Lewes allows that "Miss Austen is not a poetess, has no 'sentiment'" – or, as Austen might put it, "sensibility". Charlotte, enraged, responds: "Can there be a great artist without poetry?" She contrasts Austen's prissy decorum with the "deep feeling for his kind" that in her eyes enriches and validates the satire of William Makepeace Thackeray, who had championed Jane Eyre to the extent that London gossip assumed "Currer Bell" had been his governess and mistress.
In 1850, Charlotte returns to the attack in a letter to WS Williams, the supportive literary adviser to her publisher who became a close epistolary friend. Now Charlotte has read Emma, and she dislikes it even more. She acknowledges that Austen "does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of well-bred English people curiously well", but "she ruffles the reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound; the Passions are perfectly unknown to her". Her scorn mounts: "Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete, and rather insensible... woman; if this is heresy – I cannot help it."
"Heresy" it remains. Did Charlotte even know that both novelists were the offspring of impecunious Church of England clergymen who struggled to support large families while their daughters toiled to combine heavy domestic duties with the fulfilment of the literary gifts that few expected them even to possess, let along bring into the public domain? Her own father, Patrick Branty, a talented but penniless boy from County Down, had overcome every obstacle to enter St John's College, Cambridge, and on his path towards ordination in the Church was subsidised by the great Abolitionist William Wilberforce.
Charlotte's striking refusal of any solidarity or sympathy with Jane rings down the years. Much was at stake then; it continues to be at stake now. Charlotte knew on which side she stood: burning passion against cool calculation; spontaneity against artifice; free nature against bloodless cultivation; Romantic self-expression against neo-Classical control; Gothic sensation against drawing-room finesse; humble folk against scheming snobs; womanly virtues against ladylike manners. Plenty of readers have added, then and now: North against South. Of course, any close reading will blur these battle-lines, but the Brontës enjoyed a scrap.
After a period in which versions of Austen hogged our screens, the Brontës have fought back. Released today, Andrea Arnold's savagely uncompromising Wuthering Heights joins a line of adaptations of Emily's only surviving novel that began in 1920 (a lost work by AV Bramble) and went on to include renderings from directors as varied as William Wyler – with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon still the ranking Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw to many fans – and Yoshishige Yoshida, Luis Buñuel and Jacques Rivette. Earlier this year, Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre, with Mia Wasikowska as the uncowed governess and Michael Fassbender the sulphurous Mr Rochester, offered a rather smoother ride through another much-adapted book, albeit one that shares with Arnold – and the Brontës – a rapt attention to every squall and storm that blows across the ever-changing skies above the Yorkshire moors.
Yet the Brontë season will not end with Andrea Arnold and her black Heathcliff – a piece of casting that picks up on a long critical debate not only about the origins of the "dark-skinned gipsy" found wandering the streets of Liverpool, but about the colonial dimensions of both books. (In 1966, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea imagined the Jamaican life of Bertha Mason, the first, attic-bound Mrs Rochester.)
Read more
- Five novelists on what the Brontës mean to them
- Margaret Drabble
- Michèle Roberts
- Sarah Hall
- Stevie Davies
- Kate Mosse
