Being 29.

I mentally mark literary characters as I overtake them in age and leave them behind. I am rather sad to note that I have overtaken Anne Elliot from Persuasion, my particular favourite, who was 27. Now as I approach 29 I think of her single older sister Elizabeth, who, although a selfish and vain character, has stuck in my head somewhat sympathetically with these words:

It sometimes happens, that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before; and, generally speaking, if there has been neither ill health nor anxiety, it is a time of life at which scarcely any charm is lost. It was so with Elizabeth, still the same handsome Miss Elliot that she had begun to be thirteen years ago… 

(Well, when I get my braces off, I'm probably a little ahead of where I was as a teenager. Hurrah for TMJ.)

…Elizabeth did not quite equal her father in personal contentment…  …she had the consciousness of being nine-and-twenty, to give her some regrets and some apprehensions: she was fully satisfied of being still quite as handsome as ever, but she felt her approach to the years of danger, and would have rejoiced to be certain of being properly solicited by baronet-blood within the next twelvemonth or two…

The "years of danger". Slim chances of a young baronet properly soliciting my hand. Uh-oh. And then I tell myself, in the words of Emma, that "it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible". I'm perfectly comfortable and well-blessed. "a single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else." What a relief!