Anne Elliot was persuaded, when she was 19 years old, to break off her engagement with Frederick Wentworth, a promising young lieutenant in the Royal Navy but a commoner without fortune, and she has never married.

Lonely, unloved by a stuck-up and pretentious father and older sister, and little considered by a family circle incapable of recognising her value, she leads a dull life of an almost-old maid.

[3] None of the heroines of the prior novels is as visibly the center of convergence of the action and the main point of view, since the narrator does not openly pull the strings of the plot and avoids directing irony at Anne.

On the contrary, it is she who perceives the events and the people with much finesse, a keen sense of observation and analysis, and most of the time it is from her that the reader learns the details of the plot; it is on her alone, to whom the author gives complete freedom to express her feelings and her unwavering commitment to Wentworth, that the resolution ultimately depends.

When Captain Wentworth, now rich from prize money, returns from the Napoleonic Wars to visit the neighbourhood, Anne is at first pained; however, his presence gradually sets her life in motion again.

Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice), for example, who has little money of her own, refuses the hand of a financially secure but unbearable young clergyman; befriends briefly a penniless (and, as it turns out, utterly worthless) army officer; and finally marries Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, who has a great estate, a Norman-sounding name, and £10,000 a year.

When circumstances prove both the captain's worthiness and the corresponding worthlessness of fellow suitor Mr. Elliot, Lady Russell herself—the very voice of benevolent propriety—has to "admit that she had been pretty completely wrong and to take up a new set of opinions and hopes.