Jane Austen uses her novels to express her contempt for nineteenth-century English marital practice. She herself has defied convention by remaining single and earning a living through writing. Austen's novels, including Emma, ​​Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion, often feature an aristocratic heroine who is torn between marrying for love or for security. Although Austen's works do not call for a classless society, they criticize the effects of rigid class stratification on marriages. Specifically, Austen laments the fact that nineteenth-century English women usually married within their own social class for convenience rather than love, and that cross-class marriages were generally discouraged. In Persuasion we meet Anne Elliot, a brilliant, attractive, upper-class woman who fell in love with a sailor, Captain Frederick Wentworth. However, Anne was successfully persuaded to reject Wentworth by her aristocratic family and friends, who failed to recognize Wentworth's good character and saw only his shallow pockets. The central conflict in Persuasion is that between appearance and reality. Anne can certainly see the superficiality that surrounds her while at Kellynch Hall with her family; however, she allows others, namely Lady Russell and her sisters, to interpret what she sees and force her to act on their wishes. Therefore, Persuasion, like many other Austen novels, is about a young woman's coming of age. Anne is fully mature when she acts on her own desires and recognizes that her newfound adulthood requires breaking away from her superficial and delusional family. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Anne grew up in Kellynch Hall, a beautiful estate shrouded in prestige, wealth and superficiality. Her father, Sir Walter Elliot, is a vain and foolish man, who spends his days rereading the Baronetage, a genealogy of local aristocratic families. He values ​​appearance rather than depth of character; refuses to associate with anyone who is not physically pleasant. Admiral Croft, who rents Kellynch Hall, comments comically on the extraordinary number of mirrors in Sir Walter's dressing room: "I think he must be quite a smart man for his age. Such a number of mirrors! Oh Lord! There were none way of distancing oneself" (114-115). While in Bath, Sir Walter was haunted by the scarcity of attractive women: he had often observed, as he walked, that a beautiful face would be followed by thirty, or thirty-five scares; and once, while in a shop in Bond Street, he had counted eighty-seven women passing by, one after another, without an acceptable face among them. (127) Such a fascination with outward appearance severely limits Sir Walter's prospects of finding another wife or intelligent friends and keeps him ignorant and self-deluded. Two of Sir Walter's daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, share his passion for appearance and rank. Mary, the wife of the moderately wealthy Charles Musgrove, believes it is her duty and right to prevent her sister-in-law, Henrietta Musgrove, from marrying Charles Hayter, who is "nothing but a country curate" and would bring "bad connections" (68) with his family. Mary wants to end a relationship that will make Henrietta happy simply because she sees the union as a disgrace to the Elliot family: "It would be shocking for Henrietta to marry Charles Hayter; a very bad thing for her, and an even worse thing for me" (69) . Likewise, while in Bath, Elizabeth finds herselfactually to "suffer" to preserve the Elliots' wealthy appearance: he would desperately like to invite the Musgroves to dinner at his house in Bath, but he cannot "bear the difference in style, the reduction of servitude, which a dinner must betray, witnessed by those who had always been so inferior to the Elliots at Kellynch" (193). Austen clearly uses the theme of appearance versus reality to characterize the three Elliot sisters. He evidently believes that how a character views others is a direct reflection of that character's personality. Thus, we know that Anne Elliot possesses real depth of character and sincerity because her superficial family fails to recognize her fine qualities: "Anne, with an elegance of mind and a sweetness of character, which must have placed her high among any person of true understanding, there was no one with either his father or his sister: his word had no weight: his comfort was always to yield" (7). Anne is clearly the only Elliot who manages to "seeing reality": he understands his family's need for economy, laments the "elegant stupidity" (160) of the lavish parties his family attends in Bath, and recognizes Mary's frequent illness as a call for attention. However, Anne initially suffers from great family loyalty and is therefore unable to distance herself from her superficial relatives. She allows Mary to drag her to Uppercross cottage because Elizabeth reasons: "no one will want [Anne] in Bath" (30) . When she arrives in Bath, Anne follows Sir Walter and Elizabeth to various upper-class social gatherings and shows great respect for her cousin Lady Dalrymple, whom Anne truly considers a foolish nobleman. Anne's maturity is thus evident when she declines Lady Dalyrmple's invitation to dinner in favor of a visit to her old widowed friend, Mrs. Smith, whom her father considers "low company" and a "disgusting association" ( 140). , Mrs. Smith precipitates Anne's departure from the superficial world of Kellynch Hall and serves as a foil to Lady Russell's character. Unlike her superficial father and sisters, Anne is able to see beyond Mrs. Smith's dingy apartment and recognize the sweet person within. Mrs. Smith gradually begins to replace Lady Russell as Anne's confidante because Lady Russell places so much importance on "rank and consequence" (12), that she is "blind to the faults of those who possessed them" (12). Lady Russell is a suitably domineering counselor to the insecure and obedient Anne we initially meet. Anne allows Lady Russell to convince her to reject Frederick Wentworth on the basis of his poor appearance and lack of "connections" (24). Furthermore, Anne is encouraged to continue seeing William Elliot because Lady Russell cannot see his deception and instead believes he has "knowledge of the world" and a "warm heart" (131). Mrs. Smith, however, proves to be a better confidant because she sees through William's affected kindness and exposes his true intentions to Anne, thus preventing a potentially disastrous and unhappy marriage for Anne. After Mrs. Smith tells Anne of William's desire to marry into a peerage, Anne reflects on Mrs. Smith's ability to accurately assess character: "Here is a line to see human nature; and she has a fund of common sense and observation that, as a companion, you make her infinitely superior to thousands of those who, having received only “the best education in the world,” know nothing worth caring about” (139). autonomous, complete with a sincere friend, is clear when she recognizes that she herself is sometimes a better judge of Lady Russell's true character: "There is a rapidity of.