BSW: Welcome, writer of wits and creator of the sprightly
Elizabeth Bennett, Jane Austen!
JA: Pleasure.
BSW: Miss Austen, I’ve asked you here to respond to the criticism you’ve
received from Charlotte Brontë,
author of Jane Eyre, and Mark Twain,
author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Whose review should I start with?
JA: The more sensible sex, naturally. In that manner I can
exercise my intelligence and work to a sweat heartily, and then cool down with
the lighter task of addressing the American male. Gruff beasts of passionate
declarations they make themselves out to be, I find that under all that fire is
a creature no more excitable than a temperamental toddler in want of attention.
BSW: Right, then. Brontë complained that your work had no passion,
stating “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 . . . this
Austen ignores . . . Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a
very incomplete, and rather insensible woman.”
JA: She’s clearly never read Emma, but if I found one production from an artist to be disagreeable
I’d likely not bother with the endeavor to read any proceeding productions. She
says I write with no heart? Well, from an author whose characters fling
themselves from burning buildings, I suppose my characters might seem a bit
reserved. But my art does not acquaint itself with literal burnings and
blindings; I dabble in the art of subtlety, and human emotion as it was
commonly expressed during my day. I was born in 1775. Pride & Prejudice was published just three years before Miss Brontë herself
was born. The time in which I wrote my work was on the cusp of change, so those passions she wishes I would have excited in
my characters were by no means the norm she was accustomed to. But if they
were, would I have written them that way? No. I don’t have unintelligent
readers, therefore I’m not going to present obvious theatrical displays to get
my points across – the passion I wrote can be found in many of my pages for
those of the right mind to look.
BSW: Brontë also felt your world was too uptight, “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.”
JA: Did she bother to read any of my novels? Or did she
simply detest them because they were of noted opinion and she made sport of
always opposing what’s popular? One word, Brontë: Pemberely.
BSW: Perhaps Bronte wanted something more wild than the
grounds of Pemberley.
JA: She invented Edward Rochester’s face for that purpose,
didn’t she?
BSW: Let’s move on to Twain’s review. Twain said “Just that
one omission alone [of Jane Austen’s books] would make a fairly good library
out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.”
JA: That isn’t a review of a specific distaste for my
writing so much as it’s a distasteful remark.
BSW: Twain also said “Everytime I read Pride and
Prejudice I want to dig [Austen] up and beat her over the skull with her own
shin-bone.”
JA: Oh, there would be no need for digging, I’d grant him
passage to my grave willingly and offer the addition of my forearm if it meant
the opportunity to watch an excitable child at play. I am fond of children, as
you know.
Thanks for stopping by, Ms. Austen!
Thanks for stopping by, Ms. Austen!
