(no subject)
How refreshing - a film with more than one moment of beauty and more than the share of many others, of humanity, and yet without that most prosaic of things; the Happy Ending. Why does it seem so unusual, for a tale in which two people meet and feel some considerable affection for each other, yet do not find all their difficulties so fortuitously overcome - could this even have been conceived in that most unfashionable of places, the Real World? Where people who are neither paragons of virtue nor either deserve to be deprived of what they do in fact lose, for good, may yet be seen to derive some sense of satisfaction, even the suggestion of contentment, from doing, simply, that which must be done. The woman whose subsequent heroines suffered 'only in order that they might truly appreciate what was eventually gained' - the woman who spoke as Anne Elliot, and acknowledged that “I should have suffered more in continuing the engagement than I did even in giving it up, because I should have suffered in my conscience”. She may be dismissed as that most ordinary of women, a Realist - worse, a spinster whose conscience condemned her as such, yet that woman 'wrote six of the finest novels in the English Language', earned her own living at a time when the majority of others sought only to be supported - contentment, of a sort. Of what was possible to be endured, in place of what would in all likelihood have only withered and been the cause of greater pain.