Bonus categories: Audiobook, Stories with a TV/movie adaptation
This was a re-read for me--one of my favorite novels by Jane Austen. I listened to two different versions, one from Dreamscape Media on Hoopla and one from Blackstone Publishing on Overdrive and preferred the latter, narrated by Nadia May, though both were well-done.
The premise of the story is this: Eight years before the novel begins, Anne Elliot is happily betrothed to a naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, but she breaks off the engagement when persuaded by her friend Lady Russell that she is too young and inexperienced for such a match. The breakup produces in Anne a deep and long-lasting regret. When Wentworth returns from sea eight years later as a rich and successful captain, he and Anne are thrown into company again by mutual friends who know nothing of the previous events. Anne has the pain of witnessing Captain Wentworth wooing other women while she herself is being pursued by interested men, and the story sifts through various changes until the quick and dizzying conclusion!
Jane Austen has always been one of my favorite authors because of her ironic observations on social custom, love, and marriage. In Persuasion even more than her other novels, we see the differences of rank and situation found in Regency English society and what all those differences entail. There are also many observations on life and society in the English countryside versus Bath, and I would recommend this to anyone with a love for classic British literature or a curiosity about life among the gentility of early 19th-century England.
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