Last shot at James Collins

He means well; he really does. Here he is heroically defending the virtue of Elinor Dashwood and Anne Elliot:

To dispense briefly with Elinor and Anne, I will say simply that their actions must be seen in the context of their own sincerely held beliefs. The lesson is that it is sometimes right to sacrifice something we want for the sake of our conscience.

This is okay as far as it goes but what does it really mean to say we sacrifice something "we want" for the sake of our conscience? Why would it bother us to ignore an internal moral voice? It's not as if our conscience can't be wrong.

The point that Collins keeps coming up to an missing* is that for either of these women to have behaved differently, to have pursued what they "wanted", would have meant ceasing to be the kind of woman they both aspired (and succeeded) to be. To ignore their conscience would mean to cease to be the person they wanted to be.

Or, to make the egg-sucking point, in both cases what they really want is what they chose to do, not what they gave up.

*To give Collins his due, this WSJ article is only an excerpt and he perhaps gets around to this point in a section that is not included here.