Anne Elliot
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Anne Elliot | |
|---|---|
| Jane Austen character | |
 Anne Elliot as drawn by C.E. Brock (1909) | |
| In-universe information | |
| Gender | Female |
| Family | Sir Walter Elliot, Baronet (father) |
| Home | Kellynch Hall |
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 naval war with France 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.[1]
Jane Austen, in a letter to her niece Fanny Knight dated 13 March 1816, after reminding her how "Pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked", mentions the heroine of the novel she is in the process of writing, with some irony: "You may perhaps like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me."[2]
Anne is both the main character in Persuasion and the secondary narrator. Indeed, only her view of events is available to the reader.[3] 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.[4]
Description
Anne is the overlooked middle daughter of a narcissistic and extravagant baronet, Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall. The oldest of Jane Austen's heroines, she is 26 or 27 years old at the beginning of the novel and is seemingly a confirmed spinster.[5] Her mother is dead, her father, Sir Walter and older sister, Elizabeth are vain and selfish. Her younger sister, Mary, is a manipulative hypochondriac, but not quite so beyond Anne's influence as Elizabeth. With few to appreciate her sweet nature and refined, elegant mind, Anne is somewhat isolated, living in a narrow social sphere where she "was nobody with either father or sister; her word had no weight; her convenience was always to give way; she was only Anne."[6]
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.
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