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A review by emmareadstoomuch
Persuasion by Jane Austen
5.0
welcome to...PERSUAS(JULY)ON?
god, that was the worst attempt at a title/month pun yet. i'm so sorry. if it helps, i wish i never started this, but now here we are, all of us in a sisyphus situation at the start of every new project. except worse. the guy who's getting his guts eaten on the daily by a big bird. prometheus.
(isn't that kind of the most torturous part of that punishment - that he clearly has it so much worse than sisyphus and yet in comparison, zero household name recognition? tough stuff.) (like, prometheus is obviously famous, but you don't throw his example around like my boy sisyphus. sad.)
ANYWAY. welcome back to Project Long Classics, the series in which elle and i read a long classic over the course of the month, too make it less scary!
some updates here: 1) we're rereading, 2) this isn't long, and 3) it's not coming from a place of fear. but otherwise, we're all set.
we're also reading this for our book club -
join the discussion here
follow on instagram here
let's go!!!
DAY 1: CHAPTER ONE
we're immediately late (today is july 2), and yet that's fine, because i love this book and also i only have to read one chapter a day this time around. living the dream.
something i love about anne elliot is that she should be quite boring - a real fanny price, if you will - and yet she isn't.
and relatedly, i get why people are upset by what appears to be her fleabag-ification in the upcoming adaptation...but i am capable of separating the adaptation from the book (on rare and special occasions, like arbor day and half-birthdays) and i think it seems fun.
DAY 2: CHAPTER TWO
look at us, catching up!
i love how in old times you could just call people "unsuitable." i wish we still had that. "i find that acquaintance to be one well below your standing, and altogether unsuitable" (or something like that) sounds so much better than "you are my friend, and i like hanging out with you, but i find your friend very annoying."
DAY 3: CHAPTER THREE
WENTWORTH MENTION!!!!!!
genuinely...the yearning already...you gotta give it up for jane.
DAY 4: CHAPTER FOUR
a day behind because i was drinking to make it through our nation's birthday. bleh. escapist reading time!
DAY 5: CHAPTER FIVE
i just...left this blank yesterday.
read the chapter. added this to my update feed. didn't say a thing.
the first few chapters of this are (i think) even more uneventful than usual austen books. maybe because it's less funny? i don't know. it's a lot of past to establish, where we're usually picking up right in the swing of things relatively speaking.
DAY 6: CHAPTER SIX
i don't like, also, the pity-party we have to throw anne every other paragraph at the beginning. yes she is lonely and her sisters are annoying. let's get to the romance part!! or give her a hobby at least.
but here is some drama! another slay for miscommunication, a trope that endures through the centuries.
wait why did jane go this hard: "The real circumstances of this pathetic piece of family history were, that the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year; that he had been sent to sea because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad had worked its way to Uppercross, two years before." like jane he's dead! take mercy you have already killed him!
DAY 7: CHAPTER SEVEN
wentworth!!! i'll kill you!!! poor anne. suddenly the pity party is working on me.
DAY 8: CHAPTER EIGHT
"But I hate to hear you talking so like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days." slay mrs croft.
poor anne again!
DAY 9: CHAPTER NINE
well, folks. persuasion (2022) has debuted on rotten tomatoes with a score of 27%.
i can no longer pretend it's extremely likely that i'll watch it, but! onward.
all the best crushes come from one (1) completely inane moment.
DAY 10: CHAPTER TEN
catching up! (took another day off to be drunk. this is a tradition, at this point.)
there are so many Charleses in this. it seems to be a personal affront.
DAY 11: CHAPTER ELEVEN
lmao the whole gang is taking a road trip to visit wentworth's friend, who ol' captain thinks loved his dead wife more than any man has ever loved a woman, and anne NO JOKE thinks "he has not, perhaps, a more sorrowing heart than I have."
pull it together, girlfriend.
DAY 12: CHAPTER TWELVE
action chapter!!! i love immersing myself in a 19th century understanding of medicine. when you jump up and down too many times, you almost die, and them's the breaks.
one of anne's most relatable characteristics is being like "hopefully i'm too old to blush now" and then blushing constantly.
DAY 13: CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"Lady Russell had only to listen composedly, and wish them happy, but internally her heart revelled in angry pleasure, in pleased contempt, that the man who at twenty-three had seemed to understand somewhat of the value of an Anne Elliot, should, eight years afterwards, be charmed by a Louisa Musgrove." this rules. i cannot be a lady russell hater for this alone.
DAY 14: CHAPTER FOURTEEN
at the i-look-forward-to-my-daily-chapter-every-day phase of this :)
goddamn. anne can PULL.
DAY 15: CHAPTER FIFTEEN
"The worst of Bath was the number of its plain women. He did not mean to say that there were no pretty women, but the number of the plain was out of all proportion. He had frequently observed, as he walked, that one handsome face would be followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights; and once, as he had stood in a shop on Bond Street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, one after another, without there being a tolerable face among them. It had been a frosty morning, to be sure, a sharp frost, which hardly one woman in a thousand could stand the test of. But still, there certainly were a dreadful multitude of ugly women in Bath; and as for the men! they were infinitely worse. Such scarecrows as the streets were full of!" this is the funniest and most relatable passage in the whole thing. as someone who has a rule that i should not be forced to view anyone ugly when watching television (a guideline continually broken by basketball coaches and the existence of most conservative politicians), i have to stan sir walter.
DAY 16: CHAPTER SIXTEEN
anne's life really seems like such a snooze, from one girl who is always right to another. but at least i have indoor plumbing. and refrigerated cookie dough.
DAY 17: CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
the thing about jane austen books that we can forget when it's adaptation time is that the love interest is often not the most handsome of the gang. wickham is probably handsomer than darcy. mr elliott is certainly more handsome than wentworth.
but still. how can we be expected, as a society, to root against henry golding??
anyway. a kinda boring Anne Is Perfect chapter.
DAY 18: CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
come on, jane...give me some yearning today!
asked and answered.
DAY 19: CHAPTER NINETEEN
every day has to be a yearning day at this point.
WOO!!! things are picking up!
i will say i feel like anne's family lacks nuance compared to, say, the bennets or the woodhouses, who are flawed characters but have their arcs and their positive traits. elizabeth and mary and sir nobility what's his name feel a little black and white by comparison.
and speaking of things i will say... "the handsomest and best hung of any in Bath" is a great description. should have been used somewhere besides curtains.
DAY 20: CHAPTER TWENTY
"A man does not recover from such a devotion of the heart to such a woman. He ought not; he does not." AHHHH!!!!!!
oh boy. yearning city. this whole section is everything. and the letter soon!!!
DAY 21: CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ahhhh!!! jane sure knows how to cancel a guy.
DAY 22: CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
the amount of drama in this chapter...my sister is watching below deck in the background as i write this and their screechy voices pale in comparison!!!
DAY 23: CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
the penultimate day!!! i'm going to miss this so much. should i do this all the time???
...no. the last thing i need is the excuse for yet another project.
THE LETTER!!!!!!!!!!! OH MY GOD.
not only is this the most romantic love letter of all time (and it's not close! i openly read this out loud to someone i was with on the STREET!!! not as a declaration but just because it's really good and everyone should know about it), but the FRAMING. the conversation anne has with harville! her confusion at wentworth's dismissal! the yearning! her reaction to his coming back! and her feelings after! AHHHH.
jane, no one does it like you. it'd be five stars for this alone.
DAY 24: CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
the end of an era. i have so enjoyed our time together.
this is a cute kind of epilogue-y chapter, like at the end of movies that were Based On A True Story when they tell you what happened to all the goofballs you've gotten to know. i love it. every book should either have a chapter like this or a sequel.
unless i didn't like the book. then it shouldn't have anything.
OVERALL
this is still coming it at a close third in austen rankings for moi (after emma and pride & prejudice) but damn is it still good. that letter! that yearning! anne being a Nice Girl who isn't boring!
what a gift!
rating: 5
---------------
general update
NETFLIX ADAPTATION STARRING DAKOTA JOHNSON AND HENRY GOLDING THIS IS NOT A DRILL!!!
---------------
reread update
if you ever have the opportunity to spend an hour or so rereading this in a park on an unseasonably warm fall day, i recommend you take it
---------------
original review
find a long version of my original review + a review of sense & sensibility at https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/jane-austen-reviews-sense-sensibility-and-persuasion/!
god, that was the worst attempt at a title/month pun yet. i'm so sorry. if it helps, i wish i never started this, but now here we are, all of us in a sisyphus situation at the start of every new project. except worse. the guy who's getting his guts eaten on the daily by a big bird. prometheus.
(isn't that kind of the most torturous part of that punishment - that he clearly has it so much worse than sisyphus and yet in comparison, zero household name recognition? tough stuff.) (like, prometheus is obviously famous, but you don't throw his example around like my boy sisyphus. sad.)
ANYWAY. welcome back to Project Long Classics, the series in which elle and i read a long classic over the course of the month, too make it less scary!
some updates here: 1) we're rereading, 2) this isn't long, and 3) it's not coming from a place of fear. but otherwise, we're all set.
we're also reading this for our book club -
join the discussion here
follow on instagram here
let's go!!!
DAY 1: CHAPTER ONE
we're immediately late (today is july 2), and yet that's fine, because i love this book and also i only have to read one chapter a day this time around. living the dream.
something i love about anne elliot is that she should be quite boring - a real fanny price, if you will - and yet she isn't.
and relatedly, i get why people are upset by what appears to be her fleabag-ification in the upcoming adaptation...but i am capable of separating the adaptation from the book (on rare and special occasions, like arbor day and half-birthdays) and i think it seems fun.
DAY 2: CHAPTER TWO
look at us, catching up!
i love how in old times you could just call people "unsuitable." i wish we still had that. "i find that acquaintance to be one well below your standing, and altogether unsuitable" (or something like that) sounds so much better than "you are my friend, and i like hanging out with you, but i find your friend very annoying."
DAY 3: CHAPTER THREE
WENTWORTH MENTION!!!!!!
genuinely...the yearning already...you gotta give it up for jane.
DAY 4: CHAPTER FOUR
a day behind because i was drinking to make it through our nation's birthday. bleh. escapist reading time!
DAY 5: CHAPTER FIVE
i just...left this blank yesterday.
read the chapter. added this to my update feed. didn't say a thing.
the first few chapters of this are (i think) even more uneventful than usual austen books. maybe because it's less funny? i don't know. it's a lot of past to establish, where we're usually picking up right in the swing of things relatively speaking.
DAY 6: CHAPTER SIX
i don't like, also, the pity-party we have to throw anne every other paragraph at the beginning. yes she is lonely and her sisters are annoying. let's get to the romance part!! or give her a hobby at least.
but here is some drama! another slay for miscommunication, a trope that endures through the centuries.
wait why did jane go this hard: "The real circumstances of this pathetic piece of family history were, that the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year; that he had been sent to sea because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad had worked its way to Uppercross, two years before." like jane he's dead! take mercy you have already killed him!
DAY 7: CHAPTER SEVEN
wentworth!!! i'll kill you!!! poor anne. suddenly the pity party is working on me.
DAY 8: CHAPTER EIGHT
"But I hate to hear you talking so like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days." slay mrs croft.
poor anne again!
DAY 9: CHAPTER NINE
well, folks. persuasion (2022) has debuted on rotten tomatoes with a score of 27%.
i can no longer pretend it's extremely likely that i'll watch it, but! onward.
all the best crushes come from one (1) completely inane moment.
DAY 10: CHAPTER TEN
catching up! (took another day off to be drunk. this is a tradition, at this point.)
there are so many Charleses in this. it seems to be a personal affront.
DAY 11: CHAPTER ELEVEN
lmao the whole gang is taking a road trip to visit wentworth's friend, who ol' captain thinks loved his dead wife more than any man has ever loved a woman, and anne NO JOKE thinks "he has not, perhaps, a more sorrowing heart than I have."
pull it together, girlfriend.
DAY 12: CHAPTER TWELVE
action chapter!!! i love immersing myself in a 19th century understanding of medicine. when you jump up and down too many times, you almost die, and them's the breaks.
one of anne's most relatable characteristics is being like "hopefully i'm too old to blush now" and then blushing constantly.
DAY 13: CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"Lady Russell had only to listen composedly, and wish them happy, but internally her heart revelled in angry pleasure, in pleased contempt, that the man who at twenty-three had seemed to understand somewhat of the value of an Anne Elliot, should, eight years afterwards, be charmed by a Louisa Musgrove." this rules. i cannot be a lady russell hater for this alone.
DAY 14: CHAPTER FOURTEEN
at the i-look-forward-to-my-daily-chapter-every-day phase of this :)
goddamn. anne can PULL.
DAY 15: CHAPTER FIFTEEN
"The worst of Bath was the number of its plain women. He did not mean to say that there were no pretty women, but the number of the plain was out of all proportion. He had frequently observed, as he walked, that one handsome face would be followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights; and once, as he had stood in a shop on Bond Street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, one after another, without there being a tolerable face among them. It had been a frosty morning, to be sure, a sharp frost, which hardly one woman in a thousand could stand the test of. But still, there certainly were a dreadful multitude of ugly women in Bath; and as for the men! they were infinitely worse. Such scarecrows as the streets were full of!" this is the funniest and most relatable passage in the whole thing. as someone who has a rule that i should not be forced to view anyone ugly when watching television (a guideline continually broken by basketball coaches and the existence of most conservative politicians), i have to stan sir walter.
DAY 16: CHAPTER SIXTEEN
anne's life really seems like such a snooze, from one girl who is always right to another. but at least i have indoor plumbing. and refrigerated cookie dough.
DAY 17: CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
the thing about jane austen books that we can forget when it's adaptation time is that the love interest is often not the most handsome of the gang. wickham is probably handsomer than darcy. mr elliott is certainly more handsome than wentworth.
but still. how can we be expected, as a society, to root against henry golding??
anyway. a kinda boring Anne Is Perfect chapter.
DAY 18: CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
come on, jane...give me some yearning today!
asked and answered.
DAY 19: CHAPTER NINETEEN
every day has to be a yearning day at this point.
WOO!!! things are picking up!
i will say i feel like anne's family lacks nuance compared to, say, the bennets or the woodhouses, who are flawed characters but have their arcs and their positive traits. elizabeth and mary and sir nobility what's his name feel a little black and white by comparison.
and speaking of things i will say... "the handsomest and best hung of any in Bath" is a great description. should have been used somewhere besides curtains.
DAY 20: CHAPTER TWENTY
"A man does not recover from such a devotion of the heart to such a woman. He ought not; he does not." AHHHH!!!!!!
oh boy. yearning city. this whole section is everything. and the letter soon!!!
DAY 21: CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ahhhh!!! jane sure knows how to cancel a guy.
DAY 22: CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
the amount of drama in this chapter...my sister is watching below deck in the background as i write this and their screechy voices pale in comparison!!!
DAY 23: CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
the penultimate day!!! i'm going to miss this so much. should i do this all the time???
...no. the last thing i need is the excuse for yet another project.
THE LETTER!!!!!!!!!!! OH MY GOD.
not only is this the most romantic love letter of all time (and it's not close! i openly read this out loud to someone i was with on the STREET!!! not as a declaration but just because it's really good and everyone should know about it), but the FRAMING. the conversation anne has with harville! her confusion at wentworth's dismissal! the yearning! her reaction to his coming back! and her feelings after! AHHHH.
jane, no one does it like you. it'd be five stars for this alone.
DAY 24: CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
the end of an era. i have so enjoyed our time together.
this is a cute kind of epilogue-y chapter, like at the end of movies that were Based On A True Story when they tell you what happened to all the goofballs you've gotten to know. i love it. every book should either have a chapter like this or a sequel.
unless i didn't like the book. then it shouldn't have anything.
OVERALL
this is still coming it at a close third in austen rankings for moi (after emma and pride & prejudice) but damn is it still good. that letter! that yearning! anne being a Nice Girl who isn't boring!
what a gift!
rating: 5
---------------
general update
NETFLIX ADAPTATION STARRING DAKOTA JOHNSON AND HENRY GOLDING THIS IS NOT A DRILL!!!
---------------
reread update
if you ever have the opportunity to spend an hour or so rereading this in a park on an unseasonably warm fall day, i recommend you take it
---------------
original review
find a long version of my original review + a review of sense & sensibility at https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/jane-austen-reviews-sense-sensibility-and-persuasion/!