Note 77 — “PERSUASION.”[70]
Reading edition
The sudden bestowal of Louisa Musgrove and Captain Benwick on each other is one of the most genuine and delightful surprises of fiction. It is not only a triumphant testimony to how the whole destiny, not merely of one person, but of a group of persons, may be altered by what seems the simplest accident—the turning of a straw; it is one of those bits of warm, homely, human inconsistency which baffle all anticipation, are worth a hundred bloodless, laboured, logical sequences, but can only be fitly conceived and carried out in a story, by a great artist.