We have the sense of a deeply withdrawn person with a very highly developed inner life who has been somewhat silenced within her own family. The intensity of it is almost disturbing. She's so intensely in love with them. And she has to bow that every day and you feel for her. A keen way. We see someone acting very independently throughout the novel with very little regard for what her father may think for rank social niceties, anything else. All through the novel we hear about the buzz of noises around her in a kind of auditory landscape.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Jane Austen’s last complete novel, which was published just before Christmas in 1817, five months after her death. It is the story of Anne Elliot, now 27 and (so we are told), losing her bloom, and of her feelings for Captain Wentworth who she was engaged to, 8 years before – an engagement she broke off under pressure from her father and godmother. When Wentworth, by chance, comes back into Anne Elliot's life, he is still angry with her and neither she nor Austen's readers can know whether it is now too late for their thwarted love to have a second chance.
The image above is from a 1995 BBC adaptation of the novel, with Amanda Root and Ciarán Hinds
With
Karen O’Brien
Vice-Chancellor of Durham University
Fiona Stafford
Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford
And
Paddy Bullard
Associate Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Reading
Producer: Simon Tillotson