"I tried. I really did."
"I tried to read this book, really I did."
"I really did try my best, and right now I'm just patting myself on the back for finally finishing this little book after starting it a dozen times."
"I have fallen asleep EVERY TIME I have read it. THAT NEVER HAPPENS."
"Jane Austen and I don't get along very well. Am I the worst female English major ever because of it? Perhaps. And I'm okay with that."
"SNOOZE FEST!!! It was as boring as the landscape depicted in the bleek winter of this book. I'm sure my review will make me seem like an uneducated boob. But, I'm not. I just don't like boring stuff!"
"I am constantly amazed that generations of readers return again and again to this turgid slop. Dull, slow and uninteresting."
"This was the last novel by Austen before she passed on. I'd die too, if this was the last book that I've written. Simply awful."
"I really think this is a terrible terrible object. Not even as a book, just in general.
That Jane Austen is a jerk."
"I came to Persuasion in reverence, as I think one should approach any of the classics, but I am turned away in utter disgust. Anne Elliot is a calculating, grasping, whining louse. Persuasion is irrelevant."
"Jane Austen has a huge problem, in my opinion, when it comes to her novels. That is: THEY'RE ALL ABOUT THE SAME THING!! A young woman meets a guy and for one reason or another can't be with him (in this case because Wentworth didn't have enough money, with Pride and Prejudice it's because Elizabeth can't stand Darcy's behaviour). Guess what? They also end the same way - with marriage.
It's boring reading the same plot over and over again. I am finished with Jane Austen. Absolutely done."
"I didn't finish it. I couldn't even get 20 pages into it. I avoided it. I read another book after starting it. I tried to force myself to read it really fast to get past the beginning. I finally gave up and flipped to the last page, and I couldn't even force myself to read that. What I did read and see at the end was very shallow, so I'm assuming I didn't miss anything?"
"The verbiage was unending. That society was superficial to the extreme. Maybe I'm a modern, jaded woman, but it was all too much.
Miss Austen seemed to have forced herself to create these most boring folk. It does make me grateful for television - and I got rid of cable a couple of years ago."
"LAME! HATED IT! NOT MY STYLE - TOO FLOWERY, TOO MANY WORDS, TOO PROPER. UGH! So glad I did not live back then! Gag me!!!!!!!"
Terrible. How has Jane Austen become an author of 'classics' when all of her books are the same story with different names? A well behaved, nonthreatening but slightly 'different' woman doesn't get with a handsome, perfect but slightly 'inappropriate' man and then there are a few pages of nothingness and then oh look never mind, they're married now. The end.
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ReplyDeleteAlarmingly boring for such a great author. Novels like Emma, Pride and Prejudice as well as Sense and Sensibility are so well written and inviting that it's all the more baffling what went wrong here with Persuasion.
ReplyDeleteThe only complaint, and it's not really a complaint, it's more a modern sense of apprehension, is Jane Austen's liberal use of the words gay, penetrate and ejaculated, which would seem perfectly normal to the 19th century reader, and odd word choices to us.
I don't think the Jane Austen always tells the same story in her books, but there does seem to be almost nothing going on in Persuasion. Other than this person being agreeable and that person being disagreeable nothing really happens. It is so alarmingly devoid of anything interesting happening that I cannot wait to be done with the book. I am almost finished. And very disappointed because I love Jane austen, I love her, and I thought this book would be good but it's so boring