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view of romance as friendship represents the avoidance of both cold alliance for social privilege and the moral risks of passion.
    By contrast, Mr. Elliot, heir to her father’s estate and name and Anne’s suitor, assumes that “rank is rank” and argues for the happiness that results from “due consideration.” When Mr. Elliot enters the novel, Anne is able to see through his pretense of liking the family and valuing the ancestral name because she has less vanity than the others and so can be more reasonable and perspicacious. Mr. Elliot is not open and honest like Captain Wentworth or the Crofts—he is too conscious of being visible and pleasing. He has “artificial good sentiments” that are not borne out by behavior, so that Anne being “persuaded” to marry him (as Lady Russell tries to persuade her) would be to repeat her mother’s mistake in choosing external superiority over internal worth.
    Another character who figures into the evaluation of hierarchies is Mrs. Smith, Anne’s impoverished childhood friend, wellborn but downwardly mobile (the converse of the Crofts). Mrs. Smith’s spirited struggles against misfortune and her ability to retain feeling and pleasure in the face of hardship is not so much a Christian resignation to providence as it is an exertion by mind and heart that is part of character. Mrs. Smith acts like a lady even when destitute, as opposed to those who have money and are vulgar. The true hierarchy, it is implied, is not of wealth or rank, but of the merit of character. Yet Mrs. Smith is also a realist, not a sentimentalist: “Human nature may be great in times of trial, but generally speaking it is its weakness and not its strength that appears in a sick chamber,” she says in reply to Anne’s Christian moralizing (p. 147). One of the intricacies of Persuasion is that Anne is eventually “rewarded” for her democratic impulse in “not slighting an old friend” in spite of the present difference in rank.
    When the plot moves Anne and her family to Bath, she is exposed to all the “littlenesses of a town”(p. 129) with its sharp social distinctions and fine gradations of who stays where and appears with whom. Many characters in Persuasion are openly judged (like Mr. Elliot’s first wife) as to how they rank, but never more so than in Bath, where people and places and habits and speech are constantly classified. We are taken on a search for systems of classifications, through a range of discriminations among lovers, friends, relations, levels of income, taste in art, fashions, and fashionability of location. Austen furnishes us with a kind of cultural geography, and makes it clear that our point of view on these gradations differs with our position in the social web.
    As the novel brings the lovers together in its final chapters, their reunion is said to be better than the first love because it is “fixed in a knowledge of each other’s character, truth, and attachment”—in other words, in realism and mutuality (like the Crofts), which makes them “more justified in acting”(p. 227). Anne and her lover learn to distinguish anger from pride, caution and fear from duty; in other words, they overcome the split between mind and heart by splitting the difference in views.
    But startlingly to a modern reader, Anne tells Wentworth that she was “right in submitting” to Lady Russell even though her advice was wrong. This is because it’s especially a woman’s duty to submit to authority. And so Anne—and Jane Austen—come down squarely on the traditional side, after all, trusting in providence to make it all come out right, the “event” (consequence) deciding the rightness of judgment. The two—no longer very young, but still young enough—have their way in getting approval for their marriage. The confluence of “maturity” and “right” feeling with “independence of fortune,” rather than posed in opposition as in the beginning, legitimate romance. Anne