Persuasion by Jane Austen
Thank you for joining me this week for Book Beginnings on Fridays where participants share the opening sentence (or two) from the book they are reading. You can also share from a book you want to feature, even if you are not reading it at the moment.
Sorry I flaked out last week and forgot to post Book Beginnings. I was in trial in Los Angeles and didn't think about books or blogs or anything else until I got home. Then it was too late. I'm back in LA for another of these mini-trials today. But this time I remembered to scheule the post early. More exciting (for me at least) is that this is my last work trip to LA. I have one more of these trials after Thanksgiving, but it is by zoom. Thank heavens. Then I will be all finished with these Boy Scouts sex abuse claims. It has been a long haul.
MY BOOK BEGINNING
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:
"ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH HALL."
-- from Persuasion by Jane Austen. That's a long, long opening sentence! I like a shaggy opening sentence like that, but I understand why it isn't nearly as recognizable as the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
Peruasion is that last novel Jane Austen completed before she died. In celebration of the 250th anniversary of her birth this year, I've reread her six major novels. Emma is still my favorite, but I do like Persuasion very much.
YOUR BOOK BEGINNING
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Captain Wentworth was on the watch for them, and a chaise and four in waiting, stationed for their convenience in the lowest part of the street; but his evident surprise and vexation at the substitution of one sister for the other, the change in his countenance, the astonishment, the expressions begun and suppressed, with which Charles was listened to, made but a mortifying reception of Anne; or must at least convince her that she was valued only as she could be useful to Louisa.
She endeavoured to be composed, and to be just.
At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all, it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.
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