Title: Persuasion
Author: Jane Austen
Genre: Fiction
Publication Date: 1818
Purchase Price: $7.95 (paperback)
Seven years’ prior to the main events of Persuasion, Anne Elliott falls in love with Frederick, a Naval officer who is handsome and ambitious, but poor. Anne’s father and sister, obsessed with family distinction, oppose the match. Anne’s mentor and friend Lady Russell, acting on behalf of Anne’s deceased mother, convinces Anne to break off the match.
Seven years later, Anne and Frederick meet again when Frederick’s sister and brother-in-law take a lease on Kellynch, Anne’s family estate. Frederick is now a captain, rich in both money and honor — and Anne still loves him.
So much bad has happened between the two young people, however, that all seems lost. Can the young people be persuaded to be in love once more?
Some thoughts
After writing a few weeks ago about books I stopped reading, I decided to go back through my bookshelves and find one that just didn’t do it for me the last time I attempted to read it.
Although there are some great themes in Persuasion, I found myself unsatisfied with the novel overall.
There were simply too many characters, most of them unlikeable. I couldn’t always keep straight in my head the characters and their relationships to each other–although that hardly matters, because none of them were particularly pleasant or memorable.
I enjoyed bits and pieces, but deep down I know that Persuasion just doesn’t hold a candle to Pride and Prejudice.
Forgive me, Miss Austen.
Suggested Soundtrack:
Joseph Haydn Concert for Pianoforte (Richard Fuller)
Kick-ass Quotes:
” ‘I should deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by woman. No, I believe you capable of every thing great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as — if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object, I mean, while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.’ ” (pp. 226-227)
Anyone else try to read a book they’d previously abandoned? How’d it go?