Extract

She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older.

A woman of twenty-seven, no longer young by the measure of her world, returns to the company of the man she was persuaded to refuse eight years earlier, and must navigate the agony of loving in silence while he courts another. Jane Austen wrote this novel in the last year of her life, and it is her most autumnal work, suffused with the knowledge that time is not generous and second chances are not guaranteed. Anne Elliot moves through drawing rooms and seaside resorts with a composure that conceals depths revealed only gradually. The letter in which Wentworth confesses he is half agony, half hope, is the most earned declaration of love in the language. Austen's quietest novel is also her most piercing.