“‘I believe you equal to every important exertion and to every domestic forbearance so long as — if I may be allowed the expression — so long as you have an object; I mean while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not court it)* is that of loving longest when existence or when hope is gone.’ She could not immediately have uttered another sentence - her heart was too full, her breath too much oppressed.”

Dear Anne Elliot! — sweet, impulsive, womanly, tender-hearted — one can almost hear her voice, pleading the cause of all true women. Jane Austen had reached the very end of her life when she wrote thus. Her words seem to ring in our ears after they have been spoken. Anne Elliot must have been Jane Austen herself, speaking for the last time. There is something so true, so gentle about her, that it is impossible not to love her. She is the bright-eyed heroine of the earlier novels, matured, chastened, cultivated, to whom fidelity has brought only greater depth and sweetness instead of bitterness and pain.