Jane Austen wrote Persuasion in 1815-16 and it was published posthumously in December 1817, six months after her death. Anne Elliot, twenty-seven years old and past the age at which Austen's heroines typically appear, was engaged eight years earlier to Frederick Wentworth, then a naval officer without fortune. Persuaded by her friend Lady Russell that the engagement was imprudent, Anne broke it off. The novel begins when Wentworth returns, now a successful captain with considerable prize money, and takes up social life in the neighborhood. He is indifferent to Anne, or performs indifference, and pursues younger women. Anne must observe this while being useful to other people's lives and waiting to understand what her feelings and his actually are.
The novel is Austen's most formally unusual in terms of the protagonist's position. Anne is not in command of most of the situations she inhabits, she is subordinate at Kellynch, tolerated at Uppercross, overlooked at Bath. Her intelligence and feeling are fully present throughout but have almost no outlet; her role is frequently that of the person who notices what others miss and provides emotional support she will not receive herself. Wentworth's letter, "I am half agony, half hope", is the pivot on which the novel turns, and Austen stages its delivery with unusual restraint, having it passed to Anne while other conversations proceed around her. The reader sees only what Anne sees: the physical letter, the hand shaking as she reads it.
Persuasion carries more emotional directness than Austen's earlier novels, possibly because she was writing it in deteriorating health without the expectation that she would live to revise it. The letter scene is the most openly romantic writing Austen produced, and it is effective precisely because of the restraint with which everything leading up to it has been managed. The novel also contains, in the exchange between Anne and Captain Harville about whether men or women are more faithful in attachment, the most explicit statement of Austen's feminist argument, conducted through a philosophical debate while Wentworth, across the room, listens and writes.
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights was so dark that critics assumed 'Ellis Bell' (her pseudonym) must be a man.
This book is in the public domain , its copyright has expired, meaning it now belongs to everyone. All books on EbookVaultFree are sourced from Project Gutenberg, the world's oldest digital library. Downloading them is 100% legal, free, and requires no sign-up.