Academic Review 2024

24 ST EDWARD’S, OXFORD

Anne’s care for others fits with her ability to evaluate her emotions and further establishes her character as vital and active. She helps Mary with her children and her (imagined) afflictions; she helps the Musgrove seniors by listening to their concerns and complaints, and playing the piano at the dances; she helps Captain Benwick in his grief-stricken state over the loss of his fiancée, Fanny Harville; she helps organise the care of Louisa after her fall off the Cobb; she helps her immobile school friend, Mrs Smith, by offering her companionship through her visits. Her care for others is matched by her inner strength. We learn that she turned down Charles Musgrove, despite his being due to inherit property, as well as having ‘good character and appearance’, and Lady Russell approving the match (Volume I, Chapter 4). To choose to remain a spinster with her cold, selfish father and older sister (of course, at this time a woman in her position from her social background could not embark on any kind of career and had no income to live alone) rather than marry a thoroughly decent man reveals the depth of her love for Wentworth, and an extraordinary strength of character. Furthermore, Austen’s presentation of the mourning Captain Benwick, who is ‘disposed to abstraction’ (a striking contrast with Anne, who exerts herself to engage with others), and seeks out ‘the tenderest songs’ of Scott and ‘the impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony’ of Byron’s verse, highlights Anne’s lack of self-indulgence. She too is afflicted with loss, but her development is not arrested. In fact, it is due to her appetite for reflection, and her ability to do this so intelligently, that she is able to rescue Benwick from his grief. Anne’s recommendations of ‘a larger allowance of prose in his daily study’ and suggesting ‘the duty and benefit of struggling against affliction’ are the catalyst for Benwick being able to look beyond what he has lost and appreciate what is in front of him. This opening of his mind paves the way for him falling in love with Louisa as she recovers from her devastating fall.

But, whereas her immediate relations are stale (look at the description of Elizabeth at the beginning and the repetition of ‘thirteen years’ to describe how unchanging her life is), unfeeling and unreflective, Anne, although she might be ‘haggard’ at the start, is fresh in her outlook, and deeply sentient. We are told in Volume I, Chapter 2 of her ‘conscience’ (not something attributed to the rest of her family) and at the end of Volume I, Chapter 3, where she learns of the proposed tenant, Admiral Croft, being married to Wentworth’s sister, how she had ‘to seek the comfort of cool air for her flushed cheeks’ by walking along ‘a favourite grove’. We are told of her self-reliance because she has no friend to confide in: ‘Anne was left to persuade herself, as well as she could’ that the Crofts are talking of the curate brother Wentworth, and not her Frederick, during the dinner at the Musgroves. We are told that she has to ‘inure herself’ to the ‘trial’ of hearing Captain Wentworth’s name repeated. We learn of the ‘thousand feelings’ that rushed on her when she first sees Wentworth again. When she hears Wentworth describe how his ship might have sunk her ‘shudderings [are] to herself, alone’. When Wentworth comes to her aid in removing her annoying nephew from her back at the end of Volume I, Chapter 10, Anne ‘required a long application of solitude and reflection to recover’. When they go on the walk to Winthrop Anne recites to herself ‘some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn’ to ‘occupy her mind’ rather than observe with bitterness and jealousy how close Wentworth and Louisa appear to be. She is seen as constantly struggling with her ‘emotions … of pleasure and pain’. Re-encountering her old love is fraught with feeling, but these feelings do not stop her from engaging with others.