Persuasion in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Jan 13, 2020 Angie rated it it was amazing

I had the goal of reading a classic in 2019 and started Persuasion the last few days of December, thinking it was relatively small and should be a quick read. Then I remembered that it had been a LONG time since I'd read a classic and I'd forgotten how elevated the language is and how I simply can't plow through like I do with other books. Obviously, I didn't finish the book in 2019. I didn't even finish in the first week of 2020. :P But I finished! And I really did enjoy it. I loved Anne Elliot ...more

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Sep 07, 2011 Jeff Scott rated it really liked it

Shelves: audiobooks, 1001books, classics, to-own

I’ve always been intrigued with the subtle knife of conversation that’s prominent in Austen books. A subtle remark, a right phrasing and your enemy is vanquished, cast off out of good society. It seems to be an analysis on the power of language over those who are more interested in appearance than reality. So goes Persuasion, an Austen work with a little less of the drama and more about the connection of two people. It’s a detail of how family and friends kept their true love apart, a sort of Ro I’ve always been intrigued with the subtle knife of conversation that’s prominent in Austen books. A subtle remark, a right phrasing and your enemy is vanquished, cast off out of good society. It seems to be an analysis on the power of language over those who are more interested in appearance than reality. So goes Persuasion, an Austen work with a little less of the drama and more about the connection of two people. It’s a detail of how family and friends kept their true love apart, a sort of Romeo and Juliet had cooler heads prevailed.

Overall, it’s the same Austen fair, family is fallen on a bit of hard times. A handsome and wealthy man would solve the problem, but beware of the ones with long engagements or those who want to manipulate you for their own ends. Anne is able to easily evade these false attempts even though one of them would have meant a restoration to her home. She knows she was always meant for Wentworth even though those many years ago she was persuaded otherwise. It’s a story that could be told today with families pressuring their impressionable children to marry or not to marry when instead, standing up for what you want is the only thing that will lead to happiness.

Favorite Passages:

"Anne Elliot, with all her claims of birth, beauty, and mind, to throw herself away at nineteen; involve herself at nineteen in an engagement with a young man, who had nothing but himself to recommend him, and no hopes of attaining affluence, but in the chances of a most uncertain profession, and no connexions to secure even his farther rise in the profession, would be, indeed, a throwing away, which she grieved to think of!" p. 21

"Soon, however, she began to reason with herself, and try to be feelingless. Eight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up. How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness! What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations,removals--all, all must be comprised in it, and oblivion of the past--how natural, how certain too! It included nearly a third part of her own life.Alas! with all her reasoning, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing." p. 48

"She had used him ill, deserted and disappointed him; and worse, she had shewn afeebleness of character in doing so, which his own decided, confident temper could not endure. She had given him up to oblige others. Ithad been the effect of over-persuasion. It had been weakness and timidity." p. 49

"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you." p. 183

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Jan 27, 2017 Christine rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: funny

2018 update: still yes to all of the below. Although the last paragraph is a pretty weird, ambivalent way to end the story, everything that leads up to it is masterful. Wentworth>Darcy 4EVA.

***

I avoid sappy romance, but my heart would skip a beat when Captain Wentworth betrayed a possible remnant of affection for Anne.

I'm a liberal, egalitarian, modern American woman, but somehow I can sympathize with Austen's shock at "unsuitable" marriages below one's station (never mind *gasp* premarital sex! ...more

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