Author: Jane Austen
Narrator: Juliet Stevenson
Playback: 3hrs 51m
Publisher: Naxos Audiobook
First Published: 1817
Genre: Classics, Romance, Historical
Book description: Persuasion is Jane Austen's last completed novel. She began it soon after she had finished Emma, completing it in August 1816. She died, aged 41, in 1817; Persuasion was published in December that year (but dated 1818). Persuasion is linked to Northanger Abbey not only by the fact that the two books were originally bound up in one volume and published together, but also because both stories are set partly in Bath, a fashionable city with which Austen was well acquainted, having lived there from 1801 to 1805. Besides the theme of persuasion, the novel evokes other topics, such as the Royal Navy, in which two of Jane Austen's brothers ultimately rose to the rank of admiral. As in Northanger Abbey, the superficial social life of Bath-well known to Austen, who spent several relatively unhappy and unproductive years there-is portrayed extensively and serves as a setting for the second half of the book. In many respects Persuasion marks a break with Austen's previous works, both in the more biting, even irritable satire directed at some of the novel's characters and in the regretful, resigned outlook of its otherwise admirable heroine, Anne Elliot, in the first part of the story. Against this is set the energy and appeal of the Royal Navy, which symbolises for Anne and the reader the possibility of a more outgoing, engaged, and fulfilling life, and it is this worldview which triumphs for the most part at the end of the novel.
Thoughts:
This is a reread for me. Again Austen is a very good option for a classic read, the works are very easy to understand and straightforward.
This is still a very good social commentary, with wit and a few hints of humor, but the story is much slower and the characters were not as engaging as say Pride and Prejudice. One of my favorite parts was when Anne corrected a man about the common belief "women being fickle in love" by pointing out that his opinion was based on books written by, you guessed it, men!
But overall, Anna is a more timid heroine if compared to other of Austen's heroines. And of course, we have people who are represented, realistic but annoying. All throughout history we have a society that is mainly focused on appearance.
"The worst of Bath was the number of its plain women. He did not mean to say that there were no pretty women, but the number of the plain was out of all proportion. He had frequently observed, as he walked, that one handsome face would be followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights; and once, as he had stood in a shop on Bond Street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, one after another, without there being a tolerable face among them. It had been a frosty morning, to be sure, a sharp frost, which hardly one woman in a thousand could stand the test of. But still, there certainly were a dreadful multitude of ugly women in Bath; and as for the men! they were infinitely worse. Such scarecrows as the streets were full of!" - Sir Walter Elliot.
Anyhow this is a slow plotline but designed to be a shot to your emotions. In this novel, Austen meant to show—how we love, how we yearn, how we survive in perpetual loss(this feels very fitting for today's society)—by painting a very intimate portrait of a woman caught in the never-ending ache of love and sorrow, this is the first example of the drama we can expect from our Sopa Operas. It’s a story about regret and family, loss and remembrance, fear and uncertainty, and desire and our attempts and failures to love people and to stand up for ourselves. The critique of British society that Austen routes through Anne’s social exclusion is sharp, exposing what lurks beneath social surfaces and the tragedy of young women so full of life yet isolated, confined to a defined existence by selfish societies that predicate their worth on how useful they can be to their families (be it the ones they're born or they marry into). The story is also more melancholy with the sense of an ending. This is the tale of the aftermath: of what happens after love has been found and lost, when all the details of youth have faded away and one can no longer afford to be so careless, so unfettered, and so unburdened. Anne, at this time, is already in her late twenties and yet is unmarried due to her own choice, not because she doesn't want to ever marry but because she followed the advice of people who should want the best interest of her well-being. So when she decides to turn a marriage proposal down, then she spends years regretting it. But feels like she doesn't deserve to feel bad about it, after all the decision was hers.
The fact that she runs into the same man she fell for and was about to marry, had she agreed to, is the turning point. When he pretends not to know her at all, it speaks volumes about his real self. Pride is a very powerful incentive. He refuses to allow the rest of the people, new acquaintances that know nothing of their previous history. Wentworth’s love for Anne seems to have been drained leaving nothing but a hard crust of disdain and resentment.
The life of both of them has been marked, in a negative way and they are trying their damn hardest to hide it.
This is not my favorite novel mainly due to the profound existential questions that are stirred in you as the reader.
This was used for the challenges:
Classics
ReRead
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