She is making a case for the constancy of women. Captain Harville is quite startled by this, but he is gradually persuaded. She eventually just says that all she claims to her own sex is of loving longest when existence and hope are gone. And it's a very, very startling moment in the novel. I think we may have supported the plot for everybody.
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