a book
Persuasion
Jane Austen, Barbara Heller · 2022 · 250 pages
Jane Austen's beloved and subtly subversive final novel of romantic tension and second chances. Now a motion picture from Netflix starring Dakota Johnson and Henry Golding, and a TikTok Book Club Pick.
At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all, it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all, it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
recommended by 10 people
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Nigella Lawson
“Sparer, more savage and so much more poignant than ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ (a great book, too, and I don’t mean to disparage it at all,) ‘Persuasion’ is a novel that tells us, as only Jane Austen can, about the vanities and follies of being human with such memorably dry wit.”↗
Brandon Taylor
“I love Persuasion because it is a novel about people who change their minds, and there’s nothing more human than someone changing their mind and realizing the consequences of their choices. It’s a novel about grown up people making grown up decisions, but also it’s a novel about grown ups being childish and petty and silly. It’s her best novel, I think.”↗
Nia DaCosta
“I love a rom-com! I came to romantic comedy through Jane Austen. All of Austen’s books have a romantic, ‘will they, wont they?’ This one in particular, we just want Anne to be happy. I love that she sees him write the letter, it is so great.”↗
Emerald Fennell
“‘You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late.’ There can’t be a single confession in all fiction more devastating than this one. Austen single-handedly established the rom-com as we know it: Even Tim and Dawn, everyone’s favorite couple in the U.K. version of The Office, are the love children of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth.”↗
Simon Schama
“@CassCookson the book is so wonderful - autumnal, stained with sorrowing regret, intense with its quietness .. makes Emma look lurid and contrived by comparison and P n P too stagey”↗
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