A review by mdarceyhall
Persuasion by Jane Austen

5.0

I’m so happy I read this again. Not surprisingly, I enjoyed it more than I did the first time, and I owe that to age. This is one of those books, like "Anna Karenina," that’s most appreciated when you’ve lived long enough to make mistakes, to be able to look back and see how easily influenced you were, whether by internal or external pressures. Persuasion is Jane Austen’s quietest novel. It’s not as obvious in its humor as Emma or as traditionally romantic as Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility. Anne Elliott is not the obvious heroine of this type of social novel. She’s not Elizabeth Bennet or Emma Woodhouse. Anne’s character growth is measured in inches, not miles. It’s subtle, like the romance in the novel, which makes her so unique. We’ll always remember the “big” romantic heroines in great literature, like Anna in “Anna Karenina,” Becky Sharpe in “Vanity Fair,” and Natasha in “War and Peace,” because they take up space with their bold actions taken in the name of love or lust. Anne Elliot is not an Anna, Becky, or Natasha. She most resembles these protagonists’ foils—the women who take up fewer pages but ultimately achieve a more wholesome love, like Maria Bolkonskaya’s eventual romance with Nikolai Rostov in “War and Peace” and Kitty and Levin in “Anna Karenina.” And that’s what I love about this novel—that Austen made what other authors might relegate to a side plotline into the main story. Ultimately, this is a book to be read, and then read again a decade or so later, in order to fully relate to Anne’s development of character. And, of course, to appreciate her sister Mary’s hilariously self-centered comments.