Anne Elliot and Mrs Smith's friendship

The friendship between Anne Elliot and Mrs Smith is one of the most quietly transformative relationships in Persuasion, a bond forged in childhood grief and renewed in adult adversity, and one that ultimately provides Anne with the crucial knowledge to navigate the treacherous social waters of Bath. It is a friendship that operates on two distinct levels: the personal, offering Anne a rare and genuine emotional intimacy, and the instrumental, making Mrs Smith the unwitting but essential source of the revelation that destroys any lingering possibility of a match with Mr Elliot and clears the path for Anne's true happiness.

Origins and Re-establishment in Bath

The foundation of the friendship was laid years before the novel's present action, during a period of deep unhappiness for Anne. After the death of her mother, Anne was sent to school, grieving and suffering as a girl of fourteen, feeling her separation from home acutely. There she met Miss Hamilton, three years older than herself, who, because she lacked near relations and a settled home, remained at school for an extra year. Miss Hamilton was "useful and good to her in a way which had considerably lessened her misery," and Anne could never remember that kindness with indifference. Miss Hamilton later married a man of fortune and became Mrs Smith, and for years Anne knew nothing more of her. It is only after Anne's arrival in Bath that she learns from her former governess of Mrs Smith's drastically altered circumstances: she is now a widow, poor, her husband having left his affairs dreadfully involved, and she has been afflicted with a severe rheumatic fever that has left her a cripple, confined to humble lodgings near the hot baths in Westgate Buildings, almost excluded from society. Anne, consulting only Lady Russell, who thoroughly enters into her sentiments, loses no time in visiting her. The reunion is initially awkward—twelve years have changed Anne from a blooming, silent girl into an elegant woman of seven-and-twenty, and the once fine-looking Miss Hamilton into a poor, infirm widow—but the discomfort soon passes, leaving only the charm of remembering former partialities and talking over old times.

Character and Resilience of Mrs Smith

What Anne discovers in Mrs Smith is a woman of remarkable resilience. Despite having lived very much in the world, buried her husband, lost her affluence, and having no child to connect her to life, Mrs Smith possesses a disposition to be cheerful that astonishes Anne. Her accommodations are limited to a noisy parlour and a dark bedroom, and she can only leave the house to be conveyed into the warm bath, yet Anne observes that she has only moments of languor and depression to hours of occupation and enjoyment. Anne concludes that this is not merely fortitude or resignation, but something more: an elasticity of mind, a power of turning readily from evil to good, which she views as the choicest gift of Heaven. Mrs Smith's spirits had nearly failed when she first reached Bath, confined to bed in pain among strangers, but she weathered it, and her illness proved her landlady to be trustworthy. She also found an invaluable acquaintance in Nurse Rooke, a shrewd, intelligent woman who taught her to knit and who puts her in the way of selling her handmade thread-cases, pin-cushions, and card-racks to the families she nurses, allowing Mrs Smith to do a little good for the poor. Mrs Smith's conversation, full of the gossip and observations Nurse Rooke brings from sick chambers, is a treat to her, and Anne, far from cavilling, reflects that a sick chamber may often furnish the worth of volumes. This friendship provides Anne with something her own family cannot offer: genuine, unpretentious, and intellectually stimulating companionship.

The Revelation of Mr Elliot's True Character

The friendship's most dramatic function is the revelation of William Walter Elliot's true character. Mrs Smith, having initially believed Anne was to marry Mr Elliot, had been preparing to ask for Anne's influence with him to help recover some of her late husband's property in the West Indies. When Anne firmly denies any intention of marrying him, Mrs Smith, after a struggle of conscience, decides to tell Anne the truth. She describes Mr Elliot as "a man without heart or conscience; a designing, wary, cold-blooded being, who thinks only of himself." She reveals that he was the intimate friend of her late husband, Charles Smith, who trusted and loved him. Mr Elliot, then the poorer of the two, had a constant home with the Smiths, and Charles Smith often assisted him financially. Mr Elliot's motive for drawing back from Sir Walter's acquaintance years ago, Mrs Smith explains, was his belief that Sir Walter and Elizabeth were designing a match between him and Elizabeth, which would not have answered his ideas of wealth and independence. He was determined to make his fortune by marriage, and he did so, marrying a woman of inferior birth for her money, with no scruple about her background. To provide proof, Mrs Smith produces a letter Mr Elliot wrote to her husband in July 1803, in which he refers to Sir Walter as "quite fool enough" to marry again, and expresses his wish to have any name but Elliot, declaring himself "sick of it." This letter, Anne realizes, is full proof of everything Mrs Smith has said. Mrs Smith further explains Mr Elliot's present motives: having long had as much money as he could spend, he has become a completely altered man, now prizing the baronetcy he is heir to. Learning from Colonel Wallis that Mrs Clay might be angling to become Lady Elliot, he resolved to return to Bath, renew his acquaintance, and watch Sir Walter and Mrs Clay to prevent the marriage. Anne's arrival added a second motive: to marry her himself. Mrs Smith's account is corroborated by the chain of gossip from Colonel Wallis to his silly wife, to Nurse Rooke, and finally to herself. Anne, listening, finds that nothing Mrs Smith tells her contradicts what she has already suspected, and she concludes that Mr Elliot is a disingenuous, artificial, worldly man guided only by selfishness.

The Full Extent of Mr Elliot's Cruelty

Mrs Smith's revelations go beyond Mr Elliot's mercenary marriage and his schemes against Mrs Clay. She details his cruel conduct towards her own family. Mr Elliot, raised to affluence by his marriage, had led his friend Charles Smith into expenses far beyond his fortune, prompting and encouraging a ruinous extravagance while he himself became prudent. When Charles Smith died, leaving his affairs in a wretched state, Mr Elliot, appointed executor of the will, refused to act, leaving Mrs Smith to face the difficulties and distress alone. Anne is shown letters from Mr Elliot in response to her urgent applications, all breathing the same stern resolution of not engaging in a fruitless trouble, and under a cold civility, the same hard-hearted indifference. Anne feels that no flagrant open crime could have been worse. One particular grievance is that some property of her husband's in the West Indies might be recoverable, but Mr Elliot will do nothing, and Mrs Smith, disabled by her health and lack of money, can do nothing herself. This was the point on which she had hoped to engage Anne's good offices, but Anne's refutation of the supposed engagement changes everything. Anne, shuddering at the idea of the misery that would have followed had she been persuaded by Lady Russell to marry such a man, is given full liberty by Mrs Smith to communicate everything to Lady Russell, so that her friend may be no longer deceived.

Significance and Lasting Bond

The friendship between Anne and Mrs Smith is a beacon of genuine human connection in a novel filled with superficial social relations. It provides Anne with a moral and emotional anchor in Bath, a place where her father and sister are consumed by vanity and the pursuit of empty status. Mrs Smith's resilience in the face of crushing adversity offers Anne a model of fortitude, while her clear-eyed, unsentimental view of human nature—honed by her experiences and the gossip of Nurse Rooke—gives Anne the practical knowledge she needs to see through Mr Elliot's polished exterior. The friendship is also reciprocal: Anne's visits are a source of genuine pleasure and comfort to Mrs Smith. In the novel's resolution, the bond is cemented further. Captain Wentworth, learning of Mrs Smith's good offices to Anne, fully requites them by putting her in the way of recovering her husband's property, writing for her, acting for her, and seeing her through all the difficulties of the case. Mrs Smith becomes one of the two friends Anne has to add to Captain Wentworth's list, and she is their earliest visitor in their settled life. The marriage, instead of depriving her of one friend, secures her two. Mrs Smith's cheerfulness and mental alacrity do not fail her, and her spring of felicity remains in the glow of her spirits, just as Anne's is in the warmth of her heart.