Ah, the wit of Jane Austen is sharp in this novel, and enjoyable as always.
It is laid out a lot like a theatrical play. Many of the scenes could be played in their own stage. Except perhaps the long walks and the beach strolls.
This novel is her shortest, I think. However, I was stricken by the over-abundance of the word “and”.
I may return to this post with more to add. I only finished it now after starting it yesterday, and I may need to let it sink.
2022-07-27 update: “and” appears 2802 times (*) in a total of 227 pages (24 chapters). That’s 12.3 per page
(*) [After starting to underline them in my book, I found it tedious and unreliable, so I found an HTML version of the book, stripped it of non-novel cruft using emacs and then piped a word count to a grep, embracing the nerddom, but then ran a better grep(**) command which my colleague Bert Bos supplied and explained, because the simpler one would find hand, grand or wander, but not And,]
(Wed, 27 Jul 2022 01:11:29 CET)-(koalie@gillie:~:)$grep and /Users/koalie/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com\~apple\~CloudDocs/Downloads/Persuasion\,\ by\ Jane\ Austen.html | wc -l
2590
(**) (Wed, 27 Jul 2022 07:11:31 CET)-(koalie@gillie:~:)$grep -E -i -o '\band\b' /Users/koalie/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com\~apple\~CloudDocs/Downloads/Persuasion\,\ by\ Jane\ Austen.html | wc -l
2802
(where -E = enable regexps, -i = case-insensitive, -o = put every occurrence on a separate line, \b = word edge) [Thanks Bert!]