Anne Elliot is the protagonist of Jane Austen's sixth and last completed novel, Persuasion (1818). Anne Elliot was persuaded, when she was 19, to break off her engagement with Frederick Wentworth, a promising young lieutenant in the Royal Navy but a commoner without fortune, and she has never married. Lonely, unloved by a stuck-up and pretentious father and older sister, little considered by a family circle incapable of recognising her value, she leads a dull life of an almost-old maid. And yet here it is that, 8 years after the naval war with France ended, in September 1814, the young man whom she has never forgotten returns to England, having earned epaulettes, prestige and fortune in the navy. The first contacts are painful. He has retained an image of her as a person too easily influen