Anne breaks engagement with Wentworth

Anne Elliot's decision to break her engagement to Captain Frederick Wentworth in the summer of 1806 is the pivotal action from which the entire novel's emotional and narrative tension unfolds. It is an act of submission to authority and prudence that, within a few months, ends a brief but intense romance and condemns Anne to years of quiet suffering, while Wentworth departs in anger and resentment. The rupture, though made in the name of duty and good counsel, becomes the defining mistake of Anne's youth, one she will spend the next eight years lamenting and, eventually, seeking to undo.

The Engagement and Its Circumstances

Anne Elliot was nineteen years old and "an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling" when she met Captain Frederick Wentworth, then a young commander recently made in consequence of the action off St Domingo. He was "a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit, and brilliancy." With no parent living, he had found a home for half a year at Monkford, and the two were thrown together in the small society of Kellynch. "Half the sum of attraction, on either side, might have been enough," the narrator observes, "for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly anybody to love; but the encounter of such lavish recommendations could not fail." They were gradually acquainted, and when acquainted, rapidly and deeply in love. A short period of exquisite felicity followed, and but a short one. Wentworth had no fortune; he had been lucky in his profession but, spending freely what had come freely, had realized nothing. He was, however, confident that he should soon be rich, full of life and ardour, and certain that he would soon have a ship and be on a station that would lead to everything he wanted.

The Forces of Opposition

Troubles soon arose. Sir Walter Elliot, on being applied to, gave his consent "all the negative of great astonishment, great coldness, great silence, and a professed resolution of doing nothing for his daughter." He thought it a very degrading alliance. Lady Russell, though with more tempered and pardonable pride, received it as a most unfortunate one. She saw Anne throwing herself away at nineteen on a young man who had nothing but himself to recommend him, no hopes of attaining affluence but in the chances of a most uncertain profession, and no connections to secure even his further rise. She deprecated the connection in every light. Wentworth's sanguine temper and fearlessness of mind, which Anne found bewitching, Lady Russell saw as an aggravation of the evil, adding a dangerous character to himself. "He was brilliant, he was headstrong. Lady Russell had little taste for wit, and of anything approaching to imprudence a horror."

The Decision and Its Immediate Aftermath

Anne could withstand her father's ill-will, though unsoftened by one kind word or look from her sister Elizabeth, but Lady Russell, whom she had always loved and relied on, could not be continually advising her in vain. "She was persuaded to believe the engagement a wrong thing: indiscreet, improper, hardly capable of success, and not deserving it." Anne acted not from merely selfish caution; she imagined herself consulting his good even more than her own. "The belief of being prudent, and self-denying, principally for his advantage, was her chief consolation, under the misery of a parting, a final parting." Every consolation was required, for she had to encounter all the additional pain of opinions on his side totally unconvinced and unbending, and of his feeling himself ill used by so forced a relinquishment. He left the country in consequence. A few months had seen the beginning and the end of their acquaintance.

The Long Consequences

The rupture did not end Anne's suffering with the few months of the acquaintance. Her attachment and regrets clouded every enjoyment of youth for a long time, and an early loss of bloom and spirits were their lasting effect. More than seven years passed, and though time softened much, she had been too dependent on time alone; no aid had been given in change of place or any novelty or enlargement of society. No one had ever come within the Kellynch circle who could bear a comparison with Frederick Wentworth as he stood in her memory. By the time she is seven-and-twenty, Anne has come to think very differently from what she had been made to think at nineteen. She does not blame Lady Russell, nor herself for having been guided by her, but she feels that were any young person in similar circumstances to apply to her for counsel, they would never receive any of such certain immediate wretchedness, such uncertain future good. She is persuaded that under every disadvantage, she should yet have been a happier woman in maintaining the engagement than she had been in the sacrifice of it. "She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning."

Wentworth's Perspective and the Lingering Wound

Wentworth, for his part, had not forgiven Anne Elliot. He felt she had used him ill, deserted and disappointed him, and, worse, had shown a feebleness of character in doing so which his own decided, confident temper could not endure. "She had given him up to oblige others. It had been the effect of over-persuasion. It had been weakness and timidity." He had been most warmly attached to her and had never seen a woman since whom he thought her equal, but except from some natural sensation of curiosity, he had no desire of meeting her again. "Her power with him was gone for ever." When he returns to the neighbourhood eight years later, rich and intending to settle, he is ready to fall in love with any pleasing young woman excepting Anne Elliot. This is his only secret exception. Yet even in his resentment, he cannot be unfeeling; when he sees her suffer from fatigue on a walk, he quietly arranges for her to be taken home in a carriage, a gesture Anne understands as "a remainder of former sentiment; it was an impulse of pure, though unacknowledged friendship." The broken engagement, though never discussed between them, remains the unspoken ground of all their subsequent interactions, a wound that must be healed before any reconciliation is possible.