Persuasion

About Persuasion

Anne’s quiet attention contrasts with a family preoccupied by rank and appearance. The story treats listening as an active capacity, but also exposes the cost of letting other people’s certainty overrule one’s judgment. Watch the difference between useful counsel and social pressure, particularly when remembered choices affect what the characters believe they can still ask of each other.

Reading focus

Read the pauses and overheard conversations for the ways mature judgment revisits decisions once made under social pressure.

This reading edition contains 83,298 words in 24 original sections. Read the text online with adjustable type and three colour themes, or keep a printable PDF.

Author: Jane Austen. Language: English. Reading edition: 28 October 2026.

Opening excerpt

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. This was the page at which the favourite volume always opened:

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