Academic Review 2024

25 ACADEMIC REVIEW 2024

“ Her care for others is matched by her inner strength. ”

Wentworth’s beautiful, passionate, humble letter in which he lays bare his heart to Anne is the culmination of the novel’s romance. The hero is seeking the heroine’s love by declaring his own: ‘You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope… I have loved none but you.’ In a similar way to Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice , written three years earlier, Wentworth has to overcome (his wounded) pride to win his love, which the heroine is instrumental in bringing about. Elizabeth Bennet makes Darcy aware of his ungracious condescension, of his pomposity; Anne Elliot makes Wentworth realise their love did not end with the rupture of their engagement. Because it is the heroine playing such an active role in both the novels the happy marriages do not feel like anti feminist cop-outs (as 21st-century readers might feel), but joyous fulfilments of emotional journeys. Austen of course is dealing with the early 18th century marriage market for young women of well-to-do (not aristocratic) families, and passing comment on the limited options available to girls (there is no judgement, for example, of Charlotte Lucas marrying the ludicrous Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice in order to escape the burden of spinsterhood) but her novels are romances above being social critiques, and romances with hurdles to overcome have always delighted readers. Austen herself never married, being as good as wedded to her novels (she described them in strongly affectionate terms in her letters), so possibly she experienced romance vicariously through her novels’ heroines: Catherine Morland, Marianne and Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth and Jane Bennet, Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse and Anne Elliot. Besides which, she, unlike Anne Elliot, was most deeply loved by her family so she had less need to seek friendship or romantic love elsewhere. As George Sand (the pen name of the French female writer, Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, 1804-1876) famously wrote: ‘There is only one happiness in life: to love and be loved.’

Furthermore, Anne, through her generosity and strength of character, enables Wentworth to see clearly again after she so wounded his pride by rejecting him seven years previously. She is far more clear-sighted than the hero of the novel. He declares that he ‘will put up with’ ‘something a little inferior’ to ‘a strong mind, with sweetness of manner’ (end of Volume I, Chapter 7), which of course is not true: he has to learn through the course of the novel that no one else can match Anne Elliot in his eyes in worth and appeal. When he prizes the little Musgrove boy off her back, when he notices her fatigue after the walk to Winthrop and places her in the Crofts’ carriage, when he looks to her for guidance as to what to do with the senseless Louisa, when he seeks her approval as to how to break Louisa’s fall to Mr and Mrs Musgrove – all these incidents reveal his instinctive attraction to, and trust in, Anne. He thinks he can fall in love with Louisa or Henrietta, but he does not; he cannot. Anne never thinks she can fall in love with Captain Benwick – or William Elliot, the two possible rival suitors the narrative offers. Her self-knowledge and her awareness of others’ goodness and faults (consider her circumspect evaluation of Mr Elliot’s character and how prescient it is: ‘he was not open’; he ‘was too generally agreeable’) urge the reader to deem Anne the leader, even though she is not the one who has a brilliant career or the freedom to travel the world.