Persuasion is now probably the favourite Austen book after Pride and Prejudice. It tells the story of a life that might have been wasted, but is redeemed by love. It is a story by anyone who believes in second chances, or, in Tony Tanner's words "to anyone who has experienced the sense of an irreparably ruined owing to an irrevocable mistaken decision". While Pride and Prejudice was written when Austen was a young, marriageable woman, Persuasion was...