Persuasion

Anne Elliot is twenty-seven and almost invisible. Her father catalogs his own family in a book of baronetcies for fun. Her older sister thinks of her as a vacancy. Her younger sister thinks of her as a nurse. Eight years earlier, when she was nineteen and someone, she fell in love with a navy officer named Frederick Wentworth and was talked out of marrying him by the people who claimed to know better. He sailed off. She didn't. That is the situation Jane Austen drops us into at the start of her final completed novel — not a courtship beginning, but the long slow shadow of a courtship that ended badly, and the awkward question of what a person owes their younger self.

Persuasion is the quietest of Austen's books and, by some measure, her sharpest. It was published in 1817, a few months after she died, in a four-volume set with Northanger Abbey. The original draft of the final chapters survives — the only Austen ending we can compare against itself — and her revisions sharpen everything that matters. If Pride and Prejudice is the novel about being clever enough to almost ruin your own happiness, Persuasion is the novel about being prudent enough to actually do it, and then living with the consequences for nearly a decade before being granted, against all probability, a second try.

A House Built on Vanity

The book opens not with Anne but with her father, and this is the first quiet trick. Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall reads only one book for pleasure — the Baronetage — and within it, only his own entry, where he has personally inscribed the addendum that his youngest daughter Mary married Charles Musgrove of Uppercross on the sixteenth of December, 1810. "Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character: vanity of person and of situation." He is fifty-four, still handsome by his own measurement, and there are, in his estimation, few women in England whose looks he could not improve upon if pressed to consult.