'Persuasion' by Jane Austen Can Teach You How to Grow Up

Time​ Magazine

17-07-2025

To make a forced and artificial division, we might say that there exist Jane Austen novels of youth and folly: Emma and Northanger Abbey. The novels of coming-of-age and responsibility: Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Pride and Prejudice. And then there is Persuasion, a novel of adulthood. I call this division artificial because Austen's genius makes it so—one is perhaps tempted to say that the novels change when we return to them, finding new textures and insights that make them relevant to our lives at just that moment, but of course this is false.
The novels do not change. We change, and as we grow, we become more sensitive to these novels, detecting layers of insight and relation for the first time that were always there. Yet, it does have a kind of logic, this idea that certain novels speak to us at different moments in our lives.
When I was in my 20s, my favorite Jane Austen novel was Sense and Sensibility. I loved it for the way it made me laugh and made me think. I delighted in its comedy and the elegance of Austen's irony as she depicted Marianne's aesthetic snobbery and Elinor's exasperated affection for her mother and sisters. It was a bustling and charming novel of family shot through with Austen's typical attention to the importance of property. But something happened, and one day I woke up and found not that I loved Sense and Sensibility any less, but that I loved Persuasion most of all.
Persuasion is the last novel that Austen completed in her lifetime. She wrote it in a phase of failing health and dwindling material security as her extended family's fortunes (never very robust) imploded in a failed financial venture. It is sometimes considered tacky or distasteful to think of art and commerce, or to think of how money might have shaped the lives and art of those artists who mean the most to us. It would be a very pretty picture indeed to imagine that money never once entered Austen's mind as she composed her novels. But that would require ignoring so much of her genius because in their way, all Austen's novels turn on questions of money, fortune, property, and prosperity—one finds in her characters' harmonious and happy endings a fusion of material and emotional fulfillment.
Read More: In Exile, I Lost India But Gained a Home
When I say that Persuasion is a novel of adulthood, you might think that I mean boring, or tedious, or lacking all the vivacity and spontaneity that animates Austen's other novels like Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice. I can understand how a person might be misled into thinking this. Some people are also likely to think that Mansfield Park is sanctimonious and high-handed, with a reputation for being an 'issue novel.' This is wrong, obviously. I might even say stupid. Because, for one thing, all Austen's novels are 'issue novels,' the issue being the evils of capitalism and private property.
For another thing, Persuasion is as funny and wonderfully ironic as that most loved novel, Pride and Prejudice. The character of Sir Walter Elliot, for instance, is the target of much of the novel's irony and by extension its humor. One has the feeling that everyone in the room is deeply aware of his delusional vanity, but powerless to do anything about it, or, if not powerless, then uninterested or unwilling to change him. Watching Anne and the other rational characters deal with Sir Walter is sort of like watching a family deal with a cranky, somewhat addled elderly relation whose ways cannot be reformed and must simply be humored until they are out of earshot. This will of course remind you of Mrs. Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. This is not by mistake. In Austen, characters belonging to previous generations often come in for a great deal of ironic treatment precisely because their lives are an extension of the social rules and laws that Austen is criticizing. They are avatars, and victims, of the world order that she has taken in hand to examine. Part of the fun of Austen's novels is her affectionate skewering of that world order.
The answering note to its prevailing ironic treatment of Sir Walter is of course the melancholy and hint of regret that suffuse much of the novel's tone. We have come to Anne Elliot eight years after she's failed what she now realizes was the great test of her life: she turned down Frederick Wentworth at the persuasion of her deceased mother's dearest friend, Lady Russell. This premise is significant because it sets Persuasion apart from the other novels, whose climaxes tend to involve a false or thwarted proposal, and culminate with a marriage or marriages. Anne Elliot has turned down not one but two marriage proposals. Her younger sister is married to the second man she rejected. Her elder sister was herself jilted by a cousin set to inherit the family estate. The mother is dead. The father is useless, and while they still have the property, their money is rapidly depleting. One sees the ghosts of other Austen novels, naturally, particularly Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, but to me, the plot of Persuasion is significantly different because it is about someone facing her future while coming to grips with her past.
This backward tension is what gives the novel its uniqueness among Austen's works. Indeed, Austen dedicates several of the opening chapters to laying out the whole sordid mess of Anne's predicament—both that of her family's financial ruin and also the matter of how she came to be persuaded to give up Wentworth in the first place. And what such a choice cost her.
Persuasion is absolutely haunted by the past, to a degree greater than all Austen's novels. For all the humor and comedy of her efforts to convince the very image-conscious Sir Walter of the necessity to 'retrench' and her younger sister Mary's narcissistic terrorizing of her in-laws, there is an inescapable aura of someone moving through the after of her life. Anne is only 27, a crucial member of her family, and yet, she feels as though, having failed that test of Wentworth's proposal, her chance at happiness is gone and that all that remains for her to do is to negotiate the quiet unhappiness of her life. There is nothing left but to find a way to manage it all.
That's really sad!
Yet, the novel, like life, persists. Anne goes along, serving her family, playing music at the gatherings at Uppercross, where she is much loved by the Musgroves, the family into which her sister Mary married, being a companion to Lady Russell, and serving as a dispenser of practical and good advice. And one day, Wentworth returns, unexpectedly, and she must contend both with old feelings and a new understanding of what her actions did to his life, too. In Persuasion, we have a novel about what happens when you survive the event of your life and must go on living anyway. Who hasn't made a choice that we wish we could take back? Who hasn't had to face the cold, harsh light of the morning after and realize, with horrifying clarity, that we've made the wrong call? There is shockingly little literature about not just that moment but the life that follows. This is partly because regret tends to be hard to dramatize, at least in a way that is not boring or bad.
Read More: Trump's Orwellian Erasure of Women
But this is where Austen's genius comes in. Because Anne is never really allowed to wallow. She first has to solve the issue of Sir Walter's money problems, so she and Lady Russell convince him to rent out Kellynch-hall. Their letting of Kellynch is what brings Admiral and Mrs. Croft to Kellynch, which naturally leads to Mrs. Croft inviting her brother, Frederick Wentworth, into the neighborhood. Because Kellynch is so near to Uppercross, and because of the relations between the Musgroves and the Elliots, the Crofts are invited to Uppercross, where Anne is staying with her sister Mary. And in this way, this series of small acts and consequences, Anne and Wentworth are brought together.
I have a somewhat controversial opinion that is perhaps not controversial at all. I think that Anne and Wentworth would have made a happy though unremarkable couple if they had stayed engaged all those years ago. Or perhaps, they might have even been unhappy after a time. The Wentworth we encounter at the start of the novel would not have, I believe, been capable of such a revelation as we find at the end of the novel. Indeed, that is the whole point. That the book chronicles the journey each must take toward becoming the sort of person they needed to be in order to find their way back to each other. Anne needed to grow beyond being a dutiful, persuadable young woman. Wentworth needed to find some humility to temper his natural prideful streak.
The people they are at the end of the book did not exist eight years previous. They were different people. And now we find two people who are gentler, kinder, more forthright with each other. They are precisely and exactly where they need to be.
Adapted from the Introduction by Brandon Taylor to PERSUASION by Jane Austin out in trade paperback on July 21 from Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Brandon Taylor. All rights reserved.