What is an analysis of Austen's Persuasion?

Austen never fully revised Persuasion, her last completed novel, so it is shorter than the four novels she published in her lifetime. If the earlier Pride and Prejudice was "light, bright, and sparkling" (as Jane Austen herself wrote in her letters), Persuasion has a somber, autumnal quality. As it opens, the heroine, Anne Elliot, believes she threw away her one chance of happiness seven years before. At that time, she had refused to marry the man she was in love with, Captain Wentworth, because his financial prospects were uncertain.

Wentworth returns, rich...

Austen never fully revised Persuasion, her last completed novel, so it is shorter than the four novels she published in her lifetime. If the earlier Pride and Prejudice was "light, bright, and sparkling" (as Jane Austen herself wrote in her letters), Persuasion has a somber, autumnal quality. As it opens, the heroine, Anne Elliot, believes she threw away her one chance of happiness seven years before. At that time, she had refused to marry the man she was in love with, Captain Wentworth, because his financial prospects were uncertain.

Wentworth returns, rich and successful. Anne, marginalized because she is a dependent single woman in a family absorbed in shallow pursuits, is aware she is still in love with him. 

Anne is a woman who has learned to serve others, from her self-absorbed married sister to her vain father, who judges everyone by their looks. When, against Anne's will, the family moves to Bath to economize, Anne spends time generously visiting an impoverished, invalid schoolmate, the widowed Mrs. Smith.

While Anne and Wentworth find their way back together, this is a mature love, based on a knowledge that life can be painful and fraught with disappointment. The novel also illustrates the quiet toll that being treated as a person of no importance can take on a single woman. Yet it is also a story of virtue rewarded, for Anne, with a depth of character molded by a life of serving others, has more compassion and sensitivity than most of those around her. She wins one of the most virile and socially adept of Austen's heroes. The novel shows there are second chances. It also questions a marriage market in which women are taught love must be subordinated to economic security.