Persuasion

'All the privilege I claim for my own sex ... is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.' Anne Elliot's heartfelt words strike the keynote of Jane Austen's last completed novel. It features a heroine older and wiser than her predecessors in earlier books, and its tone is more intimate and sober as Jane Austen unfolds a simple love-story told with the irony, insight, and sane evaluation of human conduct which sets her writing apart. Note: There is another version of Persuasion uploaded by HarryT which is worth considering. The main differences known to me are: - HarryT's version has illustrations, whereas this one doesn't. - This version, although originally derived from Gutenberg sources, has been carefully edited to conform as closely as possible to Jane Austen's original novel as documented by the R. W. Chapman edition of 1923, as documented in turn by the Penguin Classics edition of 1965 and the Oxford World's Classics edition of 1980. This has involved a few spelling, but very many punctuation changes, which (to me) make the novel a subtly different reading experience.