Abstract
Charlotte Brontë’s views on Jane Austen are well known. G. H. Lewes sent her Pride and Prejudice to read after the publication of Jane Eyre, thus neatly linking the first three authors under examination. She was not impressed, comparing the work of her predecessor to a neat, well-ordered garden and complaining of the lack of poetry and by implication of passion in it. The verdict is an unfair one, although it is sometimes echoed by modern readers. To do her justice, Brontë did add, in a passage which editions of her letters unaccountably omit, praise of Austen for her lack of windy wordiness and her clear common sense. But in general she dismisses her as too prim and proper, a Victorian writing before her time. The verdict she gave on Austen to Lewes was repeated in a letter to W. S. Williams.1
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Notes
T. Winnifrith, The Brontës and Their Background (London, 1973), pp. 23–4, 96–7.
‘I love the Church of England with all its faults.’ T. Wise and J. Symington eds, The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence (London, 1932), II, p. 166.
C. Alexander, The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (London, 1987) gives an excellent account of these fantasies.
The Spell: An Extravaganza, written between 21 June and 21 July 1834.
G. Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters (Oxford, 1954), 1, pp. 268.
The idea that men’s sexual urge was inescapable and fairly constant was standard medical opinion. The comparison was with women who had no sexual urges until they were deflowered. See M. Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender (London, 1989), pp. 24–50.
T. Winnifrith and E. Chitham, Brontë Facts and Problems (London, 1989), pp. 11–12.
This book, first published in 1966, has undoubtedly led recent critics to look at Bertha Mason in a more favourable light as a member not only of an oppressed sex but of an oppressed race. Neither reading is wholly compatible with Rochester’s account of his first marriage.
M. Allott, The Brontës: The Critical Heritage (London, 1974), pp. 105–12.
Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (Yale, 1976), pp. 372–98, seize on Eva’s dream and the myth of Mother Nature, but are rightly conscious of the pessimism in Shirley about this myth being able to survive in the real world.
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© 1994 Tom Winnifrith
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Winnifrith, T. (1994). Brontë. In: Fallen Women in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377721_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377721_3
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