CHAPTER II.

Jane Austen

At nineteen, Anne Elliot was persuaded to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a young naval officer with no fortune and no connections. Eight years later her vain father has run the family into debt, the house has been let to tenants, and Wentworth, now a wealthy captain home from the Napoleonic Wars, walks back into her life. He is polite, cool and, by every appearance, looking for a wife elsewhere. Anne, older, wiser and still in love, has to watch. Austen's last completed novel is her most tender, and it holds one of the great love letters in English fiction.