Persuasion by Jane Austen

Well, I am very proud of myself. I managed to make the canon of Austen literature last for over a year. But tragically, I have finished the last one. I guess I'll have to start all over again.

Persuasion was superb, both in its predictability, and in its innovation. The female lead loves the male lead, and there is lots of uncertainty until they get together in the end. That is a given. But this heroine is older. She spurned the advances of a young sailor in her youth at the advice of a friend, and now she is "seven-and-twenty" and still single.

The sailor, now Captain Wentworth, shows up again because of common acquaintances, but he has eyes only for younger, livelier girls, not "bloom"-less Anne Elliot. Anne just hangs out doing the whole Austen forbearance thing, and simply by being her normal, tactful, modest self, persuades the sailor to renew his love.

The eponymous concept is also manifest in Anne's decision to initially refuse the offer of marriage. Her friend had persuaded her to change her mind, and this is a major objection for Captain Wentworth.He thinks such a changeable mind exhibits weakness. But, of course, he is soon persuaded otherwise.

It was a very pleasant book. The story gives hope to quiet, untoward, unexceptional-looking girls. Apparently their better qualities will nevertheless shine through eventually. After all, Anne had no less than three potential suitors and certain admirers, in just six months. And, moreover, while in her late twenties in Regency England.

Austen made some great observations in this book, and I copied down some of the best:

"Anne always contemplated them as some of the happiest creatures of her acquaintance: but still, saved as we all are by some comfortable feeling of superiority from wishing for the possibility of exchange, she would not have given up her own more elegant and cultivated mind for all their enjoyments..." (Chapter 5)

"Anne had not wanted this visit to Uppercross to learn that a removal from one set of people to another, though at a distance of only three miles, will often include a total change of conversation, opinion, and idea." (Chapter 6)

"She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped." (Chapter 17)