3 Review(s)

In Persuasion, Jane Austen’s last completed novel, unpublished until her death, satire and ridicule become milder and the tone is more grave and tender. This novel depicts her most memorable heroine – Anne Elliot, a young woman of perfect breeding, profound depth of emotion and unswerving integrity. These virtues, however, exist in a world – the world of country gentry in Regency England – where shallowness and hypocrisy thrive. It is Anne’s balanced confrontation with these forces, as she vies for the affection of the man she loves, which gives shape to a novel which shows Jane Austen’s rich maturity of vision and her newfound sense of human potential. Combining sharp wit and warm sympathy, stylistic brilliance and tender insight, the novel unfolds her matchless art. Persuasion depicts the most beautiful and candid anatomy of woman’s love representing the author’s personal grief and loneliness. Jane Austen wrote to her niece Fanny, “You may perhaps like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me.”