Persuasion

Jane Austen’s last completed novel: Anne Elliot, persuaded at nineteen to break off her engagement to a penniless naval officer, meets him again eight years later, now a wealthy captain home from the war.

Start reading24 chapters, about 84,000 words

Famous quotes

• Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character; vanity of person and of situation.

  Chapter IIn context

  • Character
  • Pride

• How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!

  Chapter IIIn context

  • Thinking

• She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.

  Chapter IVIn context

  • Age
  • Youth

• Anne hoped she had outlived the age of blushing; but the age of emotion she certainly had not.

  Chapter VIIn context

  • Age
  • Emotion

• Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted.

  Chapter VIIIIn context

  • Friendship
  • Love

• I hate to hear you talking so like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures.

  Chapter VIIIIn context

  • Women

• One man’s ways may be as good as another’s, but we all like our own best.

  Chapter XIIIIn context

  • Character

• When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering

  Chapter XXIn context

  • Experience

• All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.

  Chapter XXIIIIn context

  • Love
  • Women

• You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago.

  Chapter XXIIIIn context

  • Love

• I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.

  Chapter XXIIIIn context

  • Love

Contents

1. Chapter I
2. Chapter II
3. Chapter III
4. Chapter IV
5. Chapter V
6. Chapter VI
7. Chapter VII
8. Chapter VIII
9. Chapter IX
10. Chapter X
11. Chapter XI
12. Chapter XII
13. Chapter XIII
14. Chapter XIV
15. Chapter XV
16. Chapter XVI
17. Chapter XVII
18. Chapter XVIII
19. Chapter XIX
20. Chapter XX
21. Chapter XXI
22. Chapter XXII
23. Chapter XXIII
24. Chapter XXIV