The streak of romanticism in Persuasion struck me too, including the one in ch.5 where Anne doesn't want to go to Bath partly because she is "grieving to forego all the influence so sweet and so sad of the autumnal months in the country". As Patricia Meyer Spacks, the editor of the Norton Critcal Edition, puts it in her preface:

Those [readers] with a literary-historical bent have noted the incursion of attitudes and assumptions that we associate with romanticism: the novelist who once mocked Marianne's enthusiasm for dead leaves (in S&S) now allows her heroine, without overt criticism, to take pleasure in evidence of the "declining year". (p.ix)