JANE AUSTEN AND CHARLOTTE BRONTË: TWO LADIES AT ODDS YET LOOKING FOR THE SAME ULTIMATE

 

JANE AUSTEN AND CHARLOTTE BRONTË: TWO LADIES AT ODDS YET LOOKING FOR THE SAME ULTIMATE

                       

Yes, the whole world is heading for the apotheosis on the 16^th of December 2025, the 250^th anniversary of Jane Austen (*1775-†1817), the English writer who is now revered as one of the grandes dames de la littérature européenne. And one of the most successful novelists – post mortem – in British history. Laura Hackett, at The Times, sums up the never-ending fascination, the ever-increasing infatuation with the authoress of Pride and Prejudice (1813) by qualifying her as:

“… the most beloved female writer in English literature – scrap that: most beloved writer...¹

A remarkable transformation for an early-19th century lady from the campagne, “provincial upper-middle-class life”, who never visited another country. A title of an essay, 2009, resumes the trajectory, all substance thereby revealing:

“Austen Goes Pop:The Evolution of Jane Austen from Rural Writer to Contemporary Icon “²

Yet the noisy foaming which began months ago (there are even talks of creating an Austenland), spreading like Tsunami-waves, is also bringing new and perhaps irreverent perspectives on that witty English lady. The new screen-versions of her novels, and also the ones centring on her sister, her family and contemporary re-transcriptions, add to the booming “Jane Austen-Industry”. Her contribution to the British economy, over the last two-hundred years, in terms of foreign earnings through royalties, films and television-serials rights, tourism and related paraphernalia, can only be surpassed, perhaps, by another lady: Agatha Christie (*1890-†1976).

But other countries are also trying to capitalise on the world-wide demand. A French film released in 2024, Jane Austen a gaché ma vie (Jane Austen has spoiled my life), portrays a young woman working in the Shakespeare Bookshop in Paris, a fan of Austen and a potential would-be writer. Some time ago, a manifesto was published by known French authors, entitled Austen Power, aimed at stimulating the reading of Jane Austen, aureoled with a “Feminist Avant-garde” crown.

Hence, the “quasi-monopoly” which had been enjoyed by England, and which had already been dented by the USA, now suffers threats from other corners of the world

                               

Looking for the “Dark Side” of Jane Austen, not forgetting the other...

The “Dark Side” of Austen is one of those themes, becoming more and more recurrent.

Many point out, above all, at the novel Mansfield Park (1814), the last-but-one published during her lifetime. A denser, multilevel and complex text, where one has to struggle, in particular during the first twenty-thirty pages, in order to be accepted and become an intelligible witness of the parcours and the entanglements and dis-entanglements of so many figures, compared, for example, with the straighter main narrative thread of Emma (1815) or even Pride and Prejudice. The novel also contains the only explicit reference to “slaves” and “slavery” to be encountered in her whole narrative, as the family the protagonist Fanny Price has been “integrated” to, derives its wealth from estates in Antigua (Caribbean).

                                    

                                                    

Such a “darkness”, if it were to be the right conceptualisation, is also linked to a disputation about her letters, and the role played by her sister Cassandra in, so it is argued, destroying most of them (presumably 3,000), and of editing - no scruples at all – those which survived (about 160). Opinions divert, ranging from those who defend Cassandra, as in the case of Miss Austen, a four-part television-serial by the BBC, shown for the first time in 2025. This screen-recreation navigates through the new sea of “political correctness” and “debunking” of “epoch-biases”, by, among others, letting one key male figure, a surgeon, be portrayed by a colour-man. An event not impossible, then, yet very much unlikely. 

                                     

Gill Hornby, on the other hand, stated at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, that we ought to be grateful to Cassandra, Jane’s Sister, for destroying all those letters, as the author was “bitchy”. We may never know. Was that “bitchiness” a result of personal frustrations, or perhaps just Jane Austen’s irony and wittiness being raised to the power of 10?

                            

                                                   The Daily Telegraph, 27.05.2025.

De-historising Jane Austen

Great expectation exists also regarding a new television production, likely to appear on the screens early 2026, The Other Bennet Sister, which will also attempt to down-earth Austen into the trivialities of “our epoch” (if such a name is to be deserved…), no more “posh-accents”, getting away from the “fetishisation of a period”.

This “debunking” of the previous “period-dramas” will include clothing (much more modest bonnets, we presume...), hair-dressing (perhaps a “punkish” approach…), no more “sedated ballrooms scenes” (a little bit of “rock-and-roll”, no doubt…), and even the way people move:

“We will have a movement coach in to get the Bennet family to move more like a family…”, said producer Jane Tranter, apparently because everyone, above all extras, move “too slow” in the previous screen-versions, due to “excessive clothing”.

But did not everything at that time move much, much slower? The first steam-locomotive was built in 1804, the first successful commercial steam-boat was operated in 1807, and the first passenger steam train in 1825 … Jane Austen died in 1817.

Whether this, and the upcoming ones, re-working and re-translation of Austen’s novel onto the screen will ever be able to surpass the quality, and the depth, of the BBC 1995 crown-jewel, in particular because of the spoken English, remains a huge question mark. It is precisely that “classical, crystal-clear, elegant, humour-refined” language which has made Jane Austen one of the immortals in European literature.

Yet there is more to come. Andrew Davies, the known screen-writer, promises “slavery, psychopaths and early death” for the coming adaptations. 

 

                                                  

                                                          The Times, 13.10.2025

Attempts to “de-epoch” Jane Austen, to “de-contextualise”, to “modernise” the novels through films made with 21^st century lenses, by uprooting her from her epoch and her social class, to “de-historise” her, as if it were a puppet one could take anywhere, may obey to some unmentionable commercial ambitions. They risk, however, re-translating the author into the whimsical fashions of our time, which, in any case, have a clear “date of expiration”.

If it continues like this, we should not be surprised to be confronted soon with a “most original” screen-version of Pride and Prejudice, wherein Miss Elizabeth Bennet is refashioned into an early 19^th century version of Mrs. Marple, idem Mr. Darcy, who will appear as an ancestor of Hercule Poirot. Both working on a murder-mystery: Who killed Mr. Collins, the preposterous clergyman? Was it perhaps the father of Elizabeth, terrified at the prospect of Mr. Collins marrying his preferred daughter?

Yet that on-going debate on whether to “proletarise” Jane Austen (or at least lower her down from the upper-middle-class-rural society to a sort of lower-middle-class suburban society, speaking rural cockney) allows us to enter into the core of this contribution, the relegation of Austen’s narrative by Charlotte Brontë(*1816-†1855) to an almost “claustrophobic delineation of closed gardens, tranquil villages and superficial social interactions, lacking emotions, passion and … poetry”. Even accepting that Jane Austen did know how to write.

Comfort, escapism ...

A pertinent article The Guardian related to the “best literary comfort reads”, mentions the author Francesca Segal, who turns to Austen when she needs a “restorative read”. A reader would go farther, by stating:

                                                           

“Any novel by Jane Austen offers ultimate comfort and escapism, even in the trickiest of times…” The Guardian, 15.11.2024.

Comfort, escapism, refuge, soothing of the soul …

Was that very sensation which prompted Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853), to “devalue” the novels of Jane Austen? Or at least those she had read.

Charlotte considers herself at “a distance” from, and not quite in the same wavelength as that of Jane.

Jane Austen’s limitations, according to Charlotte Brontë

Let us consider first the letters to G.H. Lewes (*1817-†1878), the author and philosopher who would become the lover and partner of Lady Evans (George Eliot) (*1819-†1880).

First letter to G.H. Lewes, January 12, 1848

‘Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written ‘Pride & Prejudice’ or ‘Tom Jones’ than any of the Waverley novels. I had not seen ‘Pride & Prejudice’ till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers – but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy – no open country – no fresh air – no blue hill – no bonny beck.

 I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.’

Second letter to G.H. Lewes, 1848

*G H Lewes’ letters to Jane Austen were not saved ...

‘You say I must familiarize my mind with the fact that “Jane Austen is not a poetess, has no ‘sentiment’ (you scornfully enclose the word in inverted commas) no eloquence, none of the ravishing enthusiasms of poetry” – and then you add, I must “learn to acknowledge her as one of the greatest artists, of the greatest painters of human character , and one of the writers with the nicest sense of a means to an end that ever lived.” The last point only will I acknowledge. Can there be a great artist without poetry?’

Two years later, however, in a letter of the 12^th of April 1850 to William S. Williams, the 19^th century publisher and mentor of the authoress of Jane Eyre, Charlotte reveals that she has now read more of Austen, and has found some good (valuable) points:

“I have likewise read one of Miss Austen’s work’s ‘Emma’ – read it with interest and with just the degree of admiration which Miss Austen herself would have thought sensible and suitable – anything like warmth or enthusiasm; anything energetic, poignant, heart-felt, is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstrations the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as outré and extravagant. She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well; there is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting: she ruffles her ready 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; even to the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition; too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress. Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of Death – this Miss Austen ignores.”

Charlotte was reading Jane through the eyes of her epoch, and of her own view-of-the-world (Weltanschauung). That was a “romantic” view, in the sense of the Anglo-German romanticism which germinated first in Germany with the Sturm und Drang movement in the 1760s and early 1780s (to be translated as “Storm and Impetus” and not as “Storm and Stress”, as mentioned often in the virtual world).

It reached a first peak in 1774 with the publication of The Sorrows of the Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), the epistolary novel of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe which became the first true European “best-seller”, apart from sending to premature death dozens and dozens of young readers who imitated the tragic destiny of the main male character outlined in the book. By the early 19^th century “Romanticism” was spreading like wildfire throughout England and France, and the rest of the world.

The strip-teasing of soul and mind to their recondite layers, the admission of darkness and mystery as valid companions, the wandering through obscure woods and mighty mountains, the search for farther, exotic lands, the submersion into nature, indeed, the glorification of nature, the deification of music (that most abstract of arts) as a firework of emotion and passion, tutti quanti, tutti quanti …, that was not the world of Jane Austen.

As stated by Tony Tanner in the Original Penguin Classics Introduction to

“This is not the place to embark on a summary of the Romantic movement. The point is that Jane Austen was brought up in eighteen-century thought and was fundamentally loyal to the respect for limits, definitions, and clear ideas which it inculcated. “³

Passion was considered, then, in the Anglo-Protestant culture as a “derailment of the mind, no matter how poetical that accident may appear to some, At that time, emotions and above all passions, if one happened to have been invaded by such an “illness”, were supposed to be kept under the surface. Passion is a dangerous word (a misleading one, too...), and in the sense of describing feelings and emotions being set on fire by the ego in relation to persons, ideals, objects and also nature, as such considered almost indecent in the English culture, at least up to the middle of the 19^th century.. Or to be kept well-hidden.

It comes from Greek through the Latin passio, the verb πάσχο, “to suffer” whereby the noun pathos, παθος, means “suffering”. Hence the current meaning of pathology, “the study of disease”.

Hence Charlotte’s comment, “anything energetic, poignant, heart-felt, is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstrations the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as outré and extravagant”.

Charlotte writes in English, but she thinks and speaks Romantisch or perhaps Romantischki⁴

No doubt, “nature” is not altogether ignored by James Austen, but it is mostly mentioned en passant, as a static décor, which just happens to be there. In “Romanticism” nature is a key character, not merely an extra.

It would however be absurd to state that, while “enlightened reasoning” happens to be absent in the novels of Charlotte, “emotions and feelings” resound through their non-existence in the novels of Jane.

Perhaps it has more to do with the ways passion, ardent feelings, could be expressed, could be redirected, above all, could be camouflaged. Mr. Darcy’s marriage proposal to Elizabeth, in Pride and Prejudice, apart from being one of the clumsiest ever registered in the history of world literature, is a passionate outburst of uncontrolled emotions, an irrational one, as the woman he choose is just, in the context of the asymmetry of “consequences” of both persons, “well below par”. Likewise, Elizabeth’s rejection of Mr. Darcy’s proposal is a romantic, emotional decision, a very irrational one, as she is rejecting one of the handsomest and richest bachelors in the whole country. As her father would say to Elizabeth, when she tells him that she has accepted Mr. Darcy’s second marriage proposal:

“Are you out of your senses to be accepting this man?”⁵

But all that “transaction” takes place in a civilised manner, with wishes of well-being and the usual courtesy of entering and leaving a room.

“… emotion over reason, or vice-versa …” But is it really such a dichotomy, that of “reason versus emotion”, to be considered as “binding” in comparing Jane’s oeuvre with that of Charlotte?

Let us come back to that most slippery of words, “surface”, as indicated by Charlotte,

“She (Jane) does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well; there is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting.“

Indeed, the “surface” is there, but we know that, underneath, there are “things”, “palpitations”, “fears”. Charlotte would prefer all that to be displayed in the open, unmasked, rotund, aching. Jane let the reader unveil what is bubbling underneath the surface. They are different styles, not necessarily different understandings of human nature.

Hence the “emotion-reason” dichotomy rather as a “framework”, as a tentative draft, in order to find those “grey regions” in the text of both writers, where “emotion” and “reason” happen to coexist amicably.

Could we summarise that shaky dichotomy through paintings of both epochs?

Perhaps Jane Austen’s idyllic vision of a landscape, as portrayed by Angelika Kaufmann (*1741- †1807), the Austrian-Swiss lady who is supposed to be one of the painters admired by Jane.

“Portrait of the family of Ferdinand the 4^th of Napoli”. 1783, Museo e Real Bosco di Capidomonte.

Perhaps Charlotte Brontë’s inner vision of nature, as interpreted by Joseph Mallord William Turner (*1775-†1851).

Fire at Sea, 1850.

Yet one painter, Caspar David Friedrich (*1774-†1840), would have summarised both through a single tableaux.

Frau am Fenster, Woman at the window, 1822,

The motive of “the woman at the window” is enacted many times in the 1995 film-version of Sense and Sensibility (1811).

“Two ladies at odds yet looking for the same ultima…” What ultimate?

“The ultimate is to prove that women can use the word to recreate the world through a novel, as skilful as men, and, at times, perhaps with a sharper insight.”

Perhaps the most sympathetic conclusion is that of the writer Monica Ali. “I can’t conceive life without Austen and Tolstoy”.

                                            

The author of this blog would like to re-arrange that comment, leaving Tolstoy aside, as he is someone without whom life cannot possibly be understood.

I happen to believe that both Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Eyre, are two of the best and most relevant novels of the first half of the 19^th century. The temptation to scrap “two of” remains very strong, but let us have it as such, for the moment…

“I cannot conceive life without Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë."

Herewith then a continuous invitation to re-visit Jane and Charlotte, if possible, please far away from the whimsical and noisy re-writings of the modern media, just concentrate on the language.

1Laura Hackett, Deputy Literary Editor, The Times, January 25, 2025.

2Scholer, Christian, Rollins Scholarship Online, 2009.

3“Original Penguin Classics Introduction” (1974) by Tony Tanner, in Austen, Jean, Pride and Prejudice, Penguin Classics, 2003, p. 405.

4Both neologisms are the invention of the writer of this blog, the second-one having a sort of a “Slavic” resonance.

5Pride and Prejudice, Penguin Classics, p. 355. The underlying is ours.

VIRGINIA WOOLF, "A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN": OR RATHER, "A LIFE OF ONE’S OWN".

 

VIRGINIA WOOLF, A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN: OR RATHER, A LIFE OF ONE’S OWN.

52 Tavistock Square, London, WC1, a plaque now remembers Virginia Woolf (*1882- †1941), the basement from where she ran, as from 1924, together with her husband, the Hogarth Press, and whether she also had her “writing-room”. We presume that this is where she fine-tuned the final written version of the lectures delivered at Cambridge University in 1928, “On Women and Fiction”, to appear in 1929 as “A room of one’s own”, subsequent to be rescued as one of the pillars of modern “feminism”, at least in the realm of literature. Much later, in the year 2004, a bust of Woolf was added to the garden of the square.

We had the pleasure of “co-habitating” with the spirit of Virginia Woolf in Tavistock Square (not forgetting that of Charles Dickens, who lived in Tavistock House between 1851-1860), as the writer of these lines occupied an office, thanks to an “Honorary Position” a the University of London, between 1988-90, on the street of the square looking straight onto Woburn Place. Bloomsbury indeed, as our daily rhythm oscillated between a brief check of the post arriving at my office in Tavistock Square, a brief interlude in the garden of the square, and then a visit to the British Library, to work there, entering either from the Senate House side, or from the Great Russell Street side. The routine extended itself onto the 1990 and early 1991, including a rather rushy and fragmentary consultation of some of the main literary opus of Woolf, above all Orlando: A Biography (1928), and The Waves (1931), as appropriate as it ought to have been, in the main Reading Room of the British Library. It is precisely there where Virginia Woolf consulted the sources related to women and literature since the 16^th century:

“… a thousand questions at once suggested themselves. But one needed answers, not questions; and an answer was only to be had by consulting the learned and the unprejudiced, who have removed themselves above the strife of tongue and the confusion of body and issued the result of their reasoning and research in books which are to be found in the British Museum. If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?”¹

 

 

Let us underline that charming homage to the British Library (then hosted by the British Museum, nowadays in Euston Road, near St-Pancras), and reiterate our thanks to the personnel of that honourable institution, perhaps the most enlightening and productive “office” the author of these lines has ever had, from 1981 onward, and which has helped writers, artists, scholars and politicians from all over the world since its first opened.

Years ago, while scribbling away on a notebook the next authors who were to appear in the blog, I did engrave the name of Virginia Woolf, even taking into account that my familiarity with her literary opus should be described as rather tentative and incomplete. The fact that she appears now, much earlier than planned, is all the fault of the Greeks, as always. In 2023 I received an email, which always begins with a vibrant χαῖρε!, from Antigone. An open forum for classics², a wonderful website dedicated to the celebration (and re-interpretation) of the Greek-Roman backbone of our so-called Western world, which keeps being eroded from the inside. It was an invitation to read an essay of Virginia Wolf On Not Knowing Greek³, published first in 1923.

I was all astonishment, as I began to be assaulted by the beauty and the rhythm of such love-declaration to Classical Greek, a text whose flow does indeed reverberate the “stream of consciousness”, a narrative device which she, together with Marcel Proust (1871-1922) and James Joyce (1882-1941), was to pioneer, helping her to be considered, at least by some, as one of the most innovative novelists of the 20^th century. Above all, Classical Greek continues to constitute a refuge, for everyone wanting to be exorcised of the malheur and the aimless forwardness of the epoch, be either that of Woolf, or ours. What the Germans at the most appropriate call “Weltschmerz” (badly translated as “the pain of being in the world”), was for the Ancient Greeks a normal, inescapable, unlamented “natural state of the world”:

“There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”⁴

But it is the language in itself that perseveres, at one level the rhythm, at other the “compactness”:

“Chief among these sources of glamour and perhaps misunderstanding is the language. We can never hope to get the whole ting of a sentence in Greek as we do in English. We cannot hear it, now dissonant, now harmonious, tossing sound from line to line across a page. We cannot pick up infallibly one by one all those minute signals by which a phrase is made to hint, to turn, to live. Nevertheless, it is the language that has us most in bondage; the desire for that which perpetually lures us back. First there is the compactness of the expression. Shelley (Percy Bysshe Shelley, *1792-†1822) takes twenty-one words in English to translate thirteen words of Greek.

πᾶς γοῦν ποιητὴς γίγνεται, κἂν ἄμουσος ᾖ τὸ πρίν, οὗ ἂν Ἔρως ἅψηται. ⁵ (13 words)

…For everyone, even if before he were ever so undisciplined, becomes a poet as soon as he is touched by love. (21 words)

Every ounce of fat has been pared off, leaving the flesh firm. Then, spare and bare as it is, no language can move more quickly, dancing, shaking, all alive, but controlled.”

The key problem in Shelley’s translation is the word ἄμουσος, which he adroitly transforms into “undisciplined”, μουσος being related to the “Muses” (Μοῦσαι, the nine inspirational goddesses of the arts and science), ἄ acting as an “inverting” prefix, “those not inhaling the spirit of the “Muses”. In German we have the adjective “musisch”, derived straight from Greek, hence “unmusisch” would be a person who, alas, has not been permeated by the “Muses”. Thus, a German version, aspiring at the same “compactness” would be:

“Alle werden Dichter, selbst die früher Unmusischen, alsbald denen Liebe anfällt.“(11 words)

An even shorter version, replacing “Unmusischen” for “Unfähigkeit', and getting rid of one article and one personal pronoun, would be:

„Alle werden Dichter, alsbald Liebe anfällt, trotz früher Unfähigkeit'' (9 words)

A possible English version:

“Everyone, self those earlier unenlightened, becomes a poet, as soon Eros imperates…” (12 words)

In Spanish:

“Todos devienen poetas, incluso aquellos que eran incapaces, apenas Eros impere...” (11 words).

Yet the version which upholds the compactness of the Greek original and does not alter the substance is in Latin, provided by a Latinist, an acquaintance of the writer of these lines:

AMŌRE QVICVMQVE RAPIĀTVR, QVAMQVAM LONGISSIME A MVSIS AFVERIT, ARTIFEX FIT.  (10 words)

But was Shelley perhaps, by enlarging the number of words, just trying to extend the fragrance, to enhance the enjoyment of the “concentrated substance” contained in the Greek original? Or, as he might have been “paid” by the number of words contained in his opus, did he simply stretch the phrase as far as possible, in order to get more money? Let us be magnanimous.

So it is indeed possible to force other languages to abandon a little bit of their carcass (perhaps superfluous), but we are pushed towards such an attempt by the Greek language. It is she who is illuminating the path to be entered to obtain “semantic concentration” …

Hence Woolf’s insistence on going to the original:

“It is useless, then, to read Greek in translations. Translators can but offer us a vague equivalent; their language is necessarily full of echoes and associations.“⁶

“And, although it seems ungracious to add this when we have owned so much indebtedness to translators, some knowledge of the language is a possession not to be done without. With the best will in the world the translators are bound to stamp their individuality or that of their age upon the text. Our minds are so full of echoes that a single word such as “aweary” will flood a whole page for an English reader with the wrong associations. And such is the power of the Greek language that to know even a little of it is to know that there is nothing more beautiful in the world.“⁷

The last phrase “… nothing more beautiful in the world…” could sound nowadays as an excessive romantic over-appraisal. Yet that eulogy, formulated in the 1920s, has not lost its pertinence. Even more, it has been retaken and popularised, hence reaching larger audiences, over the last years. One example is the considerable success (more so taking into account the subject) of a delightful book (more than 300.000 copies sold) written by the Italian hellenist and essayist, Andrea Marcolongo, “La Lingua Geniale. 9 ragioni per amare il greco” (2016), The ingenious language. Nine epic reasons to love Greek” “ , translated into many languages, and well-received everywhere in spite of some shortcomings and errors. 

 

 

A very much recommendable Italian television programme, Otto e Mezzo, la 7, broadcasted on the 3^rd of January of 2017 the refreshing encounter, LUNGA VITA ALLE LINGUE MORTE, under the supervision of Lilli Gruber, between Marcolongo, the Latinist and professor at Oxford, Nicola Gardini, author of a book also successful, “Viva il latino, Storia et Belleza di una lingua inutile” (2016), and the art historian Vittorio Sgarbi. (…) Gardini will publish in 2021 “Viva il Greco. Alla scoperta della lingua madre”, to underline, once more, what he said in that television programme, “… il lavoro sul il latino y il greco è davvero un addestramento a la densità del significato…”, motivated by “un desiderio de parola ultima…”

 

 

I cannot but insist upon every reader of this blog to watch that programme (available in Internet), even if their Italian was too basic, and listen to that joyous, enlightening exchange between connoisseurs and amateurs of the classical languages, and how the supposedly “dead languages” help to understand the whirlwinds of our epoch, the fate of Italy and Europe, and even that of the Catholic Church. 

Yet this Classical Greek tsunami keeps expanding its waves. Less than two months ago, Le Figaro, one of the major French newspapers, carry a long article, entitled “Why Ancient Greek is essential to enjoy happiness” (free translation), in which Laure de Chantal, “écrivaine et agrégée de lettres classiques”, “Si vous faites du grec, vous serez toujours heureux!”, “If you do Ancient Greek, you will always be happy!”. 

 

 

 

Whether this propaganda for Ancient Greek as the ultimate panacea for the malheurs of our epoch reflects to a large extent the current French crisis and national disorientation, which looms becoming one of the most earthshaking of the “5^th Republic”, remains a valid question mark. Whatever the answer, the embrace of Ancient Greek, either seeking refuge or seeking wisdom, emerges more and more as the last anchor in a so-called Western World which has lost its compass.

DO MATERIAL CONDITIONS NECESSARILY DETERMINE THE POSSIBILITY AND THE QUALITY OF LITERARY PRODUCTION?

A first impression, after reading Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”, is that the English writer was adamant that only “economic independence” would guarantee that a woman could express herself, and be herself, in the unpredictable industry of “writing fiction”.

“All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point – a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a

conclusion upon these two questions – women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. ⁸

Yet there is more than the postulate of a mechanic synergy between material conditions and literary creation. It is also a somewhat whimsical yet relevant and humour-blessed panorama of the absurdities uttered on women and their supposed inabilities over the last centuries, including Napoleon and Benito Mussolini, the latter finding women incapable, the former despising them. No wonder that these two “war lords” ended their career under lugubrious circumstances. On the “other side” were both Dr. Samuel Johnson and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, admiring women and seeking their companionship, recognising their cogitations as no way underneath the level of men.

Woolf goes further, that of the two news which landed more or less at the same time, “votes for women”, and a “legacy of an aunt”, it was the legacy that counted the most. A lesser dependency on men implied also a reappraisal of their role in the world:

 

“The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor’s letter fell into the post-box and when I opened I found that she had left me five hundreds pounds a year for ever. Of the two – the vote and the money – the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important. (…) So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race. It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. (…) I need not flatter any man; ...”⁹

Mrs. Woolf takes a particular interest in the Elizabethan Era, the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), considered by many as the “golden age” in English history, a sort of “English Renaissance”, with considerable achievements at all levels, in literature above all the name William Shakespeare will be engraved in gold.

“...ask the historian (,,,) to describe under what conditions women lived (…) in the time of Elizabeth. For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. ¹⁰

(…) One only has to think of those Elizabethan tombstones will all those children kneeling with clasped hands; and their early deaths; and to see their houses with their dark, cramped rooms; to realize that no women could have written poetry then.” ¹¹

“Judith Shakespeare” appears, a fictional character created by Virginia Wool, “the sister of William”, to demonstrate that a woman with all the capabilities of the great English writer, could not have been allowed to implement all her talent, she would not be sent to school, that she would, at the end, simply die, forgotten, leaving no written traces of her artistic ambitions.

Albeit material conditions do impact upon artistic creation, it is risky at the utmost to reject the possibility of literary creation emerging even under the direst conditions, be either man or woman. As has been said, even slaves may be touched by the “Muses”, and respond by composing a song or a sonnet, precisely in order to elevate themselves above the misery and the exploitation.. A recent book by the Renaissance scholar Ramie Targoff, appropriately titled “Shakespeare's Sisters” disagree at strength with Woolf’s assessment of the Elizabethan epoch, proving that that era did indeed produce its share of great women writers. 

 

Let us now jump into the nineteenth century, where we will see the emergence of the British “middle class”.

“… which Miss Emily Davies a litter later was so strikingly to demonstrate, that the middle class family in the early nineteenth century was possessed only of a single sitting-room between them. If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain, ‘women never have an half four … that they can call their own’ – she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required. Jane Austen wrote like that to the end of her days. ‘How she was able to effect all this’, her nephew writes in his Memoir, ‘is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, and most of the work must have in the general sitting-room, subject to all kind of interruptions. “¹²

So, notwithstanding the lack of “a room of one’s own”, Jane Austen was capable of writing great novel. Was she perhaps just an exception?

It is in the comparison between Jane Austen (*1775- †1817 ), whom Mrs Woolf admires all heartedness, to the point of comparing her to the great Ancient Greeks, and Charlotte Brontë (*1816- †1855), where we could pinpoint the seeds of Woolf’s final formulation of his theory about women’s writing, but also her contradictions:

“One might say, I continued, laying the book beside Pride and Prejudice, that the woman who wrote those pages (Jane Eyre) had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks the jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she (Charlotte) will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly (…) She was at war with her lot.”¹³

That Charlotte Brontë had genius was recognised first by William Makepeace Thackeray, who eulogised Jane Eyre as “the work of a great genius”. I happen to disagree with Mrs. Woolf, to the point perhaps of abandoning my politeness. What the Bloomsbury lady says is that (my reformulation):

“… Jane Austen wrote, abandoning herself to simplicity and spontaneity (and humour), as a woman, without any existentialist Angst. Charlotte Brontë wrote as a woman, who kept complaining about the world treated her, hence…”

Yet where then not sufficient, solid arguments for Charlotte, and most women, to complain about the way society was treating them? And to let that transpires through a novel is to be welcomed.

Woolf’s then begins to formulate her view of how women should “exist” in literature:

“But this creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men. And one must conclude that it would be a thousand pities if it were hindered or wasted, for it was won by centuries of the most drastic discipline, and there is nothing to take its place. It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sees are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring our and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? ¹⁴

This is a powerful statement, and nowadays perhaps even more relevant. It is followed by another crucial warning:

“Even so, the very first sentence that I would write here, I said, crossing to the writing-table and taking up the page headed Women and Fiction, is that it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It its fatal to be a a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman.”¹⁵

One might be tempted to interpret the above-quoted as an indirect appeal for some kind of “androgyny" ”, yet I believe it is just another way of underlying, again, that simple, unequivocal appeal for anyone venturing into the varied avenues of the belles lettres, at times thorny, at times flowery: when you write, you should forget about your sex.

It must be said that Wool’s tour de force through the steppes and the mountains of “Women and Fiction” circumscribed itself, mostly, to the English-speaking word. In particular the French-speaking world will provide, not doubt whatsoever, a more complex, and perhaps even more intriguing panorama. From the 16^th century, French women writers (albeit almost always coming from the aristocracy, be either the well-endowed or the less fortunate regarding property and cash) would play a key role in the emergence and development of the French novel.

Even the way Mrs. Woolf used the English language does provide difficulties for other languages. The very expression “of one’s own” is almost untranslatable in many languages. In German, for example, the usual translation is “Ein Zimmer für sich allein”, which, retranslated into English, means in fact “a room for oneself alone”. Far away from the emphasis on possession, of “property”, evident in the English original, though Woolf does not specify throughout the whole essay whether that “room” should be legally “owned” by the woman.

Summa summarum, rather “A life of one’s own”, that writing would be more inspiring, more enlightening and could reach peaks of spontaneous, contagious beauty, if it is rooted in a life constructed beyond sex, beyond false allegiances, beyond fashionable disguises.

Virginia Woolf enjoys the privilege of being re-born incessantly, and sought-after as a feminist of la première heure, very much alive in our epoch. See, for example, a recent article in Le Figaro, France.

Or a most interesting podcast in the London Review of Books, by David Runciman, quite recently:

“This week our review of the greatest essays and essayists reaches the twentieth century and Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, “A Room of One’s Own” (…) And how, despite all that, it sill manages to be as fresh and funny as anything written since.”

Some readers of this blog might ask themselves why did I begin the contribution on Mrs. Woolf by her essay on the Greek language, and not on the one providing the title of the contribution. I wanted to explain why is it that Virginia Woolf appears now, rather than much later, but above all, I wished the reader to understand that only a woman who has bathed herself in that glorious ocean of Ancient Greek, who took possession of the tools provided by that “mother of all languages”, “that were everything began”, “the language of the Gods”, could have written such a splendid and lively essay on the destiny of women, which confirms her status as one of the most intelligent, one of the most original and penetrating female minds of the 20^th century.

JCHK 2024.

1Woolf, Virginia, “A Room of One’s Own”, Grafton. An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 1977, first edition 1929, Pg. 30. Out underlying.

2https://antigonejournal.com/

3Consult https://antigonejournal.com/2023/on-not-knowing-greek/. First edition 1923.

4Woolf (1923), p. 23.

5Woolf (1923), p. 20. Plato Symposium 196e; the phrase “even if he was formerly uncultured” is a quotation from a lost play of Euripides, Stheneboea (fr. 663)

6Woolf (1923), p. 20.

7THE PERFECT LANGUAGE. Review of the second volume of W.R. Paton’s Greek Anthology (Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann, 1917), Times Literary Supplement 801 (24 May 1917) , following Woolf (1923 ( p. 32).

8Woolf (1929(, PP. 7-8.

9PP. 42-43.

10PP. 43-44.

11Pg. 64.

12Pg. 73.

13Pg. 76.

14Pg. 95.

15Pg. 112.

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