Persuasion

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Summary: the most profound book by Jane Austen
Review: I feel this is Austen's most serious and heart-felt novel. It's even painful at times.

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Summary: Well thought out and overflowing with feeling and meaning.
Review: Persuasion is Jane Austen at her best. The novel is most brilliantly thought out and beautifully presented. With romance at the forefront Austen nevertheless apprehends the task of presenting valuable life lessons. She achieves the intensity of the most gripping works, the light-heartedness of the most comical, and the wonder of the fantastic. This novel challenges whatever good lies dormant and inspires what's honorable in you. It also warms the heart.

Rating:
Summary: Most mature work
Review: I found Persuasion to be the most mature of all Austen's works. The story of Anne Elliot's simple yet poignantly lost love (and final redemption)is heartfelt. The language, I think, is sophisticated and not pretentious. However, I think that most interesting aspect of this is that fact that when I read this book 20 years later, I will be able to feel its profoundity on yet another level.

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Summary: Persuasion: Austen at Her Best
Review: Persuasion is Austen's version of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Ugly Duckling." How does Anne Elliot deal with her "faded bloom?" Throughout the novel, Austen depicts a most sympathetic character, Anne Elliot, that a woman of the 1990's can readily identify with. Anne Elliot is pulled in each and every direction as she tries to fit in and find her own self. This is not just another one of Austen's cliched marriage plots. It is a book about learning to cope and evaluating one's culture.

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Summary: The virtue of Jane Austen
Review: Anne Elliot, the heroine of "Persuasion", is surely more of Jane Austen than any of her other heroines. This was her last book and it was here that she drew together all the virtues she saw in an ideal woman. Anne is no longer young, has lost the full bloom of youthful beauty, and has been disappointed in love because she heeded the wishes of others, and not of her heart and her mind. The few images we have of Jane Austen we have show her to be a plain woman, and we know by reading any of her books of her fierce intelligence, biting wit and brilliant powers of observation of human behaviour. Anne is certainly more idealised than the voice of the narration (Austen herself), but she seems to be a manifestation of what she thought she was, or at least, how she would like to be - intelligent, kind, sensitive to other's feelings, and most importantly, someone who is valued for these qualities rather than for beauty and money. The tension of "Persuasion" is based around the question: "Is Captain Wentworth, the ideal Austen male - strong, determined yet intelligent and prepared to accept a worthy female as an intellectual equal - in love with Anne"? Persuasion is a good read - it's not as cheeky as "Emma", or as involved as "Pride and Prejudice", but there are plenty of the great Austen ironic (or even sarcastic) flourishes. And the intelligence of her writing is a delight.

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Summary: A Delicately Wrought Autumnal Minuet
Review: Like all of her novels, Jane Austen's PERSUASION is essentially a comedy of manners--a work in which the characters must negotiate a complex code of conduct in order to survive, much less achieve their ends. And in a certain sense the novel is indicative of Austen's great talent, razor sharp, laced with irony and wit, and remarkably phrased. And yet PERSUASION is quite unlike Austen's other novels in the story it tells.

Eight years earlier, Anne Elliot fell in love with a man named Wentworth. Her family and friends disdained the match, arguing that the man was below her in station and lacked any fortune with which to maintain Anne in her accustomed mode of life. Persuaded to reject him against her own will, Anne broke off the engagement--and thereafter found herself unable to love another even as she endured the follies of her father and two sisters. But Wentworth has returned, having made his name and fortune with the British navy, and it is now his turn to reject her.

Published in 1816, PERSUASION is the last novel Austen completed before her death a year later, and it is remarkable for a very autumnal tone. Unlike such Austen masterpieces as PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and EMMA, the herione is not a spirited, quickwitted young women on the verge of matrimony; the hero is not a dashing gentlemen of great estate; there is no verbal duel between the sexes. It is instead the story of a commonsense and pleasantly ordinary woman who considers herself past the likelihood of marriage--and who now wishes only to escape the emotional pain and humiliation visited upon her by a suitor from long ago.

While PERSUASION does not really stand along Austen's greatest works, it is nonetheless a very fine novel, a delicately wrought tale of opportunity lost and the passage of time, told in the uniquely piercing style so typical of the author--and while, of course, all eventually comes right for the romantically downtrodden Anne, it has a touch of melancholy quite unlike the tone of her other novels. Austen readers will find it a delight.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

Rating:
Summary: MAGNIFICENT
Review: Many would have Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" determine her status as one of the greatest of all novelists; however, this critic will always stand by the quiet and profound maturity that defines this lovely masterpiece "Persuasion." Here the characters are all terribly human and flawed and the narrative so touching without ever resorting to maudlin prose. There is an underlying sadness in this book which tells the reader that at some point in her life, Jane Austen loved deeply. This book is a celebration of that love; indeed, she would not have felt comfortable mourning it before her family or her readers. Therefore, instead of indulging in self-pity, Austen gratifies the soul by telling the story of one woman who refuses to sacrife her integrity and "secures" the man she loves in her way and in her time. This is more than a great read; it is truly a magnificent work.

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Summary: Persuasion to Love
Review: Jane Austen wrote Persuasion as her last novel. She influenced her characters to be moderate people who lived within the same town as she grew up in. This town is to be called Bath.
Anne, the main character of the novel, is the sister of Elizabeth and Mary. The family is well respected in town. They live with their father, Sir Walter Elliot, who without great thinking puts the family into dept. They then move to Bath and leave their house to Admiral and Mrs. Croft. Mrs. Croft is Captain Wentworth's sister, the man Anne had once fallen so deeply in love with. Anne goes and visits the Musgrove family where again she meets Captain Wentworth after not seeing him for so long. The Musgrove family, have two children and Captain Wentworth focuses his attention on one in particular.
They travel to see another family in which Mr. Elliot falls in love with Anne. After only knowing her for a short period of time they later find out that they are cousins. Anne forgets about Captain Wentworth for awhile and focuses her attention on Mr. Elliot. They become engaged and Anne finds out Mr. Elliot's motives. Forgiving Mr. Elliot Anne stays with him. As time goes by she hears that Captain Wentworth proclaims that his love for her has never gone away.
Jane Austen portrays the story as a love story but with a little twist and turn to it. Where family members fall in love and sides are taken. Based in the pas it has a present kind of love to it. Love triangles, family ties, and friendships that go on and off.
Persuasion needs a lot of attention. You have to focus on the little details and be interested in old literature and the time period in which the book was based and written in. There were certain things that become uncertain and unclear to understand.
The way Jane writes isn't really as typical as most books teenage children would read. She sets her stories on other books she has written and being sick while writing this book, it could have been a little better. Not to say it was a horrible book, but you really have to have the time and heart to read it.
If you are a serious reader and can really get into a book, this is a good choice. It portrays a love story that could happen in today's society but has other aspects that allows you to know that it was set back in a time period when love wasn't the one thing everyone was looking for and willing to talk about.


Rating:
Summary: My sixth and final Austen book. Delightful!
Review: I have now read all of Austen's completed works and wrote reviews for all them as well ^-^. (I'm feeling very proud of myself by now) It's not my favorite, but it's definitely not the worst. And for Jane Austen, even the worst is an enjoyable, entertaining read; I only mean the worst compared to her other novels not on a general scale.

To get down to the book, it was quite different from the others. Anne is twenty-eight at the start of the book, she is plain and unattractive having lost her `bloom' seven years earlier due to the loss of her love, and isn't as witty and sparkling as Elizabeth Bennet or Emma. Yet you don't come to despise her; she's not weak. And when you come to think of it, her agreeing to break off her engagement with the hero was a wise thing to do at her age. If he hadn't acquired a great fortune or perhaps died in service, then where would she be? Plus the fact that she was young and smothered with disapproval all around and the woman she thought of as her mother was dead against the match.

So anyway, she also has the most despicable family out of any of Austen's other novels-even Mansfield Park-they are conceited, selfish and self-important. The sad thing is that you realize that people like Sir Walter really exist, people who care solely for appearances and rank. Even Anne's sister Mary, perhaps the nicest sister, is selfish without really meaning it, and treats Anne the way a spoiled child treats it's parents; nicely when it wants something, but all the while thinking: what else do they have in their lives to do but to cater to all my whims?

There are a few trivial things I didn't like: first that Sir Walter Elliot is such a snob; Walter is my absolute favorite name! Austen gave it a pretty bad impression. Secondly, I wish that James could have married Anne; I really liked him, much better than the hero, and he suited her so well! I didn't really like the hero of this book; I'm a sucker for the rich, dashing gentlemen of her other novels. You don't really know the hero of this book so well.

Anyway, like all her books, the prose is outstanding, her usage of the language remarkable and the reader's attention is never lost; Austen's greatest gift. I have always loved Austen's style of writing, it's great! Great book, highly recommended! Add it to your classics shelf. Don't have one? Get one!!!
=^-^=

Rating:
Summary: An unknown masterpiece of Jane Austen !
Review: Persuasion is one of my favourite novels of Jane Austen. Like in all her other novels Jane Austen describes with wit and style the life of a cute heroin. At that point Anne Elliot is slightely different, because she found her real love when she was a young woman, but she had to break her engagement, because the famaily matters wanted her to. After a few years she still loves the man she broke up with. As she meets him again a couple of years later, he has made a lot of money as Captain . At first they try to keep out of their way, but that seems to be impossible. They meet eachother really often, because the relatives of Anne want him to mary one of their daughters. The love is still there , in both of them, but manners and doubts make it impossible to tell.
Like in all Jane Austen's novels there are implications and disaccords that let you always hope for a Happy End .
And for my opinion Jane Austen wrote the most romantic loveletter in that book.