At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is quietly overlooked in her own family, the sensible, undervalued daughter of a vain and financially careless baronet. Years earlier, she let herself be talked out of marrying the man she loved, a naval officer who then had neither fortune nor standing, and she has regretted it in silence ever since. Now her family's mounting debts force them to give up their grand estate, and by a turn of circumstance the man she refused returns to her circle, no longer poor and seemingly indifferent to her. Austen's tender final novel opens on a woman given the rarest of things: a second chance.