Persuasion. Jane Austen.

Persuasion
Jane Austen
Oxford University Press. 1818.

Why read it? Novel. Note Jane Austen's humorous observation of the people in her social circle and her keen sense of the place of women in her society. The heroine, Anne Elliot, and her lover, Captain Wentworth, were engaged for eight years before the story begins but Anne broke the engagement in deference to family and friends--they didn't like him. Reunited, they fall in love again. Austen's impressions of the people around her are delightful.

Some sample ideas from the novel: "A few years before, Anne Eliott had been very pretty, but her bloom had vanished early...." "How quick come the reasons for approving what we like." "One of the least agreeable circumstance of her residence there, was her being treated with too much confidence by all parties, and being too much in the secret of the complaints of each.... She could do little more than listen patiently, soften every grievance and excuse each to the other...." "No; the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look, in no respect lessening his personal advantages."

"She had given him up to oblige others...the effect of over-persuasion...weakness and timidity." "Anne's object was not to be in the way of anybody...." "Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn...." "He had a pleasing face and a melancholy air, just as he ought to have, and drew back from conversation."

"Sir Walter...hoped she [Mrs. Wallis] might make some amends for the many very plain faces he was continually passing in the streets..... The worst of Bath was the number of its plain women...; did not mean to say that there were no pretty women, but the number of the plain was out of all proportion...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 in Bond Street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, one after another, without there being a tolerable face among them."

"He was quite as good-looking as he had appeared at Lyme, his countenance improved by speaking, and his manners were so exactly what they ought to be, so polished, so easy, so particularly agreeable...." "...she is sure to have something to relate that is entertaining and profitable, something that makes one know one's species better." Admiral Croft: "I wonder where that boat was built.... I would not venture over a horse pond in it." "Benwick is a clever man, a reading man...." "She was deep in the happiness of such misery, or the misery of such happiness."

Quote: "We [females] certainly do not forget you [males], so soon as you forget us. Perhaps our fate rather than our merit; live at home, quiet, confined and our feelings prey upon us while you are forced on exertion...have always a profession, pursuit, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions."