Jane Austen vs Emily Brontë: The Queens of English Literature Debate with Dominic West
Jane Austen created the definitive picture of Georgian England a landscape of Palladian mansions and handsome parsonages, peopled by rigidlydivided classes. No writer matches Austen s sensitive ear for the hypocrisy and irony lurking beneath the genteel conversation. Never has a novelist written comic prose with such subtlety and restraint. If you want to understand the early 19th century the power of money and inheritance, the clothes, the interior décor Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice are worth a dozen history books, and any number of secondrate novels by Austen s contemporaries. That s the argument of the Janeites, but to the aficionados of Emily Brontë they are the misguided worshippers of a circumscribed mind. In Wuthering Heights, Brontë dispensed with Austen s niceties and the uppermiddle class drawing rooms of Bath and the home counties. Her backdrop is the savage Yorkshire moors, her subject the allconsuming passions of the heart. The s
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