I won’t say that this was exactly a mistake. It’s never a mistake to reread Jane Austen! But it may not have been the best way to approach director Carrie Cracknell’s cheerful, Hollywood rom-comized version of the story.
Austen’s Persuasion is her most melancholy work. It features older protagonists—in their 20s and 30s rather than teens and twenties—and you can feel the years in every restrained glance and quiet heartbreak.
The novel opens eight years after Anne Elliot was persuaded by her friend and mother surrogate Lady Russell to give up her true love, the sailor Frederick Wentworth.
But she is still in love with Wentworth, and can’t bear to marry, even if there were anyone to ask her. She truly has little to look forward to but silence and sadness for the rest of her life.