the heroine (along with her family) enters a kind of limbo in which she is a wanderer from the ancestral estate, privileged by birth but with a social and economic identity whose worth is uncertain and in flux. All she has is her value in the marriage market.

In chapter 3, the theme of social mobility is introduced: Sir Walter objects to letting the house to an admiral because the navy offends his two most valued traits: privilege ranked by birth, and male beauty. The navy is “the means of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction, and raising men to honours which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt of,” forcing men to behave as social equals to those “whose father, his father might have disdained to speak to” (p. 19). This is the privileged perspective on meritocracy, of course. Austen makes fun of its snobbish presumptuousness of superiority by birth in immediately linking it with Sir Walter’s fear and horror of the unattractive: He assumes that the weathered appearance of a naval man must be an “object of disgust” to all. Sir Walter’s extreme obsession with male youth and beauty satirizes a worldview in which social worth is externalized by attractive appearance, so that nature and social life are assumed to work in tandem.

We are therefore well into the novel before we learn that Anne has “low spirits” because she has had an unhappy parting seven years before from a man she loved, Captain Wentworth of the navy, brother-in-law to the Crofts, who are about to rent the ancestral hall of the family. Their early engagement is treated with the author’s irony, but a fondly indulgent one: “Half the sum of attraction, on either side, might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly any body to love”(p. 25). Nevertheless, their proposed alliance is the beginning of the Trouble around which all narratives are said to center. The marriage of Anne and Wentworth implies a rejection of the traditionalist principles of stable and universal hierarchy, since Wentworth is, in that perspective, “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” (p. 26). Wentworth is the upwardly mobile, talented young man of the nineteenth century, “full of life and ardour”(p. 26). He has only his own resources rather than privilege to fall back on, yet he is confident and proud. The contrasting terms that describe him illuminate the tensions between two worldviews: what Anne Elliot in her youth sees as “brilliant, headstrong,” fearless, warm, and witty, the traditional Lady Russell sees as “dangerous” and imprudent. Though Anne rebels in feeling against an “over-anxious caution which seems to insult exertion and distrust Providence”(p. 29), she obeys out of deference to Lady Russell’s superior wisdom and authority, breaking the engagement.

In doing so Anne “relies” on Lady Russell as a mother—one who combines wisdom with “tenderness”—and is “persuaded” that the alliance is wrong. Yet Lady Russell is immediately shown up as narrow and self-interested when she wishes Anne would marry the mediocre Charles Musgrove because of his “landed property,” “general importance,” “good character and appearance,” and (apparently not least important) his location “near herself.” She displays a shrewd awareness of the marriage market: “However Lady Russell might have asked yet for something more, while Anne was nineteen, she would have rejoiced to see her at twenty-two” so respectably situated(p. 27). Anne’s feelings count for little here; whereas Jane Eyre tells her own story and finds her voice in narrating it to us, we are told “How eloquent could Anne Elliot have been,—how eloquent, at least, were her wishes”(p. 29). So far the theme appears to be “prudence” (privilege, disguised as wisdom, going by the rules) versus “romance,” in which prudence comes up against an egalitarian meritocracy, identified with “romance” and its trans-formative capacities and possibilities: “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning”(p. 29). This well describes the way in which Austen reverses the usual narrative association of youth with romance and feeling and age with reason and wisdom. The story looked at in this way is one of romantic renewal, a kind of Winter’s Tale.

The heroine’s traditional solution to this classic problem of the novel, the conflict between categories marked “feeling” and “reason,” or