Recommendations from our site
“I’m really interested in a love that starts in the past, or at the start of the book, and then we track it. Persuasion is wonderful in that sense: we meet Anne Elliott when she is 27 years old, having had this big love eight years before. I really love this book. It’s one of her Austen’s books—the last novel she published before she died. It’s very interior. There’s an interior voice working in a way that she didn’t have in her other books. And so it feels emotionally very satisfying. We know what they are both feeling, and it’s a powerful attraction that works on all levels.” Read more...
The Best Literary Love Stories
Lily King, Novelist
“First up are the Penguin Clothbound editions, which are available in a huge range of titles” Read more...
“Persuasion is an unusually brilliant novel, just in terms of its style of narration. Out of all of the novels Austen published in her short life, this one feels most to me like a real love story.” Read more...
Jenny Davidson, Literary Scholar
“Persuasion is really the best of the Jane Austen books. As many people have pointed out, it’s different in tone from any of the others. It makes you realise that Austen was writing in the early 19th century, right along with people like Wordsworth and Coleridge, and that she was capable of having and expressing the same kinds of feeling. It’s a real love story, all the way through. You really feel it’s a romantic story – both with a small r and a big R – in which you’re rooting for the lovers to get together from beginning to end. “ Read more...
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Literary Scholar
