This is a drama that's also set within a geography. Just after Lime, the second volume of the novel, it's a novel in two-part shifts to Bath. The Lime geography is a liminal geography between the land and the sea. And he goes to Bath, because when he lets Kalich Hall, he go to Bath, which is going to be cheaper. So Walter has rented a flat in Camden Place. He's rather proud of it, but it really is only quite a come-down from Kalich Hall. After the incident where Louisa survives the accident, she moves from that liminal space between the sea and the land and Lime to the much more constrained environment
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