Persuasion is a book about a longed-for and impossible return. It is, in that sense, a ghost story, and Frederick Wentworth a revenant. Like The Winter's Tale it is about love restored against all likelihood. The gap of loss can be closed up, youth and beauty retrieved, dead affection revived. The work is both domestic and uncanny, offering to Anne and the reader at last paradisal relief.
-- Isn't that amazing? ("And she keeps doing that, too.")