There is a
new element in Persuasion, the quality, perhaps, that made Dr. Whewell fire up
and insist that it was "the most beautiful of her works". She is beginning to discover that the world
is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed. We feel it to be true of herself when she
says of Anne: "She had been forced
into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older--the natural sequel
of an unnatural beginning". She
dwells frequently upon the beauty and the melancholy of nature, upon the autumn
where she had been wont to dwell upon the spring. She talks of the "influence so sweet and
so sad of autumnal months in the country".
She marks "the tawny leaves and withered hedges". "One does not love a place the less
because one has suffered in it", she observes.
“Love and Friendship” The
Common Reader
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