delays her chance to meet Captain Wentworth after several years apart. We rally behind Anne’s heroic sensibility in caring for Lydia, after a near-fatal accident, and her nonjudgmental attitude toward this supposed rival for Wentworth’s love. In the novel we develop an intimacy with the characters that is not possible in shorter works, such as the short story, or more public works, such as drama. In a short story we meet the characters, but the encounter is relatively brief, a mere introduction. Just as time and experience help us to know people better, the lengthy experience available in the novel helps us to become better acquainted with the characters. The experience of knowing a character may be richer because the layering of more specific details available in a work of longer prose fiction creates a fleshed-out character. Also, the novel permits us to know minor characters as well with more depth than allowed in a shorter work. For instance, Austen describes Anne’s father, Sir Walter Elliot, for many pages. He is only important to the story because it gives a reason for Captain Wentworth to be reacquainted with Anne. Sir Walter’s excessive debt forces him to move, which influences Anne’s visits to Uppercross to see her sister and to Bath to stay with him and Elizabeth. In addition to helping with the plot, Sir Walter acts as a foil to Anne’s character, her good-natured sensibility compared to her father’s frivolous vanity.The novel allows us to view the emotional life of characters and highlights, as Ian Watt puts it in The Rise of the Novel, the “primacy of individual experience” (Watt 15). As readers, we become voyeurs, privy to the inner thoughts and private emotions of the characters (or at least the main character). Not all novels reveal the inner life of its characters (it’s possible for a limited third-person narrator to only relate the actions and speech of the ch...
