Advent Reading Challenge Day Seven

Curl Up with a Book and a Hot Drink

Curling up with a book suggests to me an old favourite so that’s what I’ve chosen. Jane Austen is one of my favourite writers, and she has been for a long time. By the time I left secondary school, I had read everything at least twice, and I’ve continued reading the novels all my life. I like them all and think that they’re books that haven’t just stood the test of time; they are also relevant yesterday, today and probably forever. Without any hesitation though, I would claim Persuasion as my favourite. I’ve had this copy in the Penguin Classics series since I was eighteen.

Persuasion has always been my favourite of Jane Austen’s novels and the older I’ve become, the more I’ve appreciated it.  Anne Eliot is a much more complex character than many of Austen’s other heroines, partly because of her age. In early nineteenth century terms Anne is most definitely an old maid, that most unconsidered of persons. She is as equally overlooked by her own family as she is by society, being neither Miss Eliot (her older sister Elizabeth) nor Mrs Charles Musgrove (her younger sister Mary). But as the book opens changes are afoot and in the course of the novel we see her develop from a vanishing, somewhat self-deprecating woman to a happy and self-confident one.  Her past, in the form of Frederick Wentworth, catches up with her and she is forced to reflect on decisions made earlier in her life. Whilst Captain Wentworth is the catalyst for Anne’s development, he is not responsible for the change – that comes from Anne herself.  She has learnt from her own mistakes as well as from other people’s and is a stronger person for it.  I’ve always hoped that Captain Wentworth realises that he is not getting the bride he would have had seven years earlier…