Jane Austen’s ‘Persuasion’ Can Teach You How to Grow Up

To make a forced and artificial division, we might say that there exist Jane Austen novels of youth and folly: Emma and Northanger Abbey. The novels of coming-of-age and responsibility: Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Pride and Prejudice. And then there is Persuasion, a novel of adulthood. I call this division artificial because Austen’s genius makes it so—one is perhaps tempted to say that the novels change when we return to them, finding new textures and insights that make them relevant to our lives at just that moment, but of course this is false.