Gain Access Persuasion Engineered By Jane Austen In Manuscript
going there. I do not like Jane Austen,
Oh, Persuasion, Persuasion.
He was the most cheerful, agreeable, respectful, charming, hospitable, warm, friendly, kind, pleasant, courteous, delightful person who ever lived.
This is how Jane Austen writes, It is so over the top, Can anyone just be normal
Also, the dialogue, It is so unrealistic. Why do the characters have these huge monologues when they are supposedly speaking to someone else It is so boring.
In Persuasion, Anne Eliot once held a flame for Frederick Wentworth, She was all set to marry the poor guy, but she was persuaded that he wasnt rich enough.
Now, it isyears later, and she bumps into him again,
What will the predictable Jane Austen do
The only redeeming quality of Persuasion is Annes family.
They think that they are so great, but the only thing that they have managed to do is run their estate into the ground and tell themselves how awesome they are for doing next to nothing.
As for the Netflix video that was such a scandal, I thought it was great.
At least it was shorter than the book,
Well, another book off the sitelinkBooks to Read According to the BBC AND sitelink,Books to Read by James Mustich.
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sitelinkBlog sitelinkTwitter sitelinkBookTube sitelinkFacebook sitelinkInsta Persuasion by Jane Austen is aEnhanced Media publication.
Originally published in
A wonderfully pleasant classic by one of my favorite writers,
When I was invited to review a new book, the premise of which, is a modern day retelling of Jane Austens Persuasion, I accepted immediately.
But, once Id signed on, it occurred to me that I didnt remember any of the details of Persuasion.
Surely, since Jane Austen has written some of my very favorite books, and I consider her to be one of my top five favorite authors, I have read every one of her books, right Maybe I just needed a refresher.
But, for the life of me, I have no memory of ever having read this one,
So, despite my tight reading schedule, I just had to stop the assembly line and squeeze this one in.
While there are already plenty of reviews for this book, I just wanted to share my experience of it with you.
Up front, I must confess, this book, while listed as a favorite by many, is not mine, mainly because of the time it took to get to the meat of the story, and I felt the momentum dragged in some places.
However, I did appreciate the more serious tone, the way Anne managed to dodge traditional female roles, and for her time, she is written as a strong, mature, character, who didnt mind pointing out the advantages men had in the way of education and the way they often thought of women as being inconstant.
She wasnt exactly ironical, but she makes her point, I loved that!
I also enjoyed the themes explored, concerning character traits, and the misjudgment, or maybe the PRE judgment of those traits, while also touching on the disadvantages of remaining totally one dimensional.
This story also delves into the complexities of family, friendship, and of course love, and is well balanced and rounded.
The writing of course is quite different from what we are accustomed to, or I should say, what I'm accustomed to, and at times the wordiness was challenging, but I did appreciate the manners, and activities described, and the characterizations.
While this one isnt quite as sharp as other Austen novels, in my opinion, and is a just a bit more pensive than usual, I still found myself looking forward to the time I could spend with Anne inside her preVictorian landscape.
to persuade verb
“to make someone do or believe something by giving them a good reason to do it or by talking to that person and making them believe it”
Jane Austen delivers a PERSUASIVE analysis of the concept of PERSUASION, slowly PERSUADING the reader that being of a PERSUADABLE temper, commonly regarded as a virtue in young women of her time, is a weakness and a barrier to personal happiness.
Why
The answer is quite simple, and still as valid as two centuries ago: more often than not, the kind, caring and sensitive characters tend to be PERSUADABLE, whereas the egotistical, narcissistic, and stubborn bullies tend to be PERSUASIVE.
Anne Elliot, the classical Cinderella in a vain, ambitious and superficial family, sacrifices her love to accommodate the pride and prejudice of those who call themselves her friends and allies.
Eight years pass during which she PERSUADES herself that her role is that of a supporting member of the family, patiently attending to the tantrums of her sisters and accepting the disregard of her conceited father.
When her former love unexpectedly enters the stage again, they both remain PERSUADED that the other one is lost forever, and play a PERSUASIVE game of dissimulation before finally reaching the PERSUASION that love conquers all even societys coercive directives.
The lesson learned from this social study is that there is hardly a case in which PERSUASION is unbiased and truly beneficial.
The moment a person needs to be convinced to do something against his or her natural inclination, all kinds of complications, sacrifices and frustrations are likely to follow.
Listen to yourself before you listen to PERSUASIVE bullies, is my PERSUASION, after reading Jane Austen.
I was thus a PERSUADABLE reader, What can I possibly tell you about Jane Austen I really enjoyed this, I really like that by the end you get to move a bit out of the head of the main character, away from her selfdeprecations and almost masochistic lacerations and get to see what Captain Wentworth actually did think of her rather
than herlessthanselfcongratulatory version.
Okay, it is all very romantic but what I found most interesting in this book was how I felt compelled to consider how much of the world we learn by having it reported to us.
There is the life we live and know first hand, well, more or less, and then there is the world that we know from trusted sources.
And all of this adds to make up the whole of our perspective of reality, whatever that might be.
There is always a layer of reality below which we can only ever guess at and that is what is really going on in the minds of others.
Sometimes we do discover something of this and that might either bring joy or pain but otherwise we construct and reconstruct the world on the best narrative we can make from the frowns or smiles of those around us, glimpsed however imperfectly in the twinkling of a moment.
A while ago I took a very dear friend of mine to the local art gallery and showed her a couple of little statue things they have there of two old women.
The artist has created these two miniature people two homunculi who are engrossed in the conversation they whisper between themselves.
If you view them from the front they look to be talking away quite contentedly almost conspiratorially but as you move around to view them from the back you see that one of them looks very anxious, perhaps almost about to cry, perhaps oddly frightened.
This fear isnt something you notice at all from the front, But in life we dont get to have thisdegree perspective on the people we meet and talk to and so only one of these views is open to us.
The guesses we make on the motivations and desires of others are always partial, always mixed up with our own motivations and desires and misattributions.
So it is that Anne Elliot spends much of the novel perhaps a woman a little too good for this world.
She can even watch on with quiet resignation as the man she loves seems to be choosing someone else to marry.
There are many interesting themes in this book class distinctions and their worth in judging the value of someone, when to take the advice of someone and when not to, how jealousy has much to recommend it in regaining the love of your ex.
But one of the things I was most interested in was the theme of love and property which Marx and Engels talk about in the Manifesto.
It is a knee jerk reaction now to say we should marry for love but in the immortal words of an Irish folk song:
“Love is pleasing
And love is teasing
And love is a pleasure when first its new
But as it grows older
Sure the love grows colder
Til it fades away like the morning dew.
”
This is a romance, so we dont get to see this happen to our protagonists, but the relationships of those around them would hardly make one seek to rush into the married state.
From the bizarre and almost incestuous relationship between Annes father and her older sister, to the marriage of her younger sister, Mary and the marriage of Benwick to Louisa is surely destined to crash and burn.
Everyone in Annes family is unspeakably awful when Austen wants to create a character that is a pain in the bum she does so with unerring perception.
Mary and her father are masterworks in the description of the obnoxious in human form the botched soul.
Ms Austen also obviously had a bit of a thing for the strong, silent types think Mr Darcy without the fairytale quest bit in the middle but there is also something of the Enlightenment about this book.
The idea that real feeling, the hope of a truly happy marriage, can only be based on the common rationality of the couple at hand.
Love is a mingling of minds, rather than bodies, And this isnt some sort of nineteenth century prudishness, or at least, not only, but more a hypothesis that is played out in the marriages of the major characters.
Love, then, is a version of that highest type of friendship that our old mate Aristotle was so fond of and that life cruelly teaches us is so incredibly rare for us with people of either sex.
To have both sexual attraction and mental attraction with one single other person is perhaps really asking too much and just being greedy.
Still, I guess all would be well if not for those damn hormones, And of everyone in the book poor old Benwick probably cops the worst press for not being constant enough to the memory of his recently departed exwife.
The discussion at this point reminded me a bit of Hamlet whinging about his mum and uncle.
But this does all end up with that most wonderful of quotes where Anne says that women may not love deeper, but that they do love longer, even after all hope is gone.
If you are going to get a slap in a piece of classic fiction, it is probably best that it happen in a way that results in such a line.
The fact she is almost moved to tears after saying this line and that it is basically the turning point of the entire book really is a lovely thing.
If only in life it could be that saying the utterly perfect thing would reap such rich rewards But then, I guess that does rather put the onus on finding the utterly perfect thing to say.
.