True Jane-heads know that “Persuasion,” though not one of her flashiest, best-known works, is nevertheless among her finest. Like “Pride and Prejudice,” it takes as its subject the question of how minds and judgments are changed through new information or perspective. But where Lizzy Bennet is a young, bold, headstrong woman who has never made a mistake worth losing sleep over before, Anne Elliot has lived through the first blush of her youth and has had the opportunity to live with regrets about how she made up her mind during those innocent years. She comes to the events of the novel with a great deal of hard-earned perspective on how decisions are made, and the terrible consequences of making the wrong one.
Anne Elliot was, as a 19-year-old girl, desperately in love with an ambitious but hard-up naval captain, Frederick Wentworth. Her loving, conservative-minded godmother, Lady Russell, convinced her that a marriage to Captain Wentworth would be an unwi…
