ELIZABETH DALTON
59
cal significance in this novel, which deals even more openly than Austen's
other works with the ambivalent feelings among sisters. Mary's husband
Charles would have preferred
to
marry Anne, and now Mr. Elliot, the
only man the haughty Elizabeth considers worthy of herself, chooses
Anne instead. Anne even overhears a lady at Bath comparing her to the
famously beautiful Elizabeth: "'She is pretty, I think, Anne Elliot; very
pretty, when one comes
to
look at her. ... I confess I admire her more
than her sister.'" As in the fairy tale, Anne's earlier humiliation by her sis–
ters is reversed; her triumph is complete.
At Bath, Anne at last has the courage to move toward Wentworth;
when he proposes again, she accepts without consulting anyone. She has
finally freed herself from the persuasion of Lady Russell, and more impor–
tant, from that of the dead Lady Elliot. But although she moves away
from death and the past, her character does not change completely; for
her, pleasure and pain remain linked. Struggling to maintain her compo–
sure in Wentworth's presence, she feels "deep in the happiness of such
misery, or the misery of such happiness." When all is settled between
them, she is "so happy as to be obliged to find an alloy in some momen–
tary apprehensions of its being impossible to last"; for her, there is some–
thing "dangerous in such high-wrought felicity."
It
seems that for Anne,
excitement is tolerable only when mingled with the other emotions she
knows so well.
As Anne begins her life with Wentworth, there is a general renewal.
The Musgrove sisters are happily married; Mrs. Smith recovers her for–
tune; even Mary is in reasonably good spirits. Most of the dead young
ladies, above all Anne herself, have revived.
They leave behind them, however, one who did not recover. Soon
after completing the novel, before the final revision, the author herself
died, at the age of forty-one. To the neighbors who saw her on her in–
creasingly slow and curtailed walks in the garden at Chawton, she had
become "the poor young lady." She died unmarried and childless, the
beloved aunt of many nieces and nephews, having lived always with her
mother and her sister Cassandra. The only "second spring" permitted her
was that of the novel itself, with its acknowledgment of the powers of
death and the past, and its celebration of the possibility of hope, love,
and rebirth.
