John Mullan

It's funny.

It's comical, but it's also understanding.

I mean, that is what he's like.

He's full of affection.

And so Fanny's died.

He will find somebody else.

And there's something perhaps quite natural about that.

It's not a terrible thing.

Persuasion is full of things coming back to life against death, including Anne and Captain Wentworth's love for each other.

I completely agree with that.

She was absolutely happy as a novelist, as it were.

But I think Persuasion is a novel that very wisely sees, not that there's no such thing as happiness, but there is something ludicrous about trying to answer the question, are you happy?

There's a great bit at the beginning of the chapter, indeed, in which Captain Wentworth writes the extraordinary letter declaring to Anne that he still loves her, where she's in this crowded room in the White Hart Inn.

She senses his love is coming back to her.

And it says she was deep in the happiness of such misery or the misery of such happiness.

That's the way in which persuasion is true to happiness, that when it comes, it's often in a blur of contradictory feelings.

Thank you.

Thanks very much.