'Jane Eyre' Movie Rekindles Jane Austen vs. Charlotte Bronte Battle

The Washington Post:

Enough with the empire waistlines, the sparkly dialogue, the pride, the prejudice, the Colin Firth trudging out of the lake again and again on the late-night minithons on A&E. Enough with all that.

The devoted readers of Bonnet Drama have always known that if it came down to it, if someone held a flintlock musket to their heads and demanded an answer, that “I love Jane Austen and the Brontes equally” would not suffice. Sides must be chosen:

You are either a Janeite. Or you are a Charlottan.

Read the whole story: The Washington Post

Comments

[Lev Raphael]

03:49 PM on 03/20/2011

This article presents a very limited and cliched view of Austen's work as pretty and vapid. Her work is much darker than that. A book like P&P might seem comic on the surface but is filled with portraits of very nasty people, some unintentionally so. Besides the self-centered Lady de Bourgh, there's the absent, cynical father whose detachment damages his children; the fraud/seducer who will likely ruin a woman's life; the hysterical emotionally abusive mother lost in narcissism. As for lovely drawing rooms? The author's mistaking the filmed versions for the books. Whenever I re-read Austen, I'm always surprised by how little concrete description there is of setting, whether a park or a grand salon. Our reading of her books has become mediated by their on-screen versions.

[Nicholas Rowley]

08:07 PM on 03/20/2011

The trouble is satire is often missed by many people, and she was a fantastic satirist. :)

[Nicholas Rowley]

11:01 PM on 03/19/2011

The article seems to be pitting Austen against the Brontes not just one of the sisters.

[CyndiC]

09:19 PM on 03/19/2011

I am a Janeite though I agree with a lot of the other comments that there is really no comparison. Loved Sense and Sensibility, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

[MSchlagel]

08:59 PM on 03/19/2011

I am neither. I love Austen's Persuasion and Mansfield Park and I love the Brontes all (Anne, Charlotte and Emily) but in the Bonnet wars, there are not just two players. George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell (especially her Life of Charlotte Bronte) and Mary Shelley are in there as well. Not to the mention the writers who were the mothers of major Victorian authors like Frances Trollope (mum to Anthony) and Speranza (mum to Oscar Wilde).

Is it this a little silly? I can't imagine armies of Austen and Bronte admirers raising arms (quills, bonnets, bolts of muslin?) because a new version of Jane Eyre just came out five years after the last adaptation. Just for the fun of it, check out Jane Eyrehead with Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy and Joe Flaherty on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K4UY6Zqtzo)

[LisaLisa1234]

09:53 AM on 04/29/2011

I'm currently on page 410 of Daniel Deronda, and it's taking me forever. Without giving anything away, please tell me it's worth finishing. I plan to finish it (I actually have to pretty soon--I have 2 library ebooks yet to read, soon to be due, that I waited a long time for), but I'd like to know there's something to look forward to.

[c-tom]

12:16 AM on 03/19/2011

Isn't that spelled Charlatan?

[JHCorcoran]

11:22 PM on 03/18/2011

I like them both. It depends what mood you are in. I do like Austin's wit, and her male characters consists of 'good' guys as well as 'bad' guys.

[LadyDusky]

10:51 PM on 03/18/2011

If I *had* to choose, it would be Bronte. Any Bronte.

Jane Austin bores me to tears. Her novels are like being trapped into having tea with Great Aunt Biddy the town gossip...for hours and hours.

[livesimply]

05:41 PM on 03/19/2011

F/F! I totally agree. Austin always seemed so superficial to me.

[Drjimmy72296]

10:19 PM on 03/18/2011

I'd take George Eliot over either.

Wuthering Heights, incidentally, is better than anything by Charlotte Bronte or Austen.

[muhair]

11:25 PM on 03/18/2011

You just demolished a cute construct with two irrefutable points. Middlemarch leaves them all in the dust.

[cwebster]

04:10 PM on 03/19/2011

That's a matter of personal taste. I couldn't stand Wuthering Heights...I didn't like any of the characters.

[muhair]

04:55 PM on 03/19/2011

I read Brontes in HS and college and preferred Jane Eyre, despite everyone telling me Wuthering Heights was vastly superior. Mean to revisit WH. Also found Great Gatsby less involving than Tender... and others by FSF. Sometimes a gulf lies between thematic heft and the story's appeal, though when the two work together, viz. works by Tolstoy, Dickens and Eliot (and I'd include Franzen), the result is magic.

[Drjimmy72296]

06:06 PM on 03/19/2011

It goes without saying that it's personal taste.

Austen does nothing for me. She's the literary equivalent of watching paint dry. Emma was the best of the three Austen books I read. Granted, I read these awhile back and tastes change so I might feel differently today.

Jane Eyre is pretty good but takes 150 pages or so to get going whereas Wuthering Heights had me from page one.

[Krek]

09:46 PM on 03/18/2011

First of all, it's a numerically unfair comparison - three against one. The Washington Post article is based on a comparison between Jane Austen and all three Bronte sisters.

It's also unfair because Jane Austen was a generation or two ahead of the Brontes, and a lot of her work looks back to the novel traditions of the 18th Century in a way that the Brontes do not. The Brontes were writing in a culture that had fully absorbed the ideals of the Revolutionary Age, attitudes toward individual rights, and particularly the rights of women, that is such an important feature of their work, attitudes which were 'in the air' when Austen was writing but which were not nearly as influential as the literary traditions that she grew up with.

So it's not like against like. Personally I prefer Jane Austen. She was a master prose-stylist - her writing has a very clean, almost brutal precision. She could have written anything and it would have been worth reading, simply for the way it is written. That's not true of the Brontes.

[Ed438]

09:38 PM on 03/18/2011

Even if Jane lived into the beginning of the 19th Century, the Brontes were of another generation. In other words, Austin was a classicist and Charlotte a romantic.

Apples and oranges and I'm not referring to computers!

[JHCorcoran]

11:18 PM on 03/18/2011

Ed; Right on. You know your literature!

[naschkatze]

11:41 AM on 03/19/2011

But the question is really about whether one is a classicist or a Romantic. Upper case R on purpose.

[mssreader]

06:22 PM on 03/21/2011

naschkatze, I would not call the Brontes romantic. Definitely classicist. Jane could be whimsical, full of satire AND romantic.

[atretrioeciii]

09:18 PM on 03/18/2011

I'll take Mary Shelley.

[Paul Houston]

10:39 PM on 03/18/2011

Ahh, the dark side of the possible misuse of technology!

[kareemachan]

08:46 PM on 03/18/2011

"The devoted readers of Bonnet Drama have always known that if it came down to it, if someone held a flintlock musket to their heads and demanded an answer, that “I love Jane Austen and the Brontes equally” would not suffice. Sides must be chosen."

No. No, no, no. I DO like them both equally, although if Obama ever makes his time machine available (you know, the one he used to go back in time to tell his parents what to do before he was born), I would dearly love to go back and discuss the ending of 'Villette' with Charlotte. I loved that book, and was quite distressed by the equivocal ending.

[alisonv]

08:52 AM on 03/19/2011

Just noticed the time machine remark! :-)

Faved for that, even though I'm a devoted Janeite.

[M4dwoman]

08:44 PM on 03/18/2011

I pick Andre Norton.

[alisonv]

08:40 PM on 03/18/2011

Ok, this may be slightly off subject, but is probably the right crowd...

I'm on a BBC series kick. What are some of your favorites? Mine are Foyle's War, Lark Rise to Candleford, North and South, Wives and Daughters, Cranford, Downton Abbey and Jayne Eyre. I'd love to know if I've missed anything great. Thanks!

[Gladys1963]

08:57 PM on 03/18/2011

You mentioned some great ones! The recent BBC "Emma" was very good (and on iTunes). The "Jane Eyre" with Toby Stephens is good--OMG, he is SO hot! (He's Dame Maggie Smith's son!)

"The Forsythe Saga" was excellent. And, I particularly loved the updated "Pollyanna"--the little girl was charming without being cloying.

[grouseless54]

09:14 PM on 03/18/2011

Isn't he lovely? - Stephens, that is. I don't know if if qualifies, but the original Masterpiece Theater production of Pride and Prejudice is still my favorite of all the versions.

[alisonv]

10:01 PM on 03/18/2011

I didn't know that was her son! I love him. Yes...hot, indeed! The North South guy is, too, though his name escapes me at the moment.

[BBinMT]

09:08 PM on 03/18/2011

Male here who's been watching these, too. I don't have cable. I began watching these, which generally air on Sunday nights, and I've found most of them to be quite good. Foyle's War is one of my favorites.

[alisonv]

10:02 PM on 03/18/2011

I love Michael Kitchens! Don't you love his expressions? I get the dvds from the library. It's something nice that I can watch with my Mom. We don't have the same tastes in movies, generally speaking, but we both love these series.

[portrait of a lady]

07:09 PM on 03/19/2011

BB, I don't have cable either as I can't stand tv, American tv that is. I do netflixs though who as all these old goodies and the newer ones as well. The library also carries a good many of them as they seem to be devotees of PBS Masterpiece. I also own a good many of them. I have two versions of Jane Eyre and 12 Jane Austen with several with two versions.

[bksrmgk]

08:38 PM on 03/18/2011

I am a confirmed Charlotann. I love Austin when I want something light and bright, but Jane Eyre is strength, independence, integrity, and passion. I've not seen the new movie, but of the others, feel the version with Toby Stephens was the best cast--I just ordered the DVD of him in "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Bronte--but the one with Timothy Dalton was most true to the book.

[portrait of a lady]

02:13 PM on 03/19/2011

bksrmgk, I love The Tenant of Wildfield Hall. I too like the Eyre book and like the Toby Stephens DVD as he is a great Mr. Rochester with all the passion and grief with his life and and agree that the Timothy Dalton version is true to the book. I won't see the new version. The two here are the best and the new one is not getting good reviews.

[tuffymama]

01:55 PM on 03/20/2011

Huh? The new one is getting very good reviews (check out Rotten Tomatoes). I saw it yesterday, and it's excellent.

[LisaLisa1234]

10:08 AM on 04/29/2011

Timothy Dalton spoiled me for all future Mr. Rochesters.