The plot of the novel isn’t complicated—when Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth meet in their youth, love, separation, and a new meeting years later with people who have lived through much and understood much. However, at the same time “Persuasion” presents a humorously brilliant, subtly ironic “encyclopedia of manners” of provincial English “society” in the early 19th century. Young ladies chasing rich suitors and hunters for dowries, meddling mothers and aunts desperately intriging to find advantageous matches for girls, empty and affected local “lions,” ruined nobles, gossip and rumors—before the reader’s eyes, colorful portraits and sharp, amusing situations practically come alive.