First I couldn't quite get into the book. Not like I had immediately gone into Pride and Prejudice. This one started a bit slower, and more clumsily perhaps. Reading it first only 55 pages, I really couldn't decide whether or not even finish the thing, but then I just picked it back up and continued a few day later. This time I couldn't even put it down before I had finished.
In all Austen's other book I've read, the characters are caricatures of people. Sometimes too much so, in my taste. But in Persuasion all the people, nice or not, are real people, with their good sides and bad sides.
The only one I didn't actually like was the main character Anne Elliot. And it was perhaps because I could see some of myself in her. It was how she "settled for what she got" and really didn't that really annoyed me, but I could also understand it very well - I have done it, too.
Although the characters were superb (Wentworth is definitely my favourite Austen-guy), the writing itself was very incoherent in places; it wasn't at all as refined as I would've expected from Austen. I got me thinking if this had been one of her first novels or one of the last, so I had to check it up. It was one of her last - actually published after her death.
Okay, so maybe it wasn't quite finished? A very good book, anyway. As good as any of her other books.
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