Persuasion
Anne Elliot was talked out of marrying the man she loved at nineteen, and meets him again eight years later with everything changed.
Anne Elliot was persuaded at nineteen to refuse a naval officer with no fortune, and has spent eight years quietly regretting it. He returns rich, celebrated, and still angry. Austen’s last completed novel is her most autumnal, less interested in courtship than in what it costs to have been sensible, and it gives its heroine a second chance almost nobody in fiction gets.
Recommended by 2 People
Katherine Center
This is my all-time favorite Jane Austen novel and hands-down favorite literary love story. The romantic angst and the longing that Anne Elliott feels as the man she rejected, Captain Wentworth, shows back up in her life, still angry, it's a feast of love agony. Totally page-turning!
Source · June 2026
Ayelet Waldman
Persuasion is my favorite of Jane Austen's novels, though we have been informed sternly by no less a luminary than Nabokov that Mansfield Park is the "greatest," whatever that means. Though Anne Elliot could be accused of being retiring and easily manipulated, there is an element of steel in her character that I love. Also, the book is about longing and regret, and in looking at this list I see that these are emotions I seem obsessed with.
Source · May 2026
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