Garth Greenwell in The Yale Review:
I came to all of Jane Austen’s novels late, and to Persuasion particularly so, finally discovering it in a graduate seminar on the long eighteenth century. By that time, I had fallen in love with Austen, with her comedy and her depth as a moral thinker, above all with her humaneness, the tenderness that doesn’t cancel out but nevertheless subsumes the prickly, arch, almost always delightful critique she aims at her characters, even the characters she obviously intends us to admire. So I remember my shock when, in a novel that had already won me over and that I continue to love, I came upon one of the cruelest passages in any of the books I know. It comes in chapter eight; Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth are visiting the Musgroves. Anne and Wentworth were once in love, until Anne (under persuasion) called things off; now, for the first time in years, they’re running in the same circles again. Wentworth is bitter, and pointedly cold; in this moment they’re further separated, perched on the same sofa but with their hostess—“no insignificant barrier”—between them.
More here.
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