabit a sensibility that prizes duty, endurance, and constancy above drama or assertion. That may not stir us as powerfully as the hot spice of traditional, passionate romance of the Heathcliff and Cathy type, but ultimately I feel it offers us something better, more profound and ultimately more according with reality and wisdom, even if it’s less entertaining.
