In the novel Persuasion, the last novel written by Jane Austen before she died in 1817, the story of a young woman who suffers for 8 years because she was forced to cancel her engagement is told. Anne Elliot met and wanted to marry Captain Wentworth, but she was convinced not to by her family. At one point, she enters into a conversation with a man whose sister recently died. The sister's fiancee is already engaged to another young woman, which, for obvious reasons, upsets her brother. Anne and Captain Harville debate whether women or men or more loyal and persistent. Anne's final argument is this:

   

"I should deserve utter contempt if I dared suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by woman. No, I believe you capable of everything great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as - if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object. I mean, while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privilege I claim for my own sex ( it is not an enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or hope is gone"

(Austen, Persuasion, 157).

I am inclined to agree with her.