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Anne Elliot is the protagonist of Jane Austen's sixth and last completed novel, Persuasion (1817).
Anne Elliot was persuaded, when she was 19 years old, to break off her engagement with Frederick Wentworth, a promising young lieutenant in the Royal Navy but a commoner without fortune, and she has never married. Lonely, unloved by a stuck-up and pretentious father and older sister, and little considered by a family circle incapable of recognising her value, she leads a dull life of an almost-old maid. However, 7 or 8 years after the Napoleonic Wars ended, in September 1814, Frederick Wentworth, whom she has never forgotten, returns to England having earned prestige and fortune in the navy. The first contacts are painful. He has retained an image of her as a person too easily influenced, and she sees clearly that he is still angry with her. But seven years on, she has matured and gained enough independence from her family and social circle to choose her friends and her future.
The posthumously-published novel by Jane Austen presents the portrait of an independent spirit, a young, intelligent and melancholic woman, sensitive and attentive to others, who regains her self-confidence when she is given a second chance to find happiness, a very different happiness from other Austenian heroines, since she marries neither a land owner nor a clergyman, but a ship's captain. She would be "proud of being the wife of a sailor" but she would also know its anxieties and its sorrows. She is considered the most lucid and responsible Austenian heroine and the reader is privy in a special way to her thoughts, which are of an exactitude and a perceptiveness unparalleled in the heroines of previous novels.Lydia Martin 2007, p. 205
Anne is both the main character in Persuasion and the secondary narrator. Indeed, only her view of events is available to the reader.Jane Austen (prefaced by Gillian Beer), Persuasion, Penguin Classics, 2003 p. xxiii None of the heroines of the prior novels is as visibly the center of convergence of the action and the main point of view, since the narrator does not openly pull the strings of the plot and avoids directing irony at Anne. On the contrary, it is she who perceives the events and the people with much finesse, a keen sense of observation and analysis, and most of the time it is from her that the reader learns the details of the plot; it is on her alone, to whom the author gives complete freedom to express her feelings and her unwavering commitment to Wentworth, that the resolution ultimately depends.Lydia Martin 2007, p. 69
Lady Russell, her late mother's best friend, is Anne's only real confidante; and although Lady Russell means well and usually shows good judgment, she tends to put great value on social position when forming her opinions. This preference has caused Anne great sorrow: eight years before, Lady Russell persuaded her to break off an engagement with an ambitious, promising young naval officer named Frederick Wentworth— a man whom Anne loved passionately—on the grounds that his poverty, lack of social rank and connections made him an unsuitable choice.
Anne has never fully recovered from the heartbreak, and begins Persuasion as a sad figure, disregarded by her father, "wretchedly altered" in looks, looked down upon by her elder sister and resigned to an empty life. When Captain Wentworth, now rich from prize money, returns from the Napoleonic Wars to visit the neighbourhood, Anne is at first pained; however, his presence gradually sets her life in motion again.
In Persuasion, hereditary aristocracy is held up to ridicule: the 'eligible' suitor, Mr. Elliot, turns out to be a scoundrel, while the village patriarch, Sir Walter Elliot, is not only "foolish" and "spendthrift" but also absurdly proud of his . To fill the void, Austen sets up a sort of rising meritocracy made up of successful officers in the Royal Navy.Green, Sarah K. "A state of alteration, perhaps of improvement", May 1, 2003 (undergraduate essay, Brown University) (full text) Sir Walter and his daughter Elizabeth cede their position as landed gentry when they let Kellynch Hall to Admiral Croft. As Austen makes clear, these Elliots are unworthy of their high social status; they are also unworthy of Anne, a natural aristocrat who languishes, disregarded, until she reunites with Captain Wentworth. In effect, Anne escapes from her meaningless life as an Elliot to join the Navy.
Lady Russell overvalues inherited social class and so underestimates Wentworth and nearly cheats Anne of her only chance of happiness. When circumstances prove both the captain's worthiness and the corresponding worthlessness of fellow suitor Mr. Elliot, Lady Russell herself—the very voice of benevolent propriety—has to "admit that she had been pretty completely wrong and to take up a new set of opinions and hopes."Austen, Jane. Persuasion; quoted in Tony Tanner's "In Between: 'Persuasion'", ibid., p. 248
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