5 August 2025, Persuasion, Jane Austen, 1818
Jane Austen is everywhere this year, the 250th anniversary of her birth, and not wishing to miss out we chose her last completed novel, Persuasion, for our high summer read. It is regarded by many as her best novel, although it is not her most well-known or popular; that accolade falls to Pride and Prejudice. Persuasion has a slight narrative structure and in Anne Elliot, an ever present heroine. Anne, having been persuaded to break off her engagement to Captain Frederick Wentworth eight years earlier, finds him thrown back into her path and the novel recounts what happens when they meet again. It is a moving, intimate and delicate story of lost and regained love in which we observe and understand much from Anne’s point of view; we are invited to inhabit her mind throughout. But unusually with Austen we are also invited to observe and understand through Wentworth’s eyes especially at the denouement of the novel – and the effect is extremely powerful. Notwithstanding its slight structure, Austen weaves depth and complexity through the narrative as she explores the notion of power as captured in the concept of persuasion. Persuasion (power) is exercised with good intent, generating cruel outcomes; it is exercised for self-aggrandisement; it is an exercise in self- delusion; and it is exercised with gentle intent, generating unexpected outcomes. And the whole is of course laced with Austen’s acerbic wit: ‘the Musgroves had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year’.
Perhaps predictably (?), those who were already Austen readers enjoyed reading or re-reading Persuasion but those who were new to her work were not quite so easily taken up. However, our discussion of the various aspects of the novel did suggest new or different insights into the narrative – which must be one of the best outcomes to hope for from a book group.