Tastes may simply differ, of course, but I have a theory: I suspect that some readers prize Persuasion because it is superficially more “serious” than Austen’s other novels. Published posthumously, it has an almost skeletal feel, like an outline in which only the most salient points about each character are noted, as if Austen didn’t have time to “cover them with flesh.”Īnd yet many people whose taste is generally excellent-including, for instance, Slate’s own Ron Rosenbaum and the literary critics William Deresiewicz and Harold Bloom-consider Persuasion Austen’s best book. Writing about a rough draft of The Watsons, one of Austen’s unfinished books, Virginia Woolf said that “the stiffness and bareness of the first chapters” suggest that “she was one of those writers who lay their facts out rather baldly in the first version and then go back and back and back and cover them with flesh and atmosphere.” Woolf might have been speaking of Persuasion. It’s more like gawking at roadkill.) The book’s good characters are even worse: boring, smug and, after a while, downright insufferable. (Directed at such easy targets, satire ceases to be satire. The bad characters, whether snobbish, scheming, or hypochondriacal, are unwaveringly bad. It is also the least funny of Austen’s books. Why do so many of Jane Austen’s smartest readers consider her weakest novel to be her best? Persuasion, the story of kind, helpful Anne Elliot-who made a mistake years ago and is still suffering for it when the book opens-is didactic and full of crude, overdrawn characterizations.

Also in Slate, Adelle Waldman ranks Jane Austen’s works, as well as her most devastating one-liners.

Persuasion story