My favorite Austen book, read for the umpteenth time.
Sir Walter Eliott is a baronet fatuously proud of his baronetcy and his good looks. Much to the determinent of his second daughter, Anne, who had not looks to recommend her. He also spends foolishly, and finds himself facing the urgent need to retrench -- and in due course, persuaded by his agent and a good friend of the family, Lady Russell, to leave his lands and repair to Bath, and lease the hall.
Whereupon an Admiral Croft and his wife take the place, and Anne finds her life more perturbed than before, because several years earlier, she and Mrs. Croft's brother Captain Frederick Wentworth, had been engaged, and she had broken it off because he had his profession but no money at the time, and Lady Russell, whose judgment she had trusted, had urged her to so fervently.
When her father sets out with her older sister to secure their house in Bath, she is claimed by her younger, married sister to help her, and in her household, with frequent visiting from her sister's in-laws, she is frequently involved in the imbroglios of the family, and finds herself meeting Captain Wentworth, who declared to others that he would not have known her again.
It's Jane Austen, and she weaves a tale out of the common minutiae of life in that era: a trip to Lyme, two falls, a music concert in Bath, a discussion between a man and a woman about whether men or women love the longer, walks in the countryside, a young man's desire to get a living in the church, and the cousin who is heir to Sir Walter's estate.
