Jane Austen, Persuasion and Virginia Woolf

I reread Austen’s Persuasion this week, couldn’t put it down, even though I knew the plot, as even a first reader would, it’s so predictable. But marvelous, nonetheless. A great airplane book and great literature.

I read it after reading Virginia Woolf’s essay on Austen in her First Common Reader, a collection of essays for bookworms, written and published in the 1920s, more or less contemporaneously with Mrs Dalloway, still, now, my favourite Woolf novel, though we had a good argument about this at the Berkeley poetry group a week or two ago, some preferring To the Lighthouse or The Waves.

And now to get out of the house for a couple of hours, and some exercise.