Jane Austen by Andrew Norman

compounded with pleasure and pain, that she knew not which prevailed.
    Captain Wentworth receives a letter from his friend Captain Harville, who has settled for the winter with his family at Lyme (Regis) on the Dorsetshire coast. Harville had been wounded two years previously and his health has been poor ever since. When Wentworth visits Lyme and describes the ‘fine country’ round about, Anne, Mary, Charles and his sisters Henrietta and Louisa, decide that they too would like to visit that place.
    At Lyme, where the party stays at an inn, Anne is able to comfort Captain Benwick, a friend of Captain Harville, who is residing with him. Benwick is in low spirits, having been engaged to Harville’s sister Fanny, who had died the previous summer while he was at sea. Anne feels that Benwick’s chances of happiness are, if anything, better than hers. She cannot believe that he has ‘a more sorrowing heart’ than she has. He is also younger than her and she feels sure that he will rally again ‘and be happy with another’. She also feels that Benwick is reading too much poetry and ‘ventured to recommend a larger amount of prose in his daily study’. While they are in Lyme, they encounter William Elliot, the heir to Kellynch Hall.
    When Anne is finally reunited with her family in Bath she finds that ‘they have no inclination to listen to her’. Their conversation ‘must be all their own’. William Elliot pays the Elliots a visit and attempts to make amends for his former neglect of the family. Lady Russell’s opinion of him is an extremely favourable one and she believes that Anne and William would make a happy couple. Not only that, but were Anne to become the future mistress of Kellynch this would be ‘the highest possible gratification’ to her ladyship. But Anne has reservations about William, being suspicious of his sudden desire for a reconciliation with the family. She also distrusts him because:
    [he is] not open. There was never any burst of feeling, any warmth and indignation or delight at the evil or good of others.
    This, Anne sees as ‘a decided imperfection’ in his character.
    While in Bath, Anne takes the trouble to call on her former governess Miss Hamilton – now Mrs Smith – a widow who is in poor health and ‘unable even to afford herself the comfort of a servant’. She does, however, have a Mrs Rooke to nurse her.
    When the Crofts visit Bath, Admiral Croft informs Anne that Captain Wentworth is also on his way there. When, subsequently, they catch sight of one another in the street, Anne experiences a mixture of ‘agitation, pain, pleasure, a something between delight and misery’. They exchange pleasantries until William Elliot arrives and walks off with Anne, arm in arm.
    Anne and Captain Wentworth attend a concert in the Octagon Room. They discuss Louisa Musgrove and Captain Benwick, who have formed an attachment to one another – something of which Wentworth disapproves. ‘He is a clever man, a reading man – and I confess that I do consider his attaching himself to her, with some surprise’. They reminisce about Lyme, which to Anne’s mind was a place of real beauty. William Elliot comes and sits next to Anne and begins to flatter her, even alluding to the fact that if he dared, he would make her a proposal of marriage. Anne’s thoughts, however, are for Captain Wentworth, who suddenly approaches her in the middle of the concert to wish her goodnight. ‘Is not this song worth staying for?’ asks Anne, who does not wish him to leave. ‘No, there is nothing worth my staying for’ he replies sombrely.
    Anne calls, once again, on Mrs Smith who apprises her of the real character of William Elliot:
    [He] is a man without heart or conscience; a designing, wary, cold-blooded being, who thinks only of himself; who, for his own interest or ease, would be guilty of any cruelty, or any treachery that could be perpetrated without risk of his generalcharacter. He has no feeling for