That future of confinement to an unvarying, limited neighbourhood, supported with the spirits only of ruined happiness, sighted for a moment by Emma Woodhouse from the Hartfield windows on a miserable evening in July, becomes the actual condition of the gradually disclosed heroine of Persuasion, Austen's last completed novel. If Emma is a picture of health, the first volume of Persuasion, one can say with only a small exaggeration, is a portrait of suffering. Anne Elliot is a woman oppressed and insignificant, a ‘nobody’, discouraged by a burden of grief and regret that she has borne alone for the seven years prior to the novel's inception.

Having been persuaded to break off an engagement with a man whom she still loves, she wears her sadness and deprivation in her prematurely aging body and face. ‘A few years before, Anne Elliot had been a very pretty girl, but her bloom had vanished early’, now ‘faded and thin’, ‘her spirits were not high’, as her only friend Lady Russell admits, and this lack of resilience and of energy is evidenced in her first act in the novel, her intervention to persuade her sister Elizabeth about the ambitions of the hanger-on, Mrs Clay. Elizabeth arrogantly repudiates her advice, as she has foreseen.