Austen versus Brontës in epic head-to-head

IN 1848, after the publication of Jane Eyre, it was suggested to Charlotte Brontë – then writing under the male pseudonym Currer Bell – that she might seek out the work of Jane Austen as an exemplar and inspiration for her own work. The man with the temerity to do this was celebrated critic George Henry Lewes.

Brontë was not inclined to like Austen’s novels and she is on record as having been waspish about the writer who had died aged 42 in 1817, one year after her own birth.

In a letter to Lewes, Charlotte pointed out the stylistic differences between their work – the fascination of social mores in Austen and the unrestrained, rather shocking for their day, passions of the Brontë sisters.

She wrote to Lewes: “Why do you like Miss Austen so very much?... What induced you to say that you would have rather written Pride and Prejudice or Tom Jones than any of the Waverley novels?....”

She went on the describe Pride and Prejudice as “An accurate daguerrotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck...”

She later said of Austen, in a letter to publisher’s reader WS Williams: “...she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood.”

Claire Harman, in her book Jane’s Fame, says that Charlotte Brontë’s comments on Austen did affect the latter’s reputation for a time. Yet today both writers have never been more popular, and each has heavily influenced contemporary culture – from Mills and Boon to Zombie novels, from Bridget Jones to Bollywood.

Austen’s stories seem to lend themselves more easily to (countless) TV adaptations, while Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, with its wild rugged countryside which features so heavily almost as another character in the narrative, begs the scope of the big screen.

As part of the third Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Claire Harman and novelists Helen Simpson and Tiffany Murray will debate whether Austen or the Brontës have had the greatest influence on modern fiction.

The audience will be invited to join in what promises to be a lively discussion about these pioneering female writers. At the end they will be asked to choose whose work they would take to their mythical desert island.

An independent observer who is well qualified to take a dispassionate view of this “face-off” between the writers is Harriet Guest, professor of English literature at York University. She believes that, notwithstanding Charlotte’s lack of enthusiasm for her renowned predecessor, the Brontë sisters’ writing was definitely influenced by Austen’s.

“I suppose they benefited from the way she used language to describe the intensity of inner feelings and build up a view of personality through these insights.

“Austen in turn drew on what others had done or were doing. Her novels focus on what goes on between people rather than events in the world. She’s interested in creating a comedy of manners where nothing much happens. It’s all about the articulation of emotions and thoughts. This ‘interiority’ was new and marked her out from other writers. It also influenced many who came afterwards.

“The greatest contrast between the Brontës and Austen is probably in comparing her novels with Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” says the professor. “It deals in what, to Austen, would have been unspeakable events – the heroine marries a drunk with not enough to do. She shuts the bedroom door on him and he takes revenge by corrupting her son and committing adultery in their house. It was considered hugely scandalous at the time, partly because it was written by an unmarried woman.

“The Brontës’ work was much more operatic than Austen’s and there was a wild realism about them. Austen’s later novels did, however, show an interest in war and empire and depicted her women more in relation to the world at large.”

But in Wuthering Heights, “a dynastic story set in two houses”, there are parallels with the works of Austen, says Prof Guest. “Of course the Brontës painted on a much broader canvas. They also explored such issues as race and Empire.”

Would she consider either the Brontës of Jane Austen as feminist writers?

“I find it hard to see Jane Austen as anything other than a conservative writer – but even then, at the centre of all her work are women and their ability to understand human nature in some deeply intuitive way. They are the ones who hold the world together.

“The Brontë sisters, by the very nature of the kind of fierce, sexy and ambitious stories they wrote, were feminist. In their work it’s not so much about the direction of the plot but the strong feeling of their ambition.”

Writer Helen Simpson, who’ll be taking part in the Austen/Brontës debate, pins her colours to the mast quite categorically regarding the influence of Austen and what she calls “life in rooms” – via novels made compelling through the accuracy of her prose, her wit and the truth of her observations about human nature and relationships.

Discovering Austen as a teenager Simpson realised “writing didn’t have to be full of action. Life was important without lots of plot and people hitting each other.”

Stormy Sisterhood: Jane Austen versus the Brontës will be held at West Lane Baptist Church, Haworth at 7.30pm in Saturday, September 1, 01535 640188, [email protected]

Celebrating women’s words

The third Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing takes place at various venues in Haworth from Friday, August 31 to Sunday, September 2.

It includes a busy programme of readings, talks, workshops and family events.

Among the highlights are novelist Sadie Jones – whose first novel The Outcast won the Costa first novel award – in conversation with writer and poet James Nash.

An exhibition of new poetry by Zoe Brigley and Hebden Bridge-based poet Amanda Dalton inspired by their previous residencies at the Brontë Parsonage Museum is included, as is a workshop on turning a good idea into fiction.