You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.

Near the end of Persuasion, at the White Hart inn in Bath, Anne Elliot is debating with Captain Harville whether men or women love longest. Captain Wentworth, writing at a nearby table, hears every word. He leaves the room without a look, returns for his gloves, draws a letter from under the scattered papers and places it before Anne “with eyes of glowing entreaty”. Sinking into his chair, she reads.

The letter opens with “I can listen no longer in silence”, and the line follows almost at once. Eight and a half years earlier, Anne had been persuaded to break off her engagement to Wentworth, then a naval officer without fortune. Now he offers himself again: “Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.”

Persuasion was Austen’s last completed novel. Unhappy with her first ending, she rewrote it in 1816, and the letter belongs to the new version. The book appeared shortly after her death in 1817, and the letter is now one of the most famous in English fiction.

Persuasion, Chapter XXIII (Captain Wentworth’s letter), 1817

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