THE STORY of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth rounds itself off perhaps too readily by what Anne says in her final conversation with Wentworth, where the confident glow of moral meaning she gives to her version of the past seems to have been achieved a little artificially: as if it required Anne particularly, and Anne's particular eagerness for the task, to find a moral for her story. "I have now, as far as such a sentiment is allowable in human nature, nothing to reproach myself with; and if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman's portion."' Those words of Anne's have a morally conclusive ring, her heart is in them, and yet they do not quite represent Jane Austen's view of what has happened. Or more precisely, they do not quite represent Jane Austen's interest in what has happened; nor is her heart in them. This difference of interest-a certain division of attention or awareness within the novel, never sharply felt but steadily present all the same-is what I am hoping to portray in this essay as a principal characteristic of Persuasion: principal in its making this novel different from the other ones, but principal too in the