Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/115

 novels, Jane Austen has painted for us a woman loving sincerely, and with good cause, but uncertain if her love is returned; in Anne Elliot, the most beautiful of all her creations, it is an old love which has never died out, in the other two it is the first attachment of their youth, worthily bestowed, ripening in the intimacy of years, and moulding their whole natures. Both Fanny Price and Emma Woodhouse are, for a long while, unconscious of their own feelings, the former from shrinking modesty, the latter from her joyous self-confidence; to each the truth is revealed by believing that the man she loves prefers someone else, and both with them and Anne Elliot the anguish of apparently hopeless love is carried to its height by knowing that their rivals are wholly unworthy of the places they seem to have won. At the same time the circumstances are so skilfully arranged that the unfortunate complication is a perfectly natural one, and each of the three heroines suffers in silence till equally natural but unforeseen events bring matters right in the end. In Anne Elliot's case the suffering is increased by her having been induced, long before the story opens, to refuse the man she loved; and she feels, therefore, that she cannot repine if he has, in the course of years, transferred his affections elsewhere; while Emma Woodhouse has the pang of realising that it is through her alone that Mr. Knightley ever met Harriet Smith.

Another difference between these novels and the earlier ones is the complete absence of anything like coquetry of any kind in the three heroines, and also their womanly reticence upon their own love affairs. Elinor and Marianne Dashwood speak freely to one another as such young sisters might do,