the chances of a most uncertain profession [the navy], and no connexions to secure
even his farther rise in that profession ...’. Captain Wentworth returns rich with
pr ize money, and, he tells his sister, ‘ready to make a foolish match. Any body
between fifteen and thirty may have me for asking. A little beauty, and a few smiles,
and a few compliments to the navy, and I am a lost man.’ Nevertheless, ‘Anne Elliot
was not out of his thoughts,when he more seriously described the woman he should
wish to meet with. “A strong mind, with sweetness of manner”, made the first and
last of the description.’
Wentworth is persuaded that a woman who broke her engagement does not have
a strong mind; and Anne is persuaded that Wentworth cannot think of her. He is
soon involve d with Louisa Musgrove, but when Louisa has a fall, it is Anne who is
calm and useful.Earlier, Wentworth had silently relieved Anne of the attentions of a
troublesome 2-year-old while she is engaged in looking after the child’s sick brother.
In a letter to a friend, Maria Edgeworth comments on this passage: ‘Don’t you see
Captain Wentworth, or rather, don’t you in her place feel him, taking the boisterous
child off her back as she kneels by the sick boy on the sofa?’
In this short novel – concluded as the author became very ill – gesture and silence
develop emotional expressiveness. At the climax, Anne takes her opportunity to
make it clear to Wentworth – indirectly, but persuasively – that she loves him still.
Wentworth is sitting writing at a table in a room full of people as Anne is engaged in
debate by a naval officer who claims that men’s love is more constant than women’s
love. Wentworth listens to her reply, which ends: ‘All the privilege I claim for my own
sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest,
when existence or when hope is gone.’ When compared with the plot ofEmma, that
ofPersuasionis theatrically conventional, especially on its ‘wicked’ side; but the
central relationship is magically managed.
No 19th-century successor in the novel or the theatre approaches the economy in
dialogue and action Austen developed by formal discipline and concentration of
R OMANTIC PROSE 253Jane Austen aged c.35. A pencil and watercolour
sketch made by her sister Cassandra in c.1810,
the only likeness to show Jane Austen’s face.