Persuasion
by Jane Austen · first published 1789
46% recommend46% neutral8% critical
Why HN recommends it
A short, unfinished-feeling but polished Austen novel, and her most mature work. It suits those who find Pride and Prejudice or Emma hard going and want a quieter, more reflective romance.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Persuasion tells the love story of Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth, whose sister rents Miss Elliot's father's house, after the Napoleonic Wars come to an end. The story is set in 1814. The book itself is Jane Austen's last published book, published posthumously in December of 1818.
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> His book A Jane Austen Education is also very good, even for someone like me who does not love Jane Austen. Off topic, but you might try Persuasion if you haven't. I've attempted the others but been unable to get past the all-caps-bold-with-flashing-lights SMUG plastered over every page, save for in Emma, which was an excellent first 2/3 of a tragedy…
on “The Yale Problem Begins in High School” ↗Austen's Persuasion is easily my favorite of her novels, and I believe it's understood to have been not just a polish-edit away from ready for publication, but one or two content and punch-up passes, too (which reveals to…
on “John Steinbeck’s estate urged to let the world read his shunned werewolf novel” ↗Which ones have you tried? If you want to have something to talk about when people are talking about female authors and Austen inevitably comes up, I'd recommend Persuasion, and maybe Emma provided you are OK with imagining your own ending to make it the slow-motion soul-crushing tragedy it so clearly wanted to be. Persuasion wasn't given her final punch-up editing pass…
on “Let Down by the Lists” ↗…I pack in my suitcase when I'm moving as opposed to shipping), so I'll just post that list here, in no particular order: 'Good Poems' edited by Garrison Keiller; 'Pride and Prejudice' by Jane Austen; 'Persuasion' by Jane Austen; Fitzgerald's translation of 'The Rubaiyat'; Ford Madox Ford's 'Parade's End'; Hafiz, 'The Gift'; Modesitt, 'Gravity Dreams'; Heinlein, 'Time Enough for Love'; Bulgakov, 'Master and Margarita';…
on “Ask HN: Which book have you re-read recently?” ↗…Lots. Of. Bradbury. When you're loving his "boring" stories, you've made it. Everyone who likes romance seems to get into Austen just fine, so that's easy. If you bounce off the more popular ones, try Persuasion. It's very short and, I gather, didn't get a "polishing" edit/rewrite pass from Austen so it reads differently from the others. Maybe stretch into Isak Dinesen's short stories? Not romance, exactly, but…
on “Why Read Classic Books?” ↗Currently: Emma, by Austen, and Debt: The First 5,000 Years by Graeber. Both good. Recently finished Austen's Persuasion and Dickens' Oliver Twist. I'm trying to fill in big gaps in my reading of major English novels. Both were good. Dickens seems to have more compassion, which I appreciate. The two most moving scenes belong…
on “Ask HN: Which book are you reading these days?” ↗…Sense and Sensibility (I do—I find them too smug in a "gee look at me, the author, writing such clever things" way, though I think that's what people like about them so it must just be a me problem) try Persuasion. It's short and apparently Austen didn't get a chance to do her usual "punch-up" edit before she died, which probably explains why it comes off (to me) as less full of itself than the others and a much…
on “Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year” ↗…with children's: Swallows and Amazon series. Stranger in a Strange Land, The Man In The Maze, Tau Zero, Asimovs Foundation series. All Jane Austen's work: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Northhanger Abbey.
on “Ask HN: What is your favorite fiction book?” ↗…think about places in well written novels where a similar problem arose, and then go analyze how they handle it. For the basic technique of novels, pretty much everything you need is in Jane Austen's 'Persuasion' and 'Pride and Prejudice.' 'Emma' is her most technically perfect novel, but you can't learn from it. Go to Twain for handling dialect. Take your pick of some modern novelists for flashback and the like.…
on “How to Write a Novel” ↗…ensues. What would it look like to have an API for the collected works of Jane Austen that returned snippets (some of which are not even complete sentences)? How would that shape the way we read, say, Persuasion? That hermeneutic - texts are collections of independent logical propositions - was essentially unknown in the ancient world, and cedes immense epistemological ground to the project of the enlightenment…
on “Bible API” ↗Persuasion is fucking awful, and was enough to make me write off Austen entirely. There are so many good books, I don't see much point in wasting time on that kind of trash
on “Let Down by the Lists” ↗Jane Austen's "magnificent opening sentence of Persuasion" was 102 words long. I found it confusing. Replacing all the semicolons with periods, made it easy and enjoyable reading. I prefer the minimalist style of Strunk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style
on “On Semicolons and the Rules of Writing” ↗…a fortune, with trade becoming another one only in the 18th century or so. Still, we may observe some inheritance here, by the emphasis on the risks involved to justify the wins. (Read Jane Austen's "Persuasion" as a sociological study on the matter and you'll see how the British upper- and middle classes would have imploded under the pressure of second sons around 1800, if there hadn't been the Navy and the…
on “Why Young Men Go to War” ↗…attention What's weird about this is how I find Jane Austen's intros catch my attention, although they often have only tangential relation to the actual characters or plot of the book. The first chapter of Persuasion is about a vain, foolish, impoverished baronet whose primary comfort when he's down is to see his own name written in the massive tome of nobility. The main character is barely mentioned until the end…
on “Worst Opening Sentences of 2022” ↗…cents... Facts or opinions which are to pass through the hands of so many, to be misconceived by folly in one, and ignorance in another, can hardly have much truth left. - Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Persuasion, 1818 From http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Jane_Austen/
on “Ask HN: Why do half of Internet users think we are living in a simulation?” ↗