Is "Persuasion" Jane Austen's best book?

Adelle Waldman ponders the question (and answers in the negative):

... many people whose taste is generally excellent—including, for instance, Slate’s own Ron Rosenbaum and the literary critics William Deresiewicz and Harold Bloom—consider Persuasion Austen’s best book. Tastes may simply differ, of course, but I have a theory: I suspect that some readers prize Persuasion because it is superficially more “serious” than Austen’s other novels. Anne Elliot, at 27, is older than her other heroines, who range from their late teens to their early 20s. Her plight is also the saddest. While Austen’s other protagonists are optimistic about their futures, by the time we meet Anne, she feels that her life has been permanently blighted. Seven years before the novel begins, she broke an engagement to the man she loved on the advice of a trusted friend, and she has pined for him ever since. Her day-to-day life as an unattached woman is dreary. She lives with her unpleasant older sister and her father, a vain, unintelligent man, vulgarly proud of his well-preserved good looks and his baronetcy. Her main solace is tending to the children of her silly, self-involved younger sister. It’s hard not to be a little moved by the barrenness of Anne’s life. Austen herself seemed to be: The mood and setting is autumnal, and the prose is more lyrical than it is in her other novels.

The somber tone, the sadness of Anne’s situation—those alone may dispose some readers toward Persuasion. Perhaps even some of Austen’s most fervent admirers are a little embarrassed by her comedies of manners and her books’ supposedly trivial subject matter, the way each one ends with the marriage of its heroine. Perhaps these readers hold up Persuasion, with its older, sadder protagonist, as a counterargument to the charge of frivolity. (Rosenbaum seems to do precisely this.) But Persuasion lacks not only the comic sparkle of Austen’s other novels. It also lacks, relatively speaking, the fineness of observation and the psychological nuance that is enough to make any book—even the fairy-tale-like love story of a teenage girl and a wealthy man—a great one.