Captain Wentworth is a man of extraordinary decisiveness, and that's reflected in the very rapid staging. And Anne changes her best considerably in Bath, doesn't she? She changes her pace. But she carries with her that sense of that expansive space of the navy that she encountered in Lyman. It's a very interesting sense of global expansiveness in the novel. What does Mrs Smith bring? She brings a sense of revisiting a very poor woman disabled. Yes, she is. If one can use Australia in that context, she's good at it. Definitely.
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