All 4 Uses of
anonymity
in
The Scarlet Pimpernel
- All the most strenuous efforts on the part of my spies have failed to discover who he is; whilst the others are the hands, he is the head, who beneath this strange anonymity calmly works at the destruction of France.†
Chpt 8 *
- there was a man she might have loved, had he come her way: everything in him appealed to her romantic imagination; his personality, his strength, his bravery, the loyalty of those who served under him in that same noble cause, and, above all, that anonymity which crowned him, as if with a halo of romantic glory.†
Chpt 8
- A burning curiosity seized her to know him: although for months she had heard of him and had accepted his anonymity, as everyone else in society had done; but now she longed to know—quite impersonally, quite apart from Armand, and oh!†
Chpt 12
- Chauvelin had sworn to bring the Scarlet Pimpernel to the guillotine, and now the daring plotter, whose anonymity hitherto had been his safeguard, stood revealed through her own hand, to his most bitter, most relentless enemy.†
Chpt 23
Definitions:
-
(1)
(anonymity) a state where the identity of someone is unknown -- for example, the name of an author or the name of a donor
or (more rarely): a lack of individuality or interesting features -
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
More rarely, anonymity can also be used to indicate an impersonal environment where people generally don't know each other as in "He liked the anonymity of the big city."