An awful lot of a good thing

Persuasion is my favorite Jane Austen novel. I appreciated her more with my mind than with my heart, until I got to this one, and it's the book I recommend to people who say they can't get into Austen. It's quiet and dark and more about inner life than about outer, although, as in every Austen book, it's about both, the interplay of the two.

The story is driven by what I think of (in negative moments) as the plague of having to live in linear time. You can't know the future so you have to make the best choices you can without knowing for sure whether they really are the best, and you can't change the past once you've made them. Not an uncommon dilemma in stories but wonderfully realized in this tale of a young woman persuaded not to marry the love of her life, not by those who have no concept of true quality (Anne's or her beloved's), but by the person who loves and respects her the most and who genuinely fears for her happiness. Right and wrong choices are so very hard to define sometimes, even after the fact.

I love this book. So when I saw that there was an Annotated Persuasion, I jumped on it.

And it's really a cool resource. It's not perfect. I can't imagine that anybody reading Austen's books at all, much less this one, needs a note telling them what "amiable" means.

But there was great stuff in it. I now understand the relatively lowly status of a curate, and of an attorney as opposed to a barrister. The idea that for widows to remarry -- I don't mean in haste, I mean, ever -- was considered not...quite proper was new to me.

It's got some nifty illustrations too.

So that's what a "pelisse" is.

But i was hoping it would replace my nice, mundane little copy of the novel, and it won't. It's too much, as a reading copy. This is absolutely great for students, or for anybody who just wants more, but that's studying, not reading. The format -- text on the left-hand page and notes on the right -- bothers me. If that were reversed, I could possibly read a novel only on right-hand pages. Turning the page when I come to the end of a right-hand page is very natural, but not when I've just finished a left-hand page. I think the publisher should have reversed this.

So much for not expanding my book collection. (grumble) I'll be keeping both copies. The extras in the Annotated are too good to discard, but it's too hard to just read for pleasure.