Persuasion

Persuasion by Jane Austen, published posthumously in 1817, is often considered her most mature and emotionally profound work — a novel about second chances, the costs of persuadability, and the possibility of recovering what was lost. Anne Elliot, the novel’s quiet, intelligent heroine, was persuaded eight years earlier to break her engagement to Captain Wentworth. When he returns, the novel traces their halting, painful, and ultimately triumphant rediscovery of each other. Persuasion has an elegiac quality absent from Austen’s earlier novels, as if she understood she was writing about time and loss from her own experience. Published in a beautiful new edition, this is the Austen novel that moves most directly to the heart — the one that readers return to most often, and with most gratitude.