Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Charlotte Brontë vs. Jane Austen

From The Daily Beast:
It’s a fascinating oddity of literary history that the great Victorian novelist of romantic love, Charlotte Brontë, despised that other great British chronicler of love, Jane Austen, and could not quite comprehend why Austen was valued so highly by critics in Brontë’s time. This seems counterintuitive: after all, both appear regularly at the top of lists of favorites compiled by readers, especially female readers, who love classic novels and all things romantic....

As it happens, Charlotte Brontë’s perception of Jane Austen not only reveals much about Brontë herself but also highlights an important change in the evolving definition of romantic love in Western culture. Furthermore, this change foreshadows both D. H. Lawrence and our contemporary understanding of that malleable term “love,” a shift in meaning to which, I would say, Charlotte Brontë herself substantially contributed. (Read more.)
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1 comment:

julygirl said...

To compare these two different personalities, who lived in different eras and had different writing styles is like comparing an apple to an orange....they are both fruit and are round, but the comparison ends there.