Possibly the best of Jane Austen's novels, though Emma may be considered more polished, and Pride and Prejudice is often preferred by people who have only ever read Pride and Prejudice.
It is the tale of Anne Elliot, who when young was persuaded to renounce the love of the dashing but penniless sailor Frederick Wentworth. After many trials they... well, read it.

...That was how I wrote it on Everything 1. Now here's some more (written 10th April 2001) for Everything 2...

The love story between Anne and Captain Wentworth is slow and painful, but when it comes into the open once more the renewal is so natural: I think this is in part due to the character of Anne, whose heart is delineated so well, better than any other character I know in fiction. She is someone to whom one can and would be faithful: her regard rewards one who wins it. And although she and Wentworth were very young when they formed their first attachment, they recognised the sound qualities in each other, and kept the memory of them alive through the years of separation.

Anne's father is Sir Walter Elliot, an exceedingly vain man, whose sole delight is the dignity of his house and baronetcy. Her mother lived long enough to embue good sense into Anne, but not enough to see her affections for the young sailor who arrived in their neighbourhood. Lady Russell was a friend of the family who was part mother and part friend to Anne, but she too valued the dignity, and persuaded Anne to break off the match. Anne thought it right to submit, at that age. Frederick Wentworth was hurt and angry.

Years later, Anne has lost her bloom, and turned down a comfortable offer of marriage, and tries to keep her father's and elder sister's extravagances in check. They need money, and the vain Sir Walter is eventually persuaded that he can keep his dignity while moving to a cheaper house in Bath, while letting his ancestral estate, Kellynch Hall. The tenants they acquire are an Admiral and Mrs Croft. It turns out (to Anne's shock) that Mrs Croft is the sister of Frederick Wentworth, who is now (she has been following the newspapers during the war against Napoleon) a rich and successful captain. She strolls outside to cool her fevered cheeks and sigh that perhaps soon he will be walking here.

The first meeting is awkward, but they are soon in each other's company enough that they can be at ease. The past is never alluded to. He seems to be taken an interest in on or both of her cousins, Louisa and Henrietta Musgrove. A party is organised to Lyme, a seaside resort, and here they fall in with two fellow captains. They day trip is going swimmingly and they're about to go hom, when, in the dramatic central scene of the novel, the light-hearted Louisa Musgrove, teasing Captain Wentworth by jumping from the sea wall (the Cobb) into his arms, misjudges, and dashes herself unconscious on the stones.

The crisis turns all their relations upside-down. Captain Wentworth, momentarily stunned and helpless with horror, appeals to Anne as the most sensible and proper person to do something. Louisa is carried to Captain Harville's house and attended by a surgeon. The rest try to decide who should go and tell her parents, and by ill luck, for neither of them would have wished to be forced to go in company like this, Anne and Frederick are deputed. This is beginning of renewed intimacy between them; and Frederick has to reconsider his dalliance with Louisa.

Anne eventually joins her family at Bath. Here she is sought after, and almost wooed, by her father's cousin and eventual heir, Mr Elliot. When Captain Wentworth appears on the scene in Bath, he sees this. By now his feelings for Anne have opened up again. But now he thinks he may be about to lose her a second time. This pains him. He cannot know that Anne, though at first admiring Mr Elliot, cannot find in him those truest virtues by which she was bound to Frederick Wentworth. And her old school companion, Mrs Smith, now fallen on very hard times, is emboldened to tell Anne certain secrets about Mr Elliot's past that confirm that she could never respect him. Anne and Frederick want each other, they are available, their love has been tried in their own hearts for long enough now.

All someone has to do is speak. Finally, in one of two alternative endings for the novel - for it was not quite complete at Jane Austen's death, and she had not completely polished it all and finished revising -, Captain Wentworth overhears Anne debating with another over the constancy of men's and women's hearts. She avers that a woman has the power to love forever, even if the object is lost. Frederick knows he has a chance. He scribbles a note to her and thrusts it imploringly at her in passing.

And she catches up with him, and makes him happy.

This is the deepest picture of affections in any of Jane Austen's novels. Some commentators have said it must reflect her own feelings at her own broken engagement - in the early 1800s, in the period where her sister destroyed all the letters mentioning it. But of course she was a novelist; all her work draws on her own feelings and her knowledge of human nature. She said of Anne Elliot (somewhere in her letters) that she was going to write a heroine a little too good. And she makes gentle mockery of Anne from time to time.

This has always been my favourite, and I drew so much comfort from it every time I read it. It teaches that love can last, and that people can be true.