‘How eloquent could Anne Elliot have been, —’ (ii: 4, 32). As in these resonant words, Persuasion carries a freight of unspoken emotion and memories that remain unrevisited or unrecalled. This is a novel filled, too, with chance occasions, accidents and missed opportunities. But the emotional freight of the merely alluded to or implied, and these fortuitous events and moments, is undergirded by a structure that is strong, consistent and deliberate, and though it lies beneath the novel's obvious narrative, it is as compelling as in any other of Austen's works. While never for a moment relinquishing its commitment to the evocation of transient emotional reality, Persuasion has a persuasive agenda.

One of those chance, fortuitous events in Persuasion is its heroine's overhearing. This is almost as frequent in Persuasion as in Emma, but in this novel Jane Austen reveals that it has an aspect hardly touched on in the previous book. Emma Woodhouse's capacity to attend – in the sense of seeing and hearing what is going on about her – is interfered with because her consciousness is so often filled with fancies and schemes, animated by the immediate and the future. Anne Elliot's attention is equally contingent, but so often interfered with because her thoughts are saturated by the past. To put it more precisely, Anne's cognisance of the world about her is impaired for the first half of the novel because she is in that condition which we might now call chronic depression, the consequence of unresolved grief. The psychological motif of her half-hearing is crucial to the novel's implicit structure.