Persuasion
A woman of twenty-seven meets again the man she refused eight years earlier. Austen's last completed novel is about second chances, but its real atmosphere is autumnal: hedgerows, rented houses, a navy that has made new money and a landed family that is quietly losing its own.
Anne Elliot is the most interior of Austen's heroines, and the novel follows her thoughts more closely than it follows events. The letter at the end is famous for good reason, but the best writing is in the scenes where she says nothing and the reader knows exactly what it costs her.
Public-domain status
First published in 1817. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Jane Austen died in 1817, so this work has been free to republish there since 1888.
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