Meeting Benches World art in all forms
Jane Austen, 42 years of earthly light, a well known English narrator, an immortality of words and emotions, which is not dead in the summer of 1817. He grew up in a home environment culturally vibrant, opening its vast horizon of words in a vast library family. In 1793 she has already completed its “juvenilia”, a collection of her poems, short stories and drafts of novels. At the age of 21, she has already written two novels, and continues to write about others, but in 1816 gets sick, dying in Winchester.
“By a Lady“. So, Jane – the woman who died unmarried, witty and ironic, lived during the Napoleonic wars – defined itself as an author, on the cover of her novels. The women, the female figures are the scene of her words, but with “Persuasion” – written shortly before falling ill – she says, writing, a distant history of persuasion to refuse to love and life.
“Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, ia Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt. As he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century—and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed—this was the page at which the favourite volume always opened: ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH-HALL.”
In the family of Anne – a spinster, the protagonist of the novel – no one feels affection for her, who eight years earlier had been persuaded by a friend of her mother, to break the engagement with Captain Wentworth, whom she loved deeply, and which was reciprocated. But, Anne and Captain meet again eight years later. Thanks to the war, Frederick had a promotion, returning to his beloved woman and no longer persuadibile, because everything – in the heart of the Captain – speaks of her: “Do not say, please, that man forgets most of the woman, that the her love is quicker to die. I have not loved anyone, except you. “Imagine, now, Anna and her Captain, as they walk together, in eternity, exchanging words over a small path covered with gravel.
“Mrs. Smith’s enjoyments were not spoiled by this improvement of income, with some improvement of health, and the acquisition of such friends to be often with, for her cheerfulness and mental alacrity did not fail her; and while these prime supplies of good remained, she might have bid defiance even to greater accessions of worldly prosperity. She might have been absolutely rich and perfectly healthy, and yet be happy. Her spring of felicity was in the glow of her spirits, as her friend Anne’s was in the warmth of her heart. Anne was tenderness itself, and she had the full worth of it in Captain Wentworth’s affection. His profession was all that could ever make her friends wish that tenderness less; the dread of a future war all that could dim her sunshine. She gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance. THE END.”
http://www.amazon.com/Persuasion-Dover-Thrift-Editions-Austen/dp/0486295559
