Of all six completed novels Persuasion most resists a late twentieth-century reader's attempts to exonerate Austen from charges of prescriptiveness and didacticism. If Anne Elliot was ‘almost too good’ for the author, a reading based on an assumption of Austen's attachment to conventional contemporary wisdom will certainly leave her too good for us. Marilyn Butler, among others, avers that ‘Anne comes near to being dangerously perfect’ and much modern criticism finds her somewhat tediously fault-free. Curiously, though, it is the one work of Austen's which attracted prompt contemporary criticism on moral grounds; in 1818 the following was included in a review in The British Critic:

These two attitudes, nearly two hundred years apart, provide us with a bewildering paradox – is the novel supporting or rejecting contemporary rules of conduct? What was Austen up to in Persuasion?