Persuasion

Eight years ago Anne Elliot let herself be talked out of the only love she would ever feel, and she has been quietly paying for it ever since. She is twenty-seven now, her bloom faded, treated as furniture by a vain father and a colder sister, when Frederick Wentworth, the naval officer she once refused, comes back rich and admired and seemingly indifferent to her. Persuasion is Austen's last finished novel and her most autumnal, the one where the wit cools into something close to grief: its heroine is not too clever for her own good but too constant, and the book lives inside her steady, unregarded mind while everyone around her mistakes her for no one. Austen wrote it knowing she was ill, and the ache of a second spring, of bloom recovered late, runs all through it. When Wentworth finally sets down his pen and lets Anne read what he could never say aloud, the irony falls away completely, and so does the reader's composure.