Note 73 — “PERSUASION.”[70]

Anne Elliot’s pathetic position is unique, so far as I know, in the literature of Jane Austen’s day. The contrast of her faded face and subdued spirit with Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove’s fresh bloom and unchecked joyousness, would not be attempted in our day, with the same object in view, by an author who put a supreme value on material advantages, and extolled the attractions of youth beyond all other attractions. No such author—above all in a semi-cynical, semi-sensuous generation—could have anticipated, far less projected, the end of “Persuasion.”