Description
In this, Jane Austen's last novel, appears her most memorable heroine—Anne Elliot, a young woman of perfect breeding, profound depth of emotion, and unswerving integrity. These virtues, however, exist in a world—the world of country gentry in Regency England—in which shallowness and hypocrisy thrive and ever threaten to win dominion. It is Anne's poised confrontation with these forces, as she vies for the affections of the man she loves, which gives shape to a work which displays Jane Austen's rich maturity of vision and her new-found sense of human potential. Blending sharp wit and warm sympathy, stylistic brilliance and tender insight, Persuasion represents the crowning achievement of Jane Austen's career, the final unfolding of her matchless art. As Marvin Mudrick writes: “The proper parochial society that for a quarter of a century Jane Austen has been laughing at and amusing, despising and defending, at all events copiously memorializing, comes to its late flower in the unassuming
5 reviews for Persuasion