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.
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.
Précis
Austen’s heroines, wrote Anne Thackeray, were less wounded by emotion than those of novelists of her own generation, possessing an enviable ability to shake off griefs. That it was the fashion of her day did not mean, Thackeray added, that Austen felt little herself, as she showed when Anne Elliot discussed a woman’s feelings in Persuasion.
(56 / 60 words)
Austen’s heroines, wrote Anne Thackeray, were less wounded by emotion than those of novelists of her own generation, possessing an enviable ability to shake off griefs. That it was the fashion of her day did not mean, Thackeray added, that Austen felt little herself, as she showed when Anne Elliot discussed a woman’s feelings in Persuasion.
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