Dear Anne Elliot
Anne Thackeray saw something satisfying in the self-control of Anne Elliot.
1874
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Anna Sophia Alexander Robertson, by James Peale.
By James Peale (1749–1831), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
‘Anna Sophia Alexander Robertson’ (1801-1890), who was Mrs William Young Heberton, painted in 1816 by American artist James Peale (1749-1831). Anna lived her whole life in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Sadly, her husband died in 1825, aged just thirty-three. Jane Austen died in 1817, the year after Anna’s portrait was painted, and her family honoured her memory by immediately publishing two hitherto unpublished manuscripts, Northanger Abbey, one of Jane’s earliest novels, and Persuasion, her last. Anne Thackeray saw in Anne Elliot, heroine of Persuasion, something of the disappointment of Jane, a spinster in her early forties, but also something of her strength and serenity.
Introduction
Anne Thackeray wondered if the novelists of her own generation (she singled out George Eliot) were bathing the reader in a little too much emotion. Austen’s heroines did not share so intimately, or express so freely, but she had studied their characters more closely. Such a one was Anne Elliot, of Persuasion.
Abridged.
Jane Austen’s heroines have a stamp of their own. They have a certain gentle self-respect and humour and hardness of heart in which modern heroines are a little wanting. Whatever happens they can for the most part speak of gaily and without bitterness. Love with them does not mean a passion so much as an interest - deep, silent; not quite incompatible with a secondary flirtation. Marianne Dashwood’s tears are evidently meant to be dried. Jane Bennet smiles, sighs, and makes excuses for Bingley’s neglect. Emma passes one disagreeable morning making up her mind to the unnatural alliance between Mr Knightly and Harriet Smith.
It was the spirit of the age, and, perhaps, one not to be unenvied. It was not that Jane Austen herself was incapable of understanding a deeper feeling. In the last-written page of her last-written book there is an expression of the deepest and truest experience. Anne Elliot’s talk with Captain Benfield is the touching utterance of a good woman’s feelings. They are speaking of men and of women’s affections.* [...] “‘I should deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by woman. No! I believe you capable of everything good and great in your married lives.
* In her essay on Jane Austen, Anne Thackeray quotes more of this passage from Persuasion than is reproduced here here. For a fuller extract, see Are Women more faithful than Men?.
