Jane Austen's Persuasion: a dramatic audiobook
GD Kalmbach for Captain Frederick Wentworth
HOW TO PLAY FREDERICK
He's passionate and deep feeling but also dutiful.
ABOUT THIS CHARACTER
The object of Anne's affections, Captain Wentworth is a gallant Naval officer who, well-educated and well-mannered, has made his own fortunes by climbing the Naval ranks. He values constancy, practicality, and firmness of mind in women, characteristics that will make a good Navy wife. Though Captain Wentworth is almost universally liked and respected for his gentle nature and kind attentions to others, Sir Walter disdains him for his 'lower' birth.
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. This was the page at which the favourite volume always opened: ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH HALL.
[Frederick and Anne has spent the whole story never quite connecting but both longing for the other. They are kept apart by everything. Frederick hears Anne speak to a friend about women's love enduring, then decides he must speak his heart to her, leaving her a deep confession in this letter. He must convince her in this letter. It is his last hope.]
I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you.
[This story lets you see the wild-hearted man that Frederick is and how much he loves the navy. It is also a nod to the fact that he is subtly saying he never mattered to Anne but now he has money so at least he matters to society.]
We had not been six hours in the Sound, when a gale came on, which lasted four days and nights, and which would have done for poor old Asp in half the time; our touch with the Great Nation not having much improved our condition. Four-and-twenty hours later, and I should only have been a gallant Captain Wentworth, in a small paragraph at one corner of the newspapers; and being lost in only a sloop, nobody would have thought about me.
