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Persuasions #15, 1993 Pages 207-215
In Defense of Lady Russell; or, The Godmother Knew Best JOAN KLINGEL RAY Professor of English, University of Colorado at
Colorado Springs Colorado Springs, CO Readers tend to regard Lady Russell, Anne Elliot’s godmother in Jane Austen’s
Persuasion, as a kind of fairy godmother manqué. For while she certainly loves her
goddaughter and desires only the best for her, some eight years before the
novel begins she had persuaded Anne, then nineteen, to break her engagement to
Frederick Wentworth, “a stranger without alliance or fortune.”1 Given the amiable Anne’s sad deterioration
as a result of following her godmother’s advice, it is no wonder Lady Russell
fares poorly with critics. Influenced
by the passage from chapter two about Lady Russell’s “prejudices on the side of
ancestry … [and] value for rank and consequence, which blinded her …”(11), some
otherwise thoughtful critics attribute that advice either to those same “social
prejudices” or to sheer obtuseness.2 Poor Lady Russell! Was a godmother ever so befuddled and bumbling? And with her blinding “value for rank and consequence” (11) readers conclude she was a snob to boot. But I should like to come to this well-meaning dowager’s defense, an act to which I am prompted by Austen’s many judgmental comments about Lady Russell, most of them highly complimentary, but misapplied in critical evaluations of her relationships with various Elliots at key moments in their lives. Examining Austen’s judgments of Lady Russell in their proper contexts will help us to see the dowager’s behavior in a different, indeed exculpatory, light. After all, who knows the lady better than her creator? A “sensible, deserving woman,” Lady Russell had been the late Lady Elliot’s “one very intimate friend,” whose “strong attachment to herself” had brought her “to settle close by her, in the village of Kellynch” (5). The ladies’ intimacy was strengthened by their shared concern for Lady Elliot’s three daughters, all teenagers or younger when she died (4). Knowing her death would leave them to the “guidance of a conceited, silly father,” Lady Elliot “mainly relied” on Lady Russell’s “kindness and advice … for the best help and maintenance of the good principles and instruction which she had been anxiously giving her daughters’ (5). Lady Elliot’s anxiety for her daughters was well grounded in personal experiences. While she, herself, “had been an excellent woman, sensible and amiable” (4), she had made one big error in life: her marriage. In 1784, prompted by “youthful infatuation” and “attach[ed]” by a young man’s “good looks and his rank,” she, Elizabeth Stevenson, had married “the remarkably handsome,” twenty-four-year-old Sir Walter Elliot (1, 4). With ironic understatement, Austen observes that her marriage did not make her the “very happiest being in the world.” Yet Lady Elliot requested no “indulgence.” She spent the next seventeen years dealing sensibly with her husband’s flaws and finding solace and activity in her children, friends, and duties (4). I have rehearsed at length the material about Lady Elliot’s intimacy with Lady Russell, as well as that about the former’s infatuated marriage choice and its consequences, to lead us to a better understanding of Lady Russell’s concerns about Anne, her “most dear and highly valued god-daughter, favourite, and friend” (6). Anne’s being the dowager’s favorite is only to be expected. The late Lady Elliot was once her most trusted friend, and Anne is very much her mother’s daughter. As Lady Russell tells her, “You are your mother’s self in countenance and disposition …” (160). Although her godmother makes this comment within the context of a possible marriage to Mr. William Elliot, Anne thus becoming the next Lady Elliot – and “occupying [her] dear mother’s place” (159) – I would suggest that Lady Russell notices a greater and more fearsome similarity between mother and daughter than she articulates outright. She communicates this cognizance indirectly by the way she responds to Anne’s marital prospects with Frederick Wentworth. Though not a woman of “quick abilities” (11), Lady Russell saw during the Anne-Wentworth romance what, to her, were obvious indications that her goddaughter was acting like the young woman who twenty-two years earlier had foolishly married Sir Walter Elliot. That Lady Russell would not articulate this sensitive observation outright is in no way surprising. Just as her “delicate sense of honor” and “strict … notions of decorum” (11) compel her to act most tactfully with Sir Walter when he is in fiscal distress, so too, this delicacy would dictate her behavior towards her goddaughter when she considers her to be in romantic distress. It simply would be neither decorous nor consistent with her typically “consistent” (11) character for Lady Russell to tell Anne bluntly, “Anne, you’re making the same mistake your mother made two-and-twenty years ago.” For us to understand Lady Russell’s behavior in
1806, we need to reconstruct the scene and examine the background knowledge
that Lady Russell would have had at the time of the Anne-Wentworth
romance. According to the baronetage
entry with which Persuasion opens, Elizabeth Stevenson had married Sir
Walter in July 1784, when the latter, “born March 1, 1760,” would have been
twenty-four, just a year older than Wentworth was when he first fell in love
with Anne (1, 125). Using common sense,
as well as the typical bride and groom age differences one finds in a
baronetage or marriage list for the times, we can assume that the “youthful”
Elizabeth Stevenson was between seventeen and twenty-one when she married. Perhaps she was even nineteen, the same age
that Anne was when she first became enamored of Captain Wentworth. The young Miss Stevenson’s attraction to the
“remarkably handsome” young baronet (4) bears certain similarities to Anne’s
youthful attraction to Wentworth. When
Frederick first arrived in Somersetshire, he was also “a remarkably fine young
man” (26). His exceptional
attractiveness back in 1806 is suggested by the admiring remarks about his
appearances exchanged by Lady Dalrymple and that fastidious expert on male
beauty, Sir Walter, at the concert in Bath nine years later: “ ‘A well-looking
man,’ said Sir Walter, ‘a very well-looking man.’ ‘A very fine young man indeed!’ said Lady Dalrymple” (188). Likewise, “when [Sir Walter] saw more of …
Wentworth, saw him repeatedly by daylight and eyed him well, he was very much
struck by his personal claims …” (248).
High praise, indeed, for a man who has spent nearly the last eight years
at sea!3 At nineteen, Anne, too, had “claims of …
beauty”: she was “an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste,
and feeling” (26, my italics).
While Anne and Frederick’s initial acquaintance began “gradually” –
which is understandable, given the different circles in which the daughter of a
baronet and the naval-commander brother of a curate travelled – once
acquainted, they fell “rapidly and deeply in love” (4, my italics). A romance of rapid progress was inevitable
for this young couple, “for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly any body
to love” (26). Moreover, he was
“sanguine,” witty, warm, fearless, “headstrong,” free and even reckless in his
spending, yet "bewitching[ly]” confident that he would continue to be
“lucky” in securing more prize money at sea (27). How could the lonely, “feeling” Anne resist the handsome,
charismatic officer? How could the warm
and otherwise unoccupied Frederick resist the beautiful and gentle Anne? Falling rapidly in love, they had a true
romance of passion. Perhaps to Lady
Russell it even looked like Elizabeth Stevenson’s “youthful infatuation” with
Walter Elliot. Given these circumstances, the reader’s
questions about Lady Russell should not be, “Why would she oppose Anne and
Frederick’s marriage?” Rather, we need
to ask, “Why wouldn’t she oppose this match?” She saw Anne – her “mother’s self” (160) – potentially repeating
her mother’s error. While the vain Sir
Walter thought the Anne-Frederick match “a very degrading alliance,” Lady
Russell, “with more tempered and pardonable pride, received it as a most
unfortunate one” (26, my italics). The
author’s judgmental phrase, which I have italicized, is important to our
interpreting correctly Lady Russell’s subsequent behavior in this episode. When the couple approached Sir Walter about
their engagement, his pride of rank and vanity were offended; to Austen and her
readers, Sir Walter’s pride is offensive.
But the author exonerates Lady Russell’s pride, which she explicitly
states was “more tempered and pardonable” (26). The dowager’s “more … pardonable pride” is not in her rank, but
in her favorite god-daughter, "with all her claims of birth, beauty, and
mind …” (26). Nineteen-year-old Anne
Elliot, so full of potential, “so young” and “known to so few” (27), is going to
throw herself away at nineteen; involve herself at nineteen in an engagement
with a young man, who had nothing but himself to recommend him, and no hopes of
attaining affluence, but in the chances of a most uncertain profession, and no connexions
to secure even his farther rise in that profession; [this] would be, indeed, a
throwing away …. (27, 26)4 “A throwing away” is what Anne’s mother had
done in 1784. Lady Russell knew what
had attracted her dearest, most intimate friend to Sir Walter in her
youth. She knew, as well, that Lady
Elliot had never been as “highly valued” at Kellynch Hall as her superior
qualities had merited (160). And she
knew that Anne, so like her late mother in appearance and character, was as
undervalued at Kellynch as her mother had been (12). All this, added to Lady Russell’s horror of “imprudence,” led her
to deprecate and seek to end “the connexion” between Anne and Frederick, which
she feared would sink her goddaughter “into a state of most wearing, anxious,
youth-killing dependance!” (27).
“Prevent[ing]” this marriage, Lady Russell believed, was the duty “of
one who had almost a mother’s love, and mother’s rights …” (27). Moreover, she had the memory of Anne’s
mother’s experience to validate her own actions. With extreme “tenderness of manner” (27), she proceeds to make
Anne “believe the engagement a wrong thing – indiscreet, improper, hardly
capable of success, and not deserving it” (27). Anne even ends up thinking the engagement wrong for Frederick’s own
good (27-28).5 Notice that Austen never mentions Lady
Russell’s blinding “value for rank and consequence” in writing about her
handling of the Anne-Wentworth affair.
That loaded description6 of Lady Russell’s “prejudices on the
side of ancestry” appears in chapter two (11), where the omniscient narrator
comments upon Lady Russell’s attitude towards Sir Walter’s economic “faults,”
which precipitated the Kellynch financial exigencies that came to a head in the
summer of 1814. It is worthwhile to
review the passage in full: She had a cultivated mind, and was, generally speaking, rational and consistent – but she had prejudices on the side of ancestry; she had a value for rank and consequence, which blinded her a little to the faults of those who possessed them. Herself, the widow of only a knight, she gave the dignity of a baronet all its due; and Sir Walter, independent of his claims as an old acquaintance, an attentive neighbor, an obliging landlord, the husband of her very dear friend, the father of Anne and her sisters, was, as being Sir Walter, in her apprehension entitled to a great deal of compassion and consideration under his present difficulties. (11) Lady Russell’s “delicate sense of honor,”
benevolence, decorum, charity, integrity, capacity for “strong attachments” –
particularly to the memory of her “very dear friend” and that friend’s family –
and goodness (has Austen ever bestowed on one character such a cascade of
complimentary epithets in a single paragraph?) convince her that the Elliots
“must retrench,” but “with the least possible pain” to the baronet and his
family (11, 12). That the Elliots, her
“confidential friends” (10) and neighbors, were living beyond their means after
Lady Elliot’s decease surely would have been noticed by her. For it was her “very intimate friend”(5),
Lady Elliot, who had always provided fiscal “method, moderation, and economy”
at Kellynch (9). Her death had ended
“all such right-mindedness, and from that period [Sir Walter] had been
constantly exceeding” his income (9).
Yet keeping in character, Lady Russell would never have acted
indecorously and corrected Sir Walter or even suggested ways of economizing
until he appealed to her, which he finally does when his finances ebb
precariously to the edge of ruin. Knowing Sir Walter’s financial ineptitude and
his inability to provide for Anne’s future (248), Lady Russell fears that if
her goddaughter, at age nineteen, makes a fiscally imprudent marriage, such as
to Frederick Wentworth, Anne will be “sunk by him into a … killing dependance!”
(27). Her fears are not
exaggerated because, as we are told, “Captain Wentworth had no fortune. He had been lucky in his profession, but
spending freely, what had come freely, had realized nothing” (27). Lady Russell’s partially evaluating Anne’s
marital prospects in economic terms is based on what LeRoy W. Smith calls
“patriarchal principles”:7 On three occasions she counsels Anne by patriarchal standards, such as the wealth in property of the prospective husband. Although always acting with integrity and solicitude, Lady Russell represents a threat to Anne’s possibilities of happiness, the menace of one who “loves” her but whose advice would hold her in social bondage. (161) But if Lady Russell’s “advice would hold [Anne]
in social bondage,” she, along with Austen, knows that an imprudent marriage
would hold Anne in economic bondage.
Although they never marry for money, none of Austen’s heroines makes a
financially imprudent marriage. Hence,
Lady Russell “lamented” Anne’s refusing at age twenty-two the proposal from
Charles Musgrove, a young man “of good character and appearance” and the heir
to property in size and importance “second in that country” only to Kellynch
(28). Remember, except for Charlotte
Heywood in Sanditon, all of Austen’s heroines are married by this
age. As Anne enters her mid-twenties,
Lady Russell “began … to have the anxiety which borders on hopelessness for
Anne’s being tempted by some man of talents and independence, to” marry (29). Insofar as Lady Russell’s contemplating a
possible marriage between Anne and William Elliot is concerned, she is utterly
unaware of his questionable past and temporarily enamored of the idea that the
now nearly twenty-eight-year-old Anne (time is running out on her) could
eventually succeed her mother as a “more highly valued” (160) Lady Elliot. Rather tentatively and, of course,
decorously, she suggests to her goddaughter “that if Mr. Elliot should some
time hence pay his addresses to you, and if you should be disposed to accept
him,” she “think[s] there would be every possibility of” happiness (159). On Lady Russell’s behalf, we should recall
that her sentimental visions of Anne as Lady Elliot had come the morning after
doting godmother and suave heir presumptive had seen eye-to-eye as they
enumerated Anne’s merits during their conversation at Lady Dalrymple’s
(159). Indeed, it is reasonable to
assume that Mr. Elliot is the first person, other than Lady Elliot, in whom
Lady Russell ever found another admirer of her favorite young woman.8 Lady Russell views Anne’s possible marriage
to Mr. Elliot as offering her goddaughter personal happiness with a man who, by
his conversation and behavior, evidences great admiration and affection for
her; along with this comes economic security, the “patriarchal” principle
designated by Smith. Snobbishness, an
undue “value for rank and consequence,” has nothing to do with this; on the
contrary, Lady Russell saw in Lady Elliot’s unhappy marriage what the
consequences of an “attachment" based merely on “good looks and … rank”
(4, my italics) could be. That Lady Russell is no snob is underscored
further in the same chapter (vol. 2, ch. 5), when Sir Walter arrogantly
criticizes Anne for slumming by visiting “A widow Mrs. Smith, lodging in
West-gate buildings!” (158). Asked by
her father what Lady Russell “thinks of this acquaintance,” Anne replies, “She
sees nothing to blame in it … on the contrary, she approves it; and has
generally taken me [i.e., in her carriage], when I have called on Mrs. Smith”
(157). In fact, Lady Russell so much
approves her goddaughter’s visits to Mrs. Smith, though she lives in a solitary
room in the unfashionable West-gate buildings, that she numbers them among
Anne’s virtues when she praises Anne to Mr. Elliot at Lady Dalrymple’s
(158-59).9 Given the sincere and loving concern that Lady Russell has demonstrated towards Anne, it is not surprising in the final chapter that the dowager should “at a very early period … [mean] to love Captain Wentworth as she ought …” (251). Insofar as Mr. Elliot and the Captain are concerned, Lady Russell must
learn to feel that she had been mistaken with regard to both; that she had been
unfairly influenced by appearance in each; that because Captain
Wentworth’s manners had not suited her own ideas, she had been too quick
in suspecting them to indicate a character of dangerous impetuosity; and that
because Mr. Elliot’s manners had precisely pleased her in their
propriety and correctness, their general politeness and suavity, she had been
too quick in receiving them as the certain result of the most correct opinions
and well regulated mind. (249, my
italics) As the preceding quotation explicitly states,
Lady Russell’s opinions of Anne’s two suitors were based on their respective “appearance”
and “manners,” not their “rank and consequence” (11), as many readers
erroneously assume. As a woman whose
own manners “were held a standard of good-breeding” (11), Lady Russell would
naturally place great significance on the manners of others. She would never suspect that an individual –
especially the heir presumptive to Kellynch – would use a facade of gentlemanly
manners as a ploy for self-aggrandizement, as William Elliot did. Nor
would she look approvingly on the glibly confident Captain Wentworth,
whose trusting to luck for his future (27) would convey to the dowager not
merely irresponsibility, but downright cockiness. Disabused of her reliance on “appearance,” Lady Russell has
“nothing less … to do, than to admit that she had been completely wrong, and to
take up a new set of opinions and of hopes” (249). And this is precisely what the “very good” and “sensible” Lady
Russell does (249). But while her godmother was deluded by
“appearance,” Anne – young woman in love that she was and more familiar (than
Lady Russell could possibly be) with the “real” Frederick Wentworth who existed
underneath the cocky public facade – saw in the young man the makings of the
mature, sensitive man who appears so admirably at the end of Persuasion. Likewise, Anne had confidence in the
fortuneless Wentworth that he would be “lucky” (27) and make his fortune.10 She did not mistake the manners for the man,
while her godmother thought the manners were the man. Anne’s youthful, romantic perspicacity and confidence were
ultimately justified, “as the event decide[d]” (246). Thus, in the long run, Lady Russell did “err in her advice,” but
she based that advice on the cavalier Frederick she saw in 1806. Anne never saw a cavalier Frederick; she
romantically saw the navy hero that he, in fact, turned out to be. And after eight years of suffering, Anne –
however sensible and mature she is at age twenty-seven – now that she is
finally reunited with the lover who she thought was lost to her forever, would
naturally say, “I … never should, in any circumstance of tolerable similarity,
give such advice” (246).11
But the experience of life has taught Anne a lesson that Lady Russell
knew in 1806, when she dispensed her advice to her goddaughter. As Anne says, “It was … one of those cases
in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides …” (246, my
italics). In fact, the “event” turned out happily, with
Anne and Frederick joined in a marriage of love, passion (“You pierce my soul,”
wrote Frederick to Anne [237]), respect, compassion, and financial security –
but not physical security, insofar as the naval profession carries the “tax of
quick alarm,” as Austen realistically observes in the last sentence of the
novel (252). And Lady Russell is now
the beloved and loving mother-figure to Captain and Mrs. Frederick
Wentworth. Despite her mistaking the
surface manners for the inner man, the sensible godmother really did know best. The defense for Lady Russell rests. NOTES 1 The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W.
Chapman, 3rd ed., 5 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1932-34),
5:27. All subsequent citations to
Austen’s novels are to this edition and are given in the text. 2 John Halperin, The Life of Jane Austen
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 300. The material leading to this conclusion
reads: “Lady Russell has an overblown ‘value for rank and consequence’ which
has ‘blinded her … to the faults’ of those who possess them. Because of her social prejudices she
misjudges both Wentworth and William Elliot … and gives Anne bad advice.” Similar charges are levelled at Lady Russell
by Marvin Mudrick, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (1952;
rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 234; and Howard S. Babb, Jane
Austen’s Novels: The Fabric of Dialogue ([Hamden, Conn.]; Archon Books,
1967), 213. Readers who suggest the
dowager is untrustworthy, unperceptive, and/or unsympathetic include Jane
Nardin, Those Elegant Decorums: The Concept of Propriety in Jane Austen’s
Novels (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973), 148; Alison G.
Sulloway, Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 215; Mary Margaret Benson, “Mothers,
Substitute Mothers, and Daughters in the Novels of Jane Austen,” Persuasions
11 (1989), 119; A. Walton Litz, Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic
Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 154; Ann Molan,
“Persuasion in ‘Persuasion’,” The Critical Review 24 (1982), 16-29; and
Stuart M. Tave, Some Words of Jane Austen (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1973), 273. 3 For Sir Walter’s firm belief that an active
naval career has a deleterious effect on one’s personal appearance, see
particularly pages 19-20 of the novel. 4 When Lady Russell objects to Frederick’s
having “no connexions to secure even his farther rise in” the navy, we should
not interpret this as an example of her “value for rank and consequence”
(11). (It is interesting to speculate that
Frederick must have never mentioned to anyone other than Anne during his
initial visit to Somersetshire that he had a naval “connexion” in his sister,
the wife of Admiral Croft. Mrs. Croft
says in 1814 that she has been married for fifteen years [70] and thus would
have been married to the admiral for seven years by 1806.) Jane Austen, of course, knew the value of
“connexions.” Charles and Frank
Austen’s naval careers benefited from their father’s writing to patrons and
using “connexions” on their behalf. See
Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1987),
68-69, 161, passim. Lady
Russell’s apprehensions about Frederick’s lack of “connexions,” then, reflect a
realistic understanding of how professional advancement in the navy could be
facilitated. We also see this in Mansfield
Park, where Henry Crawford’s uncle, an admiral, expedites William Price’s
promotion. 5 I agree with Tony Tanner when he states, “Lady
Russell is by no means one of Jane Austen’s malign characters. On the contrary she is a ‘benevolent,
charitable, good woman ….’ She is
genuinely fond of Anne and truly appreciates all her qualities and
virtues. Anne loves her to the end
….” However, we begin to part ways as
he continues in the next sentence: “But ‘she had prejudices on the side of
ancestry ….’ In a word, she favours the
old order of society and cannot always see its derelictions and delinquencies”
(246-47). Calling the world depicted in
the novel “a society-without-a-centre,” he concludes that Lady Russell must
learn to “turn … away from … many of the old values (248-49). Such values include “rely[ing] on the
once-reliable signs of ‘propriety’ and ‘correctness,’ ‘manners’ and
‘politeness.’ In a changing society a
more emotional, ‘romantic’ personal code is emerging as both desirable and necessary
...” (248). On the other hand, Marilyn
Butler argues that Jane Austen is applying a conservative, Evangelical attitude
to Persuasion, critical of the aristocracy’s “moral backsliding.” See her Jane Austen and the War of Ideas
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 284. 6 Citing the passage in question, Darrel Mansell
in The Novels of Jane Austen: An interpretation (New York: Barnes and
Noble, 1973), 209, says “When Lady Russell is first introduced, her author’s
treatment of her is curiously qualified and shifty – even wary (p. 11). As the novel progresses one continues to get
this sense; and near the end Anne is finally made to face up squarely to a
question that may have been bothering Jane Austen all along: was Lady Russell
right, wrong, or something else, in persuading Anne eight years ago ‘to believe
the engagement a wrong thing’ (p. 27)?” Mansell’s “something else” deals with
the tensions implicit in following one’s “duty.” But the “something else” I suggest deals with Lady Russell’s
suspicions that Anne may be repeating her mother’s youthful error. An opposing view to mine is stated by Mary
Margaret Benson (n. 2, above), who writes, “Lady Russell is … blind, first when
she encourages Anne’s marriage to Charles Musgrove, and, later, when she encourages
Anne’s marriage to Mr. Elliot, considering his rank, future position and wealth
enough to ensure Anne’s happiness; she acknowledges none of Lady Elliot’s
marital unhappiness, and never quite realized that she would doom Anne to the
same” (119). I believe Ms. Benson
overlooked some important considerations when she wrote that statement. 7 LeRoy W. Smith, Jane Austen and the Drama
of Woman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 153. Alistair Duckworth in The Improvement of
the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
Press, 1971) notes that because Anne was “Young, motherless, and without
benefit of paternal approval, [she] had … acceded to the ‘persuasion’ of her
only real friend. Lady Russell …”
(194). We can extend Professor
Duckworth’s observation: with Lady Elliot dead and Sir Walter concerned
exclusively with himself and the daughter most like him, Elizabeth, Lady
Russell assumes the roles of both parents for Anne. 8 As Jane Austen tells us outright in the novel,
to Sir Walter and Elizabeth, Anne “was nobody … she was only Anne” (5). 9 Admittedly, it is easy to interpret Lady
Russell’s saying that Lady Dalrymple “ ‘was an acquaintance worth having’ ”
(150) and her “fresh arrang[ing] all her evening engagements in order to wait
on her” (158) as signs of her “value for rank and consequence” (4). She is not, however, impressed with the
Viscountess and her daughter, for after meeting them, she “confessed that she
had expected something better” (150).
In a person of such delicacy as Lady Russell, this understated comment
is strong criticism, indeed. While she
juggles her calendar in order to accept their invitation, she does not berate
Anne – as Sir Walter does – for choosing to maintain her previous engagement
with Mrs. Smith in lieu of waiting on Lady Dalrymple and Miss Carteret. And she does not behave sycophantically
towards the Viscountess as Sir Walter and Elizabeth do: recall that she “could
[not] admire” the fawning letter that Sir Walter wrote to Lady Dalrymple to
re-open the acquaintance (149). Thus,
Lady Russell’s saying that Lady Dalrymple and her daughter are “acquaintance
worth having” is merely a polite acknowledgement of socially prudent, decorous
behavior. 10 Young Wentworth’s facile association of luck
with money is echoed by the eager child, Paul, in D. H. Lawrence’s classic
short story, “The Rockinghorse Winner,” and thus underscores how naive
Frederick’s claims must have sounded to Lady Russell. 11 It should be mentioned that earlier in the
novel, Anne makes a virtually identical remark to herself, saying that she
would never give a young person counsel such as she had received which would
result in his or her experiencing “such certain immediate wretchedness” as she,
herself, has experienced (29). She says
this just after learning that the Crofts, Frederick’s sister and
brother-in-law, are to lease her family home, which fact causes “a revival of
former pain” (30). I would propose that
on both occasions of her making these same self-reflective comments, she is
inspired to do so by the highly emotional nature of each: the first occasion
she finds very upsetting, while the second she finds joyous and is romantically
nostalgic about her previous eight years of loneliness. Anne, remember, is a woman of both sense and
“feeling” (26) or sensibility. |
