Here's what Jane Austen's Persuasion is about:
Girl—smart, sensible, aristocratic, loving—marries silly, pretty aristocrat with a gambling problem. They have three daughters and then she dies. Middle daughter is the only one who inherited her character. Best friend looks out for middle daughter (because widower is completely incapable of being a good patriarch), but fails when daughter falls in love with a sea-captain. She loves him, in part, because he reminds her of her dead mother. They want to marry, but best friend thinks it's a bad idea and convinces widower-father to also disagree.
Eight years pass. Middle daughter learns to think for herself; refuses to marry eldest son of local squire, although best friend was in favor; youngest daughter marries him instead. Youngest and eldest daughters both never quite grew up, but seem not to feel the loss of their mother as middle daughter does.
Middle daughter gets older and—she thinks—uglier. She tries mothering her father and sisters, but ends up mostly being abused by them in subtle ways instead. Father becomes too poor to support the country estate, and ends up renting it out to the sister and brother-in-law of middle daughter's old suitor. Older sister and father take off for Bath; middle daughter stays with her mother's best friend and then her younger sister for a couple months.
Old suitor comes to visit his sister; seems to be courting one of youngest daughters' sisters-in-law. Middle daughter can't breathe when they're in the same room together. Her nephew falls out of a tree but isn't hurt; she mothers him because his mother won't, and the nursemaid is also irresponsible. She thinks her old suitor has forgotten her, but hears him perhaps alluding to her in his conversations with one of the women he's courting. Great anxiety and self-criticism and awkwardness ensues.
They go on a group trip to the seashore to visit his old Navy friends. She talks about Byron and Scott with his injured friend; sister-in-law jumps from a wall and hits her head; she's okay, but during her long convalescence, the in-laws and the Navy friends become close. Middle daughter observes all kinds of motherliness on the part of those families, is praised indirectly by old suitor for being a good care-giver herself. Extremely pleased.
Old suitor ends up not marrying either one of the girls, who are both otherwise affianced. He and she must admit to themselves that they're still in love; awkwardness and anxiety again ensue; they hardly speak to each other. He suspects she's going to marry her cousin who's also in Bath; she is pleased at the cousin's flirtation, but disapproves of his character. Father and older sister reveal themselves to be superficial children; mother's best friend's influence reaches an all-time low as she almost disappears into other concerns in Bath society. Middle daughter hangs out a lot with an old school friend (slightly older than herself) who is now ill and poor but had been a great comfort to her when they were young—now middle daughter comforts the friend. Suitor's sister and brother-in-law (the tenants) also come to Bath and prove acceptable parent-substitutes to middle daughter, who begins to identify with what she sees as their more sensible, compassionate bourgeois worldview. Her younger sister's mother-in-law also proves a strong source of comfort and approval.
She and old suitor are accidentally forced to speak to each other in various situations; finally he blurts out that he's afraid she's in love with her cousin, and that he loves her; she tells him she has no intentions of marrying that man, and that she's loved him since before they broke off their first engagement, but that she feels it was her duty to take her mother's best friend's advice then. (Now, though, he's quite rich—there will be no objections this time.) They marry.
