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 16th of December 2025, the 250th 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 21st 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 19th 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 12th of April 1850 to William S. Williams, the 19th 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 19th 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 19th 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 4th 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 19th 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.
