"All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone." Twenty-seven-year-old Anne Elliot is well past the bloom of her youth. Having been persuaded by her friends and family to break off her happy engagement with the young naval officer Wentworth, whose station lies beneath her own, Anne is seemingly destined for spinsterhood.