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Zusatztext “Critics! especially [recently]! value Persuasion highly! as the author’s ‘most deeply felt fiction!’ ‘the novel which in the end the experienced reader of Jane Austen puts at the head of the list.’ . . . Anne wins back Wentworth and wins over the reader; we may! like him! end up thinking Anne’s character ‘perfection itself.’” –from the Introduction by Judith Terry Informationen zum Autor Jane Austen; Introduction by Uzma Jalaluddin Klappentext Jane Austen's last completed novel! a brilliantly insightful story of regret! second chances! and the courage to follow our hearts Anne Elliot is twenty-seven and unmarried-by all accounts a spinster in her time-seemingly doomed to spend the rest of her life waiting on her image-obsessed father and extravagant older sister; attempting to maintain their once lavish! now dwindling family estate; and occasionally babysitting the children of her married younger sister. It wasn't always this way! though. When Anne was nineteen! she was in love with and engaged to Frederick Wentworth! a man with no money and few prospects. Anne's well-meaning family and friends convinced her that a young heiress like herself could do better! so she broke off the engagement. But when chance brings Wentworth and Anne together again eight years later! he is now an accomplished naval captain with an impressive fortune! and Anne must face her feelings for him that remain and consider how different her life could have been if only she hadn't been so easily persuaded by others. Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. This was the page at which the favourite volume always opened:-- 'ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH HALL' 'Walter Elliot, born March 1, 1760, married July 15, 1784, Elizabeth, daughter of James Stevenson, Esq., of South Park, in the county of Gloucester; by which lady (who died 1800) he has issue, Elizabeth, born June 1, 1785; Anne, born August 9, 1787; a still-born son, November 5, 1789; Mary, born November 20, 1791.' Precisely such had the paragraph originally stood from the printer's hands; but Sir Walter had improved it by adding, for the information of himself and his family, these words, after the date of Mary's birth:--'Married, December 16, 1810, Charles, son and heir of Charles Musgrove, Esq., of Uppercross, in the county of Somerset,' and by inserting most accurately the day of the month on which he had lost his wife. Then followed the history and rise of the ancient and respectable family in the usual terms; how it had been first settled in Cheshire, how mentioned in Dugdale, serving the office of high sheriff, representing a borough in three successive parliaments, exertions of loyalty, and dignity of baronet, in the first year of Charles II with all the Marys and Elizabeths they had married; forming altogether two handsome quarto pages, and concluding with the arms and motto:--'Principal seat, Kellynch Hall, in the county of Somerset,' and Sir Walter's handwriting again in this finale:-- 'Heir presumptive, William Walter Elliot, Esq., great-grandson of the second Sir Walter.' 'Vanity was the beginning and end of Sir Walter Elliot's character: vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome in his youth, and at fifty-four was still a very fine man. Few women could think more of their personal ap...
