Having now read all six of Austen's finished novels, I get the fun of ranking them:

1)Mansfield Park (5*)
2)Emma (4*)
3)Sense and Sensibility (4*)
4)Northanger Abbey (4*)
5)Persuasion (3*)
6)Pride and Prejudice (3*)

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Austen, Jane. Persuasion. 1817. Edited by William Galperin. Longman Cultural Edition. Pearson, 2008.
While watching the 2022 Netflix movie version of Persuasion starring Dakota Johnson, I kept thinking, “Nope, not quite Jane.” So, I figured it was time to reread the original. Persuasion was Jane Austen’s last book, not published until after her death. The heroine, Anne Eliot, is 27 years old and has lost the bloom of youth. Her father is a spendthrift, forced to rent his country estate to an admiral, who has returned home after the war with Napoleon. Anne is still carrying a torch for her teenage love, Frederick Wentworth, who has also returned home as a ship’s captain with a bundle of prize money. He wasn’t as good a catch as she was when they were nineteen, but now the values are reversed. He is surrounded by adoring younger women, and she is being courted by a handsome dude with mercenary motives and a wandering eye. It is a standard marriage plot set in a society that makes it almost impossible to communicate. They are often in the same room but never alone. We know how we want it to turn out, but the suspense is in how Jane will get it done.
The world she describes is the Regency upper middle class and lower aristocracy, the top two percenters, consisting of fewer than 1,000 families, yet it strikes us as somehow familiar. Despite the fancy clothes and careful manners, these people we seem to know, even after two centuries of social change. In fact, they are more familiar to us than they seem to be to each other at times. The fun is watching Anne try to pick up the hints about the feelings and motives of those around her. Nothing is ever as overt as we want it to be.
The problem with the new movie is that Anne talks too frankly, tells us too much too soon about how she feels.
The book gets 5 stars. The movie doesn’t. ( )

I was actually thinking about going for three Austen books, 'cause I dug Pride & Prejudice so much, but when I got into Persuasion I realized there are an awful lot of familiar elements. The well-mannered guy can't be trusted, the shy, dickish guy can, the heroine's the most perceptive character in the book, her family is near-fatally mortifying...if this is just what Austen does, that's fine, but it means one should maybe not read her books back-to-back.

Anne Elliott is a great character, though. More complicated than Elizabeth. She, like this book, is a little ambiguous. Even the novel's theme, laid out in the title, is a slippery one; Anne herself seems unable to come to terms with it, concluding - maybe half-heartedly and a little defensively - that one ought to be persuaded by one's elders instead of one's heart, because if they turn out to be wrong one might get a second chance eight years later. It's possible that I read that defensiveness in myself because I want to like Anne more than that; as it stands, that moral is an awfully conservative one, and one that doesn't sit well with me.

The version my wife had on hand, which she hates so much that this is still the only Austen book she's never read, is the Longman Cultural Edition, which comes, Norton-style, with about a hundred pages of supporting material. Some of that was terrific; I loved reading Austen's letters, chosen (wisely) from when she was Anne's age, not from the period in which she actually wrote the book. Unsurprisingly, they sound just like her books: funny and charming. It's particularly neat to read her account of a ball, and her own very recognizable trepidation and elation at being asked to dance (or not). Some of the contextual reading is also nice, including some well-chosen passages from Byron. The contemporary reviews weren't nearly as interesting as I'd hoped; they focus on her recent and posthumous identification as the author, rather than on the book, which sounds cool but turns out to sorta not be. I hated the introduction - too many big words, not enough thought - and the footnotes were superfluous. I'm not under the impression that Austen requires footnotes. Four stars for the edition. ( )