Anne Elliot Is Twenty-Seven - The Paris Review

Anne Elliot is twenty-seven. She's been twenty-seven since 1817, the year Jane Austen's Persuasion was published. I, meanwhile, was somewhere around sixteen when I first read the book in my old childhood bedroom, with its green walls and arboreal wallpaper.

Why did this story, which is so happy, make me so sad? Why did I forget so many details of Persuasion's story over the years, but unfailingly remember that Anne Elliot is twenty-seven?

Read at The Paris Review