Jane Austen Persuasion Essay

Though she lived nearly two hundred years ago, Jane Austen continues to remain a well-known author today. Her legacy lives on through her books, loved by many all across the world. Her most notable books include Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma. One of her lesser-known books, however, is Persuasion. Persuasion is a classic romance novel. Readers are introduced to Anne Elliot, who is unmarried. She had at one point been engaged to a man named Captain Frederick Wentworth. He is “the one who got away”—a woman who Anne greatly loves and looks up to, Lady Russell, coaxed Anne into ending the engagement on account of Captain Wentworth’s lack of fortune and Lady Russell’s belief that such an unequal relationship was inappropriate. Now, seven years later, Anne has finally managed to move on and recover from the heartbreak of that broken engagement when a bombshell drops: Captain Wentworth is back. Anne’s father is forced to rent out his house, Kellynch Hall, in an effort to recover his dwindling fortune. The tenants he chooses are Admiral and Mrs. Croft. Mrs. Croft, as it turns out, is Captain Wentworth’s sister. Anne and Captain Wentworth meet for the first time since their breakup when he comes to visit Mary’s sick

Elliot is the heir of Kellynch Hall. He snubs the Elliot family, rejecting their efforts to welcome him without even apologizing. When Anne meets him on the street, he and the Elliot family finally reconcile. He seems to be a man of upstanding character—warm, steady, humble, and with “strong feelings of family-attachment and family-honour” (144). However, a friend of Anne’s, Mrs. Smith, revealed that Mr. Elliot was not the nice man he pretended to be. In a letter to Mrs. Smith’s husband, Mr. Elliot called Anne’s father a fool and wrote, “‘I wish I had any name but Elliot’” (201). Mrs. Smith remarks that Mr. Elliot is “…a man without heart or conscience; a designing, wary, cold-blooded being, who thinks only of himself…”