Jane Austen vs Emily Brontë: The Queens of English Literature Debate with Dominic West

well thank you all um very much for coming i am delighted and excited to be here welcome to this intelligent square debate jane austen versus emily bronte the queens of english literature we'll see whether our conversation remains as civilized as one of our authors tonight or grows as wild as the other for this evening we'll be setting two of the greats of english literature against each other in one corner jane austen sense and sensibility pride and prejudice mansfield park emma i don't have to tell you more in the other corner emily bronte whose sole novel was wuthering heights published just a few months after her elder sister charlotte's best seller jane eyre however though emily only wrote one novel as we all know it turned out to be one for the ages as with all intelligence square debates you've been polled as you entered the hall and you'll have the chance to vote again at the end of the evening when you've heard the arguments so be prepared to change your mind and to make the arguments on behalf of our queens we have two highly distinguished advocates for jane austen we have john mullen professor of english literature at university college london who specializes in 18th century literature he is the author of what matters in jane austen 20 crucial puzzles solved and for emily bronte we have kate moss one of britain's most celebrated historical adventure novelists her langdoc trilogy labyrinth sepulcher and citadel has sold millions of copies worldwide kate's next novel which was unveiled only today for publication in september is a gothic psychological thriller the taxidermist's daughter she is a lifelong slightly nervous and writing it yes she is a lifelong devoted bronte fan and a member of the bronte society to illustrate their argument and help persuade you to vote for their chosen writer our speakers have four wonderful actors at their disposal who will be bringing the works to life with their readings first we have samuel west acclaimed actor and director who has starred on both stage and screen and played mr elliott in the 1995 film of jane austen's persuasion we have eleanor tomlinson a rising star who played georgiana darcy in the recent bbc one adaptation of death comes to pemberley pd james's sequel to pride and prejudice she also appeared in kate moss's first play in syrinx mariah gale who has been hailed as one of the most distinctive actors of her generation she played ophelia in the rsc and bbc2 productions of hamlet with david tennant and finally dominic west who has played leading roles in international film american television and on the london stage he is perhaps best known for his role as mcnulty in hbo's the wire one of the most critically acclaimed television programs ever made and as well as giving the readings our actors will be joining in our discussion later so i'm going to begin um by asking um each of the advocates in turn to just tell us a little about how you came to your passion uh for these two authors john why don't you shamefully belatedly i i i read jane austen um i studied it at school when i was 17 and i thought it was rather trivial and i thought it was all about people trying to get married and i didn't realize that was quite an important topic at the time and i'm afraid um like many things in life i was taught by inadvertently perhaps by the people i went on to teach how utterly brilliant she was and it did it dawned on me slowly through my twenties and i came like saul to damascus really finally to realize what a blithering pool i'd been as a teenager so a relatively late conversion i'm afraid so and kate well just picture this 1978 um an amazing 18 year old kate bush dancing in the red dress me sitting in my home with a terrible tape recorder trying to quickly tape it off the top 40. um and it was one of the set books i had alongside emma and i remember sitting doing my o level sitting in the school gym you know the smell of all those ghastly gymnastic things and the scratch of all those pencils hundreds of people doing it and the questions were one for wuthering heights is it a moral and amoral or an immoral book i realized i couldn't spell amoral looking back um and the other one i'm afraid john i'm sorry to say it was about emma and it was about the importance of the piano and for me i thought there's got to be more to fiction than a sodding piano no i don't so and my mum i didn't do very well in my o levels and we have a tradition which is an un-birthday present and my o level results came out about the time there was a birthday and my mum bought me this which is a wartime edition of wuthering heights with the 1921 introduction by may sinclair and charlotte bronte's own and i've had it ever since and i still think it's the best book in the world that's it very good well that's an excellent background um for the argument that you're about to hear and the extracts also you will hear um superbly acted um so john take it away thank you very much um i've got to make a confession to start with which is i love wuthering heights and i slightly love kate actually oh hooray obviously even better that was rhetorically quite clever i think um so i'm gonna try in my little slot uh to say things about jane austen and in favor of her novels and not against wuthering heights although we might be drawn into fisticuffs later in their sort of questions and question and answer but i'll try and remain chaste for now and uh and and think positive and i'm going off piste already because i couldn't resist from what erica said she said the the the polite or the genteel versus the wild and and everybody laughed as if they recognized what those two were of course the wilds emily bronte isn't there but um wild occurs in my favorite sentence in pride and prejudice um and as i actually know this sentence and the word wild has been used i will give it to you as an example of what i'm going i hope we'll be demonstrating our first reading which is that there's plenty of emotional stuff going on in jane austen if you're ingenious enough to realize it and that's shameful my favorite sentence is about lydia don't you love her i mean you know how it is in life people like lydia or mrs bennett or mrs elton or mrs norris they are ghastly being with them would be hell but in jane austen's novels you cheer every time they come into the room don't you and whenever lydia comes in aren't you delighted and there's a wonderful bit near the end of pride and prejudice where lydia who has disgraced herself who has risked her reputation has risked everything she has been off for a month and a half with a practiced rake unmarried she is a month past her 16th birthday okay those of you who feel liberal about this about lydia and who are perhaps parents of daughters think about this a month past her 16th birthday she has been living with this man for a month and a half and he is wickham blackmailed bribed call it what you willing to marry he's paid to marry her and they come back to longboard and elizabeth and jane are waiting to see what she's going to be like and we're seeing it all through elizabeth's eyes and there's a wonderful sentence among many other wonderful sentences because one of the things about jane austen is her sentences are wonderful yes i can't prove this but almost every jane austen sentence just has a dna and couldn't have been written by anybody else but there's a wonderful sentence you're looking at lydia she comes back and it says lydia was lydia still easy isn't it you could all write that you can do that in creative writing surely yes lydia is genius but it goes on lydia was lydia still untamed unabashed wild noisy and fearless it's poetry yes it's fantastic wild she is and that's why we all find her so interesting there's lots of wildness in jane austen's novels and it throbs often beneath the surface and we're about to hear a passage i think where it's going to a different kind of wildness throbs beneath the surface but i also wanted to pick up on the piano okay well i'm sorry i've got a script i could do that but you know the piano i can't resist it the piano virginia woolf there are lots of lots of great writers have not got jane austen especially men but not just men virginia woolf a genius herself got jane austen she knew that she was the greatest novelist in the english language and she said of that greatness she said something i think really true she said of all great writers she is the hardest the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness yeah i think that's a that's a profound thought and that's why it's very easy to think nothing much to it it's why it is that as i heard a great jane austen expert say recently on the on the radio well the thing is it's very very simple and it's very very complicated and you know that thing about jane austen uh which perhaps she shares in a funny sort of way with wrethering heights that an intelligent 13 year old can read pride and prejudice and totally get it especially if it's a girl boys have to wait a bit longer in my case to the age about 26 but they totally a 13 year old who likes books will totally get it and then a 50-something prof who has read it 15 times before will pick it up to read it again because of a seminar he's got to give the next week and within about a page we'll think god that's brilliant i never saw that before and those of you here i don't know if there are some of you here like this who regularly read jane austen will know that experience that every time you read it you thought you knew it but you don't it's so simple but it's so complicated and the piano thing you can pick up anything in jane austen any thread and you know that when you think about the piano which kate was a little bit satirical about that actually oh the piano the piano that matters the pianos that matter so much everywhere that nothing is accidental or incidental or not part of this beautiful design her books are like wonderful tiny my new almost wickedly ingenious swiss watches and as soon as you start thinking about pianos if you know and love jane austen i there's no chat about pianos in my book i think but they should have been why isn't there a chat about pianos think about ann elliot who we're about to hear think about her in persuasion condemned by her brilliance and talent and the fact that she's 28 and her bloom has gone to play the piano while the man she still loves flounces around with these two fluffy girls yes she has to play for them and the piano is a kind of part of her sort of fate my how your fingers fly up and down says mrs musgrove the piano in emma of course which is the sort of weird love gift that frank churchill has given to jane fairfax and that foolish emma thinks has come from somebody else pianos always mean a hell of a lot in jane austen everything it's a hell of a lot in jail we're going to go to the first reading now now i've just said quickly what it is and what and why i've chosen it eleanor's going to do most of it um it's from persuasion and it's in persuasion as some of you all know ann elliot uh who's 28 and lost her blue has eight years before the novel begins being persuaded by her friend and mother substitute her own mother being dead her friend and mother substitute lady russell to turn down the proposal of marriage from captain frederick wentworth even though she loves him and he loves her and she's persuaded to do this because she's convinced not only that it would be foolish for her to rush into it but that actually it would be bad for him for his career which is at that moment non-existent in the navy and he is sorely offended and goes off but then he comes back eight years later anne is staying with her sister mary and mary's husband her brother-in-law charles and captain wentworth is visiting and he's at the musgroves house and she knows that he's there and she hears that he's going to come down he's going out shooting with charles and henrietta and luiza the fluffy girls and he's coming down and she's about to see him and it's been eight years and i and i chose this because well i'll tell you afterwards mary very much gratified by captain wembley's attention was delighted to receive him while a thousand feelings rushed on anne of which this was the most consoling that it would soon be over and it was soon over in two minutes after charles's preparation the others appeared they were in the drawing room ha i half met captain wentworth's a bow a curtsy past she heard his voice he talked to mary said all that was right said something to the ms musgroves enough to mark an easy footing the room seemed full full of persons and and voices but a few minutes ended it charles showed himself at the window all was ready their visitor had bowed and was gone the miss musgroves were gone too suddenly resolving to walk to the end of the village with the sportsman the room was cleared and anne might finish her breakfast as she could it is over it is over she repeated again and again in nervous gratitude the worst is over mary talked but she could not attend she had seen him they had met they had once more been in the same room soon however she began to reason with herself and tried to be feeling less eight years almost eight years had passed since all had been given up how absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness what might not eight years do events of every description changes alienations removals or must be comprised in it and oblivion of the past how natural how certain too it included nearly a third part of her own life alas with all her reasoning she found that to retentive feelings eight years maybe little more than nothing how were his sentiments to be read was this like wishing to avoid her and the next moment she was hating herself for the folly which asked the question on one other question which perhaps her utmost wisdom might not have prevented she was soon spared all suspense for after the miss musgroves had returned and finished their visit at the cottage she had this spontaneous information from mary captain wentworth is not very gallant by you anne though he was so attentive to me henrietta asked him what he thought of you when they went away and he said you were so altered that he should not have known you again mary had no feelings to make her respect to her sisters in a common way but she was perfectly unsuspicious of being inflicting any peculiar wound altered beyond his knowledge and fully submitted in silent deep mortification doubtless it was so and she could take no revenge for he was not altered or not for the worse she had already acknowledged it to herself and she could not think differently let he let him think of her as he would no the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing manly open look no respect lessening his personal advantages she had seen the same frederick wentworth so altered that he should not have known her again these were the words which could not but dwell with her yet soon she began to rejoice that she had heard them they were of sobering tendency they allayed agitation they composed they consequently must make her happier thanks very much so well i hope you heard in that brilliantly rendered last line must make her happier um the two things which are kind of quite common in jane austen which i think are especially illustrated in this passage which is first of all that um despite what uh emily bronte's sister charlotte said about jane austen jane austen did do feeling she was interested in feeling and persuasion the last of her novels the most autumnal is about sort of strangulated passion um but also and i hope you won't mind me being sort of uh a little bit sort of academic or dusty about this that's no virtue in itself if it weren't for the second fact which is her incredible technical audacity because the thing about jane austen is that she wasn't just an elegant writer and a funny writer she was also technically and formally one of the most experimental novelists in the history of english literature and lots of the later novelists from henry james to nabakov who condescended to her later nicked all her techniques actually and the technique you heard in this piece which was one she invented she invented it at parlour table in hampshire she invented it without knowing any other writers or belonging to literary circles or even having clever and interesting siblings who were writing novels as well she just invented it on her own and and and it's called free and direct style and it's the most sort of important invention in the history of the novel actually because it's the means by which as as you heard elena brilliantly do jane austen appears to tell you a story and yet lets the feelings of the character sort of bend and warp the narrative that brilliant bit at the end this must make her happier yes oh i'm really pleased he says i'm ugly oh that's good that's really really good because what it means now is i won't have any illusions about him coming coming back to me yes yes that's very good and ann elliot you'll know if you read persuasion has a certain strain of self-punishment which is both painful and yet incredibly familiar i think to any adult reading it and here in that passage you can hear the drama of her own fluctuating feelings but through jane austen's narrative and this kind of miraculous thing that she did and that nobody's ever done before and that must in the last sentence nobody had ever written that before she came along uh but thoughts of other i couldn't resist looking at some other musts which nobody would have written for jane austen there's a wonderful one i i know she's a favorite character of many people so i'll offer it to you quickly charlotte lucas in pride and prejudice ah yes charlotte lucas after she has accepted mr collins's proposal after the lightning courtship of about six hours which has lasted the length of a dinner at the lucas's entirely in the company of the clamorous bennett clan but somehow she's intuited what his designs are two days after he's been turned down by elizabeth and she's accepted his proposal and she's thinking about it and she thinks well i'm going to be married that's good and then she also it says his society mr collins's society his society was irksome and his attachment to her must be imaginary brilliant yeah any novelist apart from jane austen at the time would have written his attachment to her was imaginary but no his attack attachment to her must be imaginary must be because suddenly you're thinking with her and that's why charlotte lucas is such a famous and vivid character not because we see her in a sort of feminist light as a woman who has to sacrifice sort of has to give up so much in order to kind of get material uh stability has to sleep with mr collins she's pregnant by the end of the novel you know did you know that she's pregnant by the end of the novel yes she is she spends the whole day separate from him she arranges the room so they never bump into each other she sends him down the garden to do the chickens he enjoys doing the chickens and the gardening but at night she shares a room sorry i got diverted there but you know you know that you do with jane austen that example um that eleanor read they then you then get at the end of the chapter in which it appears um jane austen takes you to captain wentworth she leaves anne elliot she takes it to captain wentworth and says that he did indeed say something like that but of course with no idea that it would be carried back to anne because captain was not a cruel man and he did say that and uh she has him talking with his sister sophia um admiral croft's wife mrs croft and he's talking about how he wants to get married he doesn't mind who as long as they're nice about the navy and he says i only need two things a strong mind and sweetness and manner and you think oh cool that's quite a tough call but anyway you gotta have both and and you're told that uh he's still cross and about an elliott rejecting him and then jane austen writes this very innocent sentence but her power with him was gone forever and that's the last thing in the whole book you're told about what captain wentworth thinks and it's not true clever isn't it it's the last thing you're told about his his inner world and it's not true and you're left with her to watch his slowly unwillingly at first but then stimulated by jealousy because she's brilliant on that his feelings returning to her and that too is a wonderful example of how narrative gives you somebody's self-deception as much as somebody's thoughts now the next piece is a kind of example of the consequences of self-deception it's from emma and it's christmas eve and uh emma has been persuading herself and her stooge the stupendously dim-witted harriet smith that harriet although she is the daughter she's the illegitimate daughter of a mere somebody should be aspiring to marry the new vicar mr elton slick mr elton and that mr elton is really interested in her we actually know any decent reader knows that mr elton's interested only in the queen of hybri emma herself but emma doesn't see this and then on christmas eve after a bibulus party at the westerns she finds him in the back of a carriage with her on the way back and in a phrase that i sometimes have to explain to ink cautious first-year students not used to regency english making violent love to her and we're going to have some of this scene please she tried to stop him but vainly he would go on and say it all angry as she was the thought of the moment made her resolve to restrain herself when she did speak she felt that half this folly must be drunkenness and therefore could hope that it might belong only to the passing hour accordingly with a mixture of the serious and the playful which she hoped would best suit his half and half state she replied i am very much astonished mr elton this to me you forget yourself you take me from my friend any message to me smith i shall be happy to deliver but no more of this to me if you please miss smith a message to mrs smith what could she possibly mean and he repeated her words with such assurance of accent such boastful pretense of amazement that she could not help replying with quickness mr elton this is the most extraordinary conduct and i can account for it in only one way you are not yourself you could not speak either to me or of harriet in such a manner command yourself enough to say no more i will endeavor to forget it but mr elton had only drunk wine enough to elevate his spirits not at all to confuse his intellect he perfectly knew his own meaning and having warmly protested against her suspicion as most injurious and slightly touched upon his respect for miss smith as her friend but acknowledging his wonder that miss smith should be mentioned at all he resumed the subject of his own passion for it and was very urgent for a favorable answer as she thought less of his inebriati the more she thought of his inconstancy and presumption and with fewer struggles for politeness replied it is impossible for me to doubt any longer you have made yourself too clear mr elton my astonishment is much beyond anything i can express after such behavior as i have witnessed during the last month to miss smith such attentions as i have been in the daily habit of observing to be addressing me in this manner this is an unsteadiness of character indeed which i had not supposed possible believe me sir i am far very far from gratified in being the object of such professions good heaven what couldn't be the meaning of this miss smith i i never thought of miss smith in the whole course of my existence never paid her any attentions but as your friend never cared whether she was dead or alive but as your friend has fancied otherwise her own wishes of misled and i'm very sorry extremely sorry but miss smith indeed you can think of miss smith when miss woodhouse is near no upon my honor there is no unsteadiness of character i have thought only of you i protest against having paid the smallest attention to anyone else everything that i have said or done for many weeks past has been done with the soul view of marking my adoration of yourself you cannot really seriously doubt it no in an accent meant to be insinuating i am sure you have seen it it would be impossible to say what emma felt on hearing this which of all her unpleasant sensations was uppermost she was too completely overpowered to be immediately able to reply and two moments of silence being ample encouragement for mr elton's sanguine state of mind he tried to take her hand again as he joyously exclaimed charming miss woodhouse allow me to interpret this interesting silence it confesses that you have long understood no cert confesses no such thing so far from having long understood you i have been in a most complete era with respect to your views till this moment as to myself i am very sorry that you should have been giving way to any feelings and nothing could be further from my wishes your attachment to my friend harriet your pursuit of her pursuit it appeared gave me great pleasure and i have been very earnestly wishing you success but had i suppose that you were not your attraction to hartfield i should certainly have thought you judged ill in making your visit so frequent i'm am i to believe that you never sought to recommend your self particularly to miss smith that you never thought seriously of her never man never i assure you i think seriously of miss smith miss smith is a very good sort of girl and i i should be happy to see her respectively settled i i wish her extremely well and no doubt there are men who might not object to everybody has their level as for myself i am not i think quite so much at a loss i need not so totally despair of an equal alliance as to be addressing myself to miss smith no matter my visits to hartfield have been for yourself only and the encouragement i received encouragement i give you encouragement sir you have been entirely mistaken in supposing it i have seen you only as the admirer of my friend in no other light could you have been more to me than a common acquaintance i am exceedingly sorry but it is well that the mistake ends where it does have the same behavior continued miss smith might might be led into a misconception of your views not being aware probably any more than myself of the very great inequality which you are so sensible of but as it is the disappointment is single and i trust will not be lasting i have no thought of matrimony at present sadly we didn't have time we had to cut the wonderfully painful following paragraph with zigzags of embarrassment as jane austen calls them as they silently go back to ditch mr elton outside his parsonage i did i think forget to mention jane austin's very funny yes that's quite a skill difficult know what to say about it but rather funny and wonderful how the very ordinariness of it is the point that wonderful line that samuel read to such effect um everyone has his level in some works of literature evil is like iago or satan isn't it but in surrey evil's like that there is i think nobody worse in the whole of literature than mrs norris in mansfield park but she never says anything you might not hear in northamptonshire to this day um it's a wonderful bit of dialogue i've i've used too much of my time probably so i'll just say that we're going to end with a another bit of dialogue after which i'll just say a couple of sentences and then that's it and jane austen i think was the greatest writer of dialogue in the history of english fiction anyway and difficult to prove that but i will offer you one thought which is i think uh which is something alexander pope the poet said of shakespeare which i think is only true of jane austen amongst uh novelists which is he said um every character however little they have to say sounds only like themselves and the great thing about jane austen i think and her dialogue is that every character speaks only like themselves and there are some characters only speak once um in the whole of their novels and yet from what they say you know that nobody else would have said it my favorite mr hearse in pride and prejudice who says when when elizabeth declines to join their card game because they're playing for high stakes says do you prefer reading to cards that is rather singular that's the only thing he says in the whole novel well that's him isn't it that's him for all eternity but this what i thought i'd give you is a slight trick i'm gonna give you uh we're gonna have read now the uh opening uh chapter of pride and prejudice but minus the it is a truth uh universally acknowledged the single man possession of good fortune must be in want of a way um and because that's a very famous book but if you listen to what follows um it's an extraordinary sort of uh um exercise in wonderful dialogue we've never met these people before because you have you've seen them on telly and all that stuff you've read the book but in 1813 nobody met these people before elizabeth's not there it's just mr and mrs bennett on their own and we hear them talking and we hardly have a single he cried she you know if it was d h lawrence it'd be he as separated she retorted kirkley but no we haven't cut everything anything except those first cents of a chapter we just let you have a dialogue and by the end of this it's brilliant such economy you know everything you need to know about the setup for the novel but also in a way you know these two people my dear mr bennett said his lady to him one day have you heard that netherfield park is let it last mr bennett replied that he had not but it is return she for mrs long has just been here and she has told me all about it mr bennett made no answer but do you not want to know who has taken it to ride his wife impatiently you want to tell me and i have no objection to hearing it this was invitation enough why my dear you must know mrs long says that netherfield is to be taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of england and that he came down on monday in the shades and four to see the place and was so much delighted with it that he agreed with mr norris immediately that he is to take possession before michaelmas and some of his servants as to be in the house by the end of the week what's his name bingley is he married or single oh single my dear to be sure a single man of large fortune four or five thousand a year what a fine thing for our girls how so how can it affect them my dear mr bennett how can you be so tiresome you must know that i'm thinking of him as marrying one of them is that his design in settling here how can you talk so but it is very likely that he may fall in love with one of them and therefore you must visit him as soon as he comes oh i see no occasion for that you and the girls may go or you may send them by themselves which perhaps would be still better for as you are as handsome as any of them mr bingley may like you the best of the party my dear you flatter me i certainly have had my share of beauty that i do not pretend to be anything extraordinary now when a woman has five grown-up daughters she ought to give over thinking of her own beauty in such cases a woman has not often much beauty to think of but my dear you must indeed go and see mr bingley when he comes into the neighborhood it's more than i engage for i assure you but consider your daughters only think what an establishment it would be for one of them so william and lady lucas are determined to go merely on that account for in general you know they visit no newcomers indeed you must go for it would be impossible for us to visit him if you do not oh you're over scrupulous surely i dare say mr bingley will be very glad to see you and i will send a few lines by you to assure him of my hearty consent to his marrying whichever he chooses of the girls though i must throw in a good word for my little lizzie i desire you will do no such thing lizzy is not a bit better than the others i am sure she is not half so handsome as jane or half so good humid as lydia but you're always giving her the preference they've none of them much to recommend them they're all silly and ignorant like other girls but lizzy has something more of quickness than her sister mr bennett how can you abuse your own children in such a way you have take delight in vexing me you have no compassion for my poor nerves oh you mistake me my dear i have a very high respect for your nerves they are my old friends i have heard you mention them with consideration these last 20 years at least oh you do not know what i suffered but i hope you will get over it and live to see many young men of four thousand a year come into the neighborhood it will be of no use to us if twenty such should come since you will not visit them oh depend upon it my dear that when there are twenty i will visit them all mr bennett was so odd a mixture of quick parts sarcastic humor reserve and caprice but the experience of three and twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character her mind was less difficult to develop she was a woman of mean understanding little information and uncertain temper when she was discontented she fancied herself nervous the business of her life was to get her daughters married its solace was visiting and news well i suppose i should just end by saying i rest my case shouldn't i but um let jane austen do it with me but for me but uh just very briefly to say well you heard them there they are they exist don't they god knows they exist and a marriage exists in front of you an extraordinary strange marriage between uh two people one of whom fails to comprehend the other and uh two characters and i i love that phrase i love those phrases in janus which you those combinations of words which you know that nobody has ever used before mr bennett was so odd a mixture of quick parts sarcastic humor reserve and caprice well he must exist i mean he's the only person like that who has ever existed of uh uh quick part sarcastic humor reserve and caprice and that of course is what in the end everybody feels about jane austen which is beyond all sort of criticism and debate which is that people exist but they exist because she's so brilliantly and technically amazingly audaciously makes them exist thanks very much well thank you uh john uh and jane and all of our wonderful performers but um it's not over yet actually i think it probably is no no yes come on kate give us emily i will i will well uh you're just too funny and she's too funny but everything that john has said about jane austen and i'm now standing in front of you rudely um i agree with it's daft we all know it's daft every one of us in this room know that these are incredible novels all of them so it's a strange business to be here not a critic not an academic not a professor i've never spoken about emily bronte in public before but it is the novel that is the reason i'm a novelist and it's a the novel that made me a reader a real reader and i don't i don't like the idea that you always have to talk about who an author is in order to understand her or his work but i'm going to tell you a little bit about emily bronte before i start to talk about all of her writing not just the one novel but her hundreds of poems and the diary entries that she did because without knowing a little bit about who she was the fact that she is one of the great writers of imagination is lost because the things that she experienced was slight and small but the things that she dreamt and wrote and believed and felt were the world so she died young as we think of it but not particularly young in those days if you like she grew up where she was the fifth of six children she was the second youngest daughter and for most of her life she lived in a parsonage in howarth in yorkshire in that parsonage she had an older sister and an older sister and an older sister and maria died when she was 10 and elizabeth died when she was 9 or 10 and they were away at a school where charlotte the next sister and emily were too and imagine everything that you have heard about the worst of the way that children were were treated and girls in particular were treated and the environment in which those four children sent away their mother was dead to that place so she had already seen when she was very young the death of her mother and her two older sisters she came back to that parsonage and although she left it three more times she went to teach wants to dewsbury once to halifax and once to brussels basically when she was not there she was homesick she was dying for not being there she is one of those people who everything that she needed she could create out of nothing in her head so she was born one year after the great and brilliant jane austen died they have more in common than people often think john mentioned the difference of the lack of society around jane austen in terms of writers but they did both have sisters one in jane's case several in emily's case who loved them and talked to them and worked together with them so what is it that makes for me this particular writer more important than jane austen jane austen i agree with john is probably the best at dialogue of that generation of writers and possibly ever she is funny she is witty everything that uh is thrown against jane austen this idea that she didn't feel is clearly ridiculous but in the end for me what she was writing about was the purpose of romance the happy ever after ending the idea of marriage that amount of any of our lives if we're lucky that will occupy however a small amount of what life is for me when i read emma and pride and prejudice and listening to it this afternoon and hearing everybody acting the world is a lighter better place because of jane austen's novels no doubt but when i read them i was left thinking there must be more than simply the pursuit of marriage the unhappiness of marriage the small world about which she was writing all of us as novelists write about the worlds that we can write about we cannot be anybody else we can only write the stories that we have it in us to write and you will not be surprised to know because i write big adventure stories about war and faith that i like the epic i like melodrama i like the big emotions not the perfectly delicately drawn ones but in mothering heights i think it was calvino that said a classic is a classic book because it has never finished what it has to say and i have read wuthering heights every generation of my 50-plus years and every time i read it it is a different book so we think of it as a love story is it no it's not a love story it's a story of obsession yes but it's also a story of ghosts a story of haunting and the first extract that i'm gonna hand over to the wonderful actors comes from very very early on in the novel in chapter three and the story you all know this it is told by two narrators who swap backwards and forwards a man called lockwood who if you like is the representative of the middle class the ordinary the respectable the acceptable and he has come to this part of yorkshire and has taken a house a beautiful grange and he has gone to meet for the very first time the strange landlord of whom he has heard a lot of talk but knows nothing about him this man is called heathcliff and he goes to find him and he finds a set up with a young girl who appears to be the mistress of the house but to whom is she married a boy that appears to be somehow connected a master of the house but he is treated like a servant and he speaks like a servant in a local accent and there is no delineation between the servants and the people who run the house and there are animals everywhere and there is this threat of something other something not respectable and accepted and then of course this is wuthering heights and the storm comes in and lockwood cannot leave and so he is shown to a room that has never been used for a long time and it's musty and there are little words written on the sill a name over and over again catherine ninten catherine earnshaw he goes to sleep and he has a terrible nightmare and he wakes up and then he goes to sleep again and again he wakes up and so samuel is going to read lockwood and mariah is going to read the ghost of catherine cathy and dominic is going to read heathcliff this time i heard distinctly the gusty wind and the driving of the snow i heard also the fur bow repeat its teasing sound it annoyed me so much that i resolved to silence it i rose and endeavoured to unclasp the casement the hook was soldered into the staple i must stop it i'm at it knocking my knuckles through the glass and stretching an arm out to seize the important branch instead of which my fingers closed on the fingers of a little ice-cold hand the intense horror of nightmare came over me i tried to draw back my arm but the hand clung to it and a most melancholy voice sobbed let me in let me in who are you i'm katherine linton i've come home i'd lost my way on the moor as it spoke i discerned obscurely a child's face looking through the window terror made me cruel and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off i pulled its wrist onto the broken pane and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed clothes still it wailed let me in the fingers relaxed i snatched mine through the hole hurriedly piled the books up in a pyramid against it and stopped my ears to exclude the lamentable prayers it's 20 years 20 years and lockwood shouts disturb heathcliff who doesn't know that he's been put in this room and of course heathcliff is ruined by grief and vengeance and all the things that have spoiled the person that he might have been and he rushes into the room and there he finds this guest he hardly knows who starts to burble about someone at the window a woman a window a girl at the window someone called catherine and he tries to explain why he's in there and apologize but he can't actually get any further because heathcliff immediately looks at him and sees that lockwood is in a state of shock and lockwood doesn't know what to make of heathcliff what can you mean by talking in this way it's me how how dare you under my roof god he's mad to speak us heathcliff gradually fell back into the shelter of the bed as i spoke finally sitting down almost concealed behind it i guessed however by his irregular and intercepted breathing that he struggled to vanquish an access of violent emotion mr lockwood you may go into my room your childish outcry has sent sleep to the devil for me take the candle and go where you please i should join you directly i obeyed so far as to quit the chamber ignorant where the narrow lobbies led i stood still and was witness involuntarily to a piece of superstition on the part of my landlord which belied oddly his apparent sense he got onto the bed and wrenched open the lattice bursting as he pulled at it into an uncontrollable passion of tears come in are coming cathy do come do once more oh my heart's darling hear me this time catherine at last the spectre showed a specter's ordinary caprice it gave no sign of being that the snow and wind whirled wildly through blowing out the light blowing out the light now that is the beginning of this novel it is a novel that is about ghost and haunting as i said but it's also a novel that is about grief and men are being allowed to have their emotions too not everything being kept down and kept controlled and kept in a certain sort of dance that makes it appropriate and nothing is unseemly the shock when people first read this novel of seeing men weeping and talking about this is as important as the shock of seeing these wild women if you like who did not conform to the standards so the first bit of the novel is lockwood he arrives and he goes back after this strange experience and he goes back to the grange where he's staying where nelly dean is there and he says tell me about this man he wants to know the whole story of heathcliff the strange household and this is how the novel if you like gets going and it's one of the great uh critics lord david cecil said it is one of the most effectively structured novels in the english language so it is set up all the way through if you like principles of light and dark there is the storm that is wuthering heights there is the peace and the calm that is the grange there is the danger and the violence and the emotions that are shared between my men and women at wuthering heights the fact that servants and masters are on equal footing both despised or both loved everything at wuthering heights happens in the kitchen and the servants and the masters and the mistresses eat together or starve together in the kitchen if you like it is the unacceptable face of the world in which emily bronte and her sisters had seen a little bit of and if you like had withdrawn from in the grange the principle of calm the principle of light there is edgar linton there is the sense of everything is done properly there are servants there but they are out of sight they do not eat with the family but everything is calm and gentle and of course what happens is we start to hear the story from nelly dean and we learn that catherine's father had gone to liverpool one day and had come back with a child that it is described in a way that he might be of mixed race he's certainly described as very dark dead and dark-skinned liverpool is of course the great and terrible slave port for britain and he comes back with this child and throws this child into the household of his spirited daughter and his sullen and rather surly son and from that moment there is the cuckoo in the nest it is the idea that you cannot if you like just simply decide to do something differently there will be consequences to everything that you do and kathy and heathcliff as you all know they form a bond against the violence of the brother who beats her and beats him and the sense that the father weathering heights much like austin in some ways but wuthering heights is filled with children with no parents with violent parents with dead mothers with no one who teaches them how to love well and that of course is what people like emily and charlotte bronte were seeing around them they knew that this was the common uh treatment if you like in many of those clergymen schools the docs the slum children but of course when kathy goes she sees this different life they tiptoe down she and heathcliff they see the grange they see a different sort of world and they are caught they run away another theme in the novel is the way that the dogs and the animals if you like are dangerous and violent they are not pets they are not to be petted and kathy is caught and bitten by the dog and she is kept there at the grange another theme throughout the novel the idol being kidnapped kept in these two different places and because of that she starts to see a refinement that she lacks in heathcliff and in the end as they grow older and heathcliff gets angrier and angrier and puts up with the punishment that's meted out to him but every single time he is becoming a little more brutalized kathy in the end decides that she will marry not heathcliff but someone else and she does it if you like for the best of reasons but she tries to explain this in the next extra we're going to hear which again is quite early in the novel it's in chapter 9 with a conversation with nelly nelly is the servant who has been at wuthering heights lily is in the grange nelly represents the good victorian servant the person who knows that things at wuthering heights are not as they are supposed to be that people do not behave as they're supposed to behave and catherine tries to explain why she is going to make this strange decision and not marry heathcliff and heathcliff doesn't hear all of the conversation he only hears the bad bit of it and because of that he leaves and almost everything else is set in training the novel so we're going to hear an extract um elena is going to read nelly and mariah is going to read catherine i was superstitious about dreams then and i'm still and catherine had an unusual gloom in her aspect it made me dread something from which i might shape a prophecy and foresee a fearful catastrophe she was vexed but she did not proceed apparently taking up another subject she recommenced in a short time if i were in heaven nelly i should be extremely miserable because you are not fit to go there all sinners will be miserable in heaven but it is not for that i dreamt once that i was there i tell you i won't hearken to your dreams miss catherine i own i was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home and i broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of wuthering heights where i woke sobbing for joy that will do to explain my secret as well as the other i've no more business to marry edgar linton than i have to be in heaven and if the wicked man in there had not brought heathcliff solo i shouldn't have thought of it it would degrade me to marry heathcliff now so he shall never know how i love him and that not because he's handsome nelly but because he's more myself than i am whatever our souls are made of his and mine are the same and linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning or frost from fire i cannot express it but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you what with the use of my creation if i were entirely contained here my great miseries in this world have been heathcliff's miseries and i watched and felt each from the beginning my greatest thought in living is himself if all else perished and he remained i should still continue to be and if all else remained and he were annihilated the universe would turn to a mighty stranger i should not seem a part of it my love for lenten is like the foliage in the woods time will change it i'm well aware as winter changes the trees my love for heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath the source of little visible delight but necessary nelly i am heathcliff he is always always in my mind not as a pleasure any more than i am always a pleasure to myself but as my own being so a ghost story a social novel um a novel that investigates the society in which people were in a novel about race a novel about the relationship between different classes of people a novel about money about why women do marry and why men do marry but also as you heard there it's a novel about what it means to be human what it means to have a soul what faith is it isn't the christian faith that is shown in the novel through joseph or to a lesser degree nelly who thinks that catherine is too wicked to be in heaven but it is the sense of the very great idea of nature of the idea that we are part of the world not separate from it it is quite astonishing to think of this woman writing a novel of this great pantheistic brilliant if you like her language is always infused with the sense of something more something other she is not content simply even in an extract which is actually about whether a woman should marry the right man or the wrong man if you like she's not content for that to be the dialogue the dialogue is about light and dark it's about the way that love changes it's about the fact that if you deny your essential self you will be cast out over heaven and you will be left in somewhere that is irrelevant to you nothing will matter if you are untrue to yourself and you're untrue to your nature so it's all these different sorts of novels and certainly the idea of nature writing without emily bronte would there be the great willa cather would they be the great jack london it was she if you like was the heiress of the great romantic writers of coleridge and wordsworth byron yes of course sadly shelley and i think that that sort of sense of being in a tradition of writers that she was nothing to do with and would not have cared for because she was solitary she was a true artist and she cared only about the work i think that makes wuthering heights one of those completely different sorts of novels that very few people have ever managed to succeed in writing before since but everything that you have heard so far and i do understand that it sounds dramatic and a bit too much if you like in the confines of a room like this taken out of context but all of the brilliance of her writing her metaphors her language the extraordinary visit visionary mysticism of her thought is there in her poems and of course you all know that she was a very great poet she was considered a great poet and charlotte bronte came upon her poems and emily bronte was furious at first that she had read them and then little by little over many weeks charlotte bronte persuaded her to let them be published and so they took on men's names as you all know cora ellis acton bell and there was a volume of poetry published in 1846 and they paid for it themselves and it sold two copies and we all know what that's like um but it was that sense that again the language the idea of heathcliff the idea about trying to work out what made me women and men the same emotionally that for me i think is the most important part of it the idea that she didn't see any difference between men's emotions and women's emotions she did not think women should not be allowed to speak their minds or feel feel sexual love feel romantic love she but she felt that men should feel the same she did not feel that men were not allowed to have romantic love either and isabella one of the great uh characters i think in wuthering heights who is edgar's sister and makes the mistake of marrying heathcliff and heathcliff marries her in order to spite catherine and everybody else and it is a very clear story of very extreme domestic violence if you will but isabella leaves even isabella who comes from the peaceful the quiet the acceptable way of being a woman in the victorian period she does not stay she leaves and she takes her son and refuses to conform as well so all the way through the novel there is the doubling back of different sorts of standards the challenging of a double standard round and round it goes the i wanted to i supposed to share some of the poetry with everybody because i think that as erica did in her introduction and i completely understand it john's got more novels to play with than i have and i'm aware that i am simply saying why i think this one novel is such an important novel but as a writer the poetry matter just as much and there are if you have your time when you go back and you will read for example no coward soul is mine the poem that the great american poet emily dickinson asked to be read at her funeral and you will see that there is a sense of mysticism and religion that is infused with the love of land the sense of the soul and the spirit that very few poets ever retain as wuthering heights goes on you will all have seen it on the television or on film or read it yourselves it is a book of two halves it is an extraordinary structured novel there are structures of parallel lives as i've said parallel colors parallel emotions parallel philosophies but there is also the first story the heathcliff with cathy story and then the result of that non-liaison later on and so the second to last extract that you're going to hear now is still in that first part of the book when we are still hearing nelly dean telling lockwood what happened all that time ago in wuthering heights and it is the scene between catherine earnshaw who is dying and heathcliff who has been away and has left her and has come back with money and nobody knows quite where he got it from and catherine has married edgar and in fact she is pregnant she will die that night giving birth to a daughter but the pregnancy is never mentioned heathcliff has heard that she is dying that it might be the last time that he can be with her and she can be with him and so he has burst down into the grange and he is terrified nelly into letting him in and it is the last dialogue between them and edgar linton catherine's husband has gone to the church with the servants because they are the acceptable face of victorian yorkshire and there is a race against time to say everything they need to say before it is too late so in this um catherine is going to be read by mariah and nelly is going to be read by eleanor and heathcliff is read by dominic you and edgar have broken my heart heathcliff and you both come to bewail the deed to me as if you were the people to be pitied i shall not pity you not i you have killed me and thriven on it how strong you are how many years do you mean to live after i am gone i wish i could hold you until we were both dead i shouldn't care what you suffered i care nothing for your sufferings why shouldn't you suffer i do will you forget me will you be happy when i am in the earth will you say 20 years hence that's the grave of katherine earnshaw i loved her long ago and was wretched to lose her but it is past i've loved so many others since my children are dearer to me than she was and at death i shall not rejoice that i'm going to her i shall be sorry that i must leave them will you say so heath are you possessed with the devil to talk in that manner to me when you're dying do you reflect that all those words will be branded in my memory and eating deeper eternally after you have left me you know you lie to say i have killed you and catherine you know that i could as soon forget you as my existence is an office sufficient for your infernal selfishness that while you are at peace i shall ride in the torments of hell i shall not be at peace i'm not witting you greater torment than i have heathcliff i only wish us never to be parted and should a word of mind distress you hereafter think i feel the same distress underground for my own sake forgive me you never harmed me in your life now if you nurse anger that will be the worst to remember than my harsh words won't you come here again do you teach me how cruel you've been cruel and false why did you despise me why did you betray your own heart kathy i've not one word of comfort you deserve this you've killed yourself yes you may kiss me and cry and wring out my kisses and tears they'll blight you they'll damn you you loved me and what right of you to leave me for right answer me for the poor fancy you felt for linton because misery and degradation and death and nothing but god or satan could inflict would have parted us you of your own will did it i've not broken your heart you've broken it and in breaking it you've broken mine so much of the worst for me that i'm strong do i want to live what kind of living will it be when you don't god would you like to live with your soul in the grave let me alone let me alone if i've done wrong i'm dying for it isn't it enough you left me too but i won't upgrade you i forgive you forgive me it's hard to forgiven to look at those eyes and feel those wasted hands kiss me again and don't let me see your eyes i forgive what you've done to me i love my murderer but yours how can i they were silent their faces hid against each other and washed by each other's tears i grew very uncomfortable meanwhile for the afternoon war fast away and i could distinguish by the shine of the western sun up the valley a concourse thickening outside gimmick and chapel porch air long i perceived a group of servants passion passing up the road towards the kitchen mr linton was not far behind now he is here oh for heaven's sake hurry down and be quick stay among the trees until he's fairly in i must go with cathy but i if i live i'll i'll see you again before you're asleep i won't stray five yards from your window you must not go you shall not i tell you for one hour not for one minute i must linton will be up immediately oh don't don't go it's the last time edgar will not hurt us heathcliff i shall die i shall die damn before hush hush catherine i'll stay if he shot me so i'd expire with a blessing on my lips thank you i do understand that it is just insane to ask you to do that in front of a lovely audience who were laughing just 10 minutes ago to sort of i suppose get to the end of my pitch for emily um all of these things for a novel to be all of these different things that calvino idea that a classic is a book that hasn't yet finished i think that wuthering heights is one of those novels that every single time you read it you see something more in it but when it came out just imagine this they had the volume of poetry that came out and then jane eyre was published and then a few months later a dual volume that had wuthering heights and anne bronte's novel agnes gray and the reaction to wuthering heights even for someone like emily bronte who lived outside the world and quite careless what people thought about her was extraordinary one of the reviews we know nothing in the whole range of fictitious literature which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity or graham's lady magazine how a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he admitted a dozen chapters is a mystery it is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors and so it went on and one of the i think the most touching things was to know that after emily bronte died um clippings from five of those reviews were found in her desk um so she did care a bit maybe but this is where i suppose i think wuthering heights matters most it changed what it was possible for women to write and for women and men to be and for men to write there was the sense i think following after wuthering heights that all the things that we as people feel are not so different just because we're a woman or a man the idea that women must write acceptable things that the only proper subject for a woman writing is love and marriage this goes out the window with wuthering heights the idea that men should not be grieving should not be full of passion should not be allowed to be vengeful if you like is also completely unparalleled in any part of victorian literature emily bronte's wuthering height is not a moralizing novel the only people who moralize are the christians and they are hypocritical and they are violent and they turn a blind eye to everything going around them that is wrong but worry about appearances and again that same word respectability because of everly bronte it was quite clear that a woman who was an artist and a man who was an artist had the same mission and what is that to write what we think is true to write what we think matters so it's not that i am bored with jane austen at all but for me that business of finding a husband that moment of the happy ever after that finishes with the lead characters not the secondary characters of course but finishes at that moment of prince charming is there what about the rest of life what about all of those other emotions and so wuthering heights i think is one of those novels that we read it at different times in our lives every time we read jane austen we laugh and we smile yes of course a brilliant stylist yes of course brilliant at dialogue but in wuthering heights you see what it is to be an ambitious writer is it perfect no novel is perfect but is it right for an artist to be ambitious to write the one thing that feels true yes i think it is so i think in the end jane austen was a writer of brilliant wit brilliant observation i think emily bronte was a mystic i think she was a writer of exceptional imagination of exceptional faith and understanding a writer that saw everything in the world as being part of the experience that makes us human and after the whole of the story of wuthering heights is over and we have seen the parallel storylines the narrator 20 years ago and then we have seen the whole story running down if you like of young kathy and her marriage to linton they've all got the same names it's very confusing um and then we've seen hayton who is he the son has been made brutalized and cathy and he little by little fall in love and they will at the end of the novel quit wuthering heights the principle of stool the principle of calm and they will go to the range and they will be married on new year's day and the next generation has finally if you like come out of the shadow of the violence and the grief and the obsessive love that never gave anybody happiness at all and the novel is left in the final paragraphs for my money i think they're the best three paragraphs in any novel the novel is left to lockwood to finish the outsider who came in at the beginning and was told this story about heathcliff and his cathy and it is left to lockwood when he is leaving wuthering heights leaving the grange for good he is the restoration of order if you like but he can't quite resist going one last time to look at the graves of those three people catherine earnshaw heathcliff the man with only one name and no history an edgar linton who was a gentleman and an important man because again he is the if you like the cuckold in that story but he is a gentle and a good man too and so all types of men i think are in this novel and all types of women are in this novel and the critics were wrong because emily bronte wrote a novel like that it meant that all of us coming after could be as ambitious as we want and so samuel is going to finish off as lockwood with the final three paragraphs of weathering heights my walk home was lengthened by a diversion in the direction of the curve when beneath its walls i perceived decay had made progress even in seven months many a window showed black gaps deprived of glass and slates jutted off here and there beyond the right line of the roof to be gradually worked off in coming autumn storms i sought and soon discovered the three headstones on the slope next the moor the middle one grey and half buried in the heath edgar linton's only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot heathcliff's still there i lingered round them under that benign sky watch the moths fluttering among the heath and hair bells listen to the soft wind breathing through the grass and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth just brings tears to your eyes i'm going to leave um samuel's beautiful voice in in everybody's ears to say that for most novelists show us a little bit of life they show us a little bit of a world they show us a slice of society a slice of emotion they divide up women and men into women over there and men over there for me emily bronte showed us the world and then she showed us the sky and then she shows us everything else above that thank you well that was immensely stirring stuff i think you will all agree it will be very interesting um now i think i'm going to tell you what the votes were as everyone was coming in and then in about 12 minutes you're going to vote again we'll talk a little bit you'll have your chance to ask questions and it will be interesting to see the transformation if there is one so before you all came in for jane austen 55 of you put your cards in the box 24 percent of you went for emily bronte leaves a crucial swing you kick the rest of you yes of 21 so we're definitely in an underdog you know situation but there's always hope um you know i i just thought i would start i think um that kate was very honest um in drawing our attention to some of the criticism that was leveled against um wuthering heights um i would be therefore i think unfair not to mention um a letter um that my compatriot mark twain wrote in 1898 to a chat called joseph twittle about the novels of jane austen i haven't any right to criticize books he said and i don't do it except when i hate them i often want to criticize jane austen but her books madden me so that i can't conceal my frenzy from the reader and therefore i have to stop every time i begin every time i read pride and prejudice i want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin bone all right yeah it's funny isn't it every time i read it i mean there's something nickeling him there isn't there oh yeah every time i read it he kind of knows he's um in a cliche that's i think luckily passing out of the language somewhat you might say he's in denial i seem to remember mark twain who was in literary terms an anglophobe um was also rather unkeen on shakespeare actually as well and felt he'd been grotesquely overvalued um well what can i say yes i mean he is he is going back to it and and and there's he's he's actually in quite good company there are quite a lot of people who do this who are great writers themselves you know i mentioned nabacop and charlotte bronte there are lots and lots of them um there's a great letter from joseph conrad uh to h.g wells saying i've just and it's always pride and prejudice i've just read it there's nothing in it is it who's there and then usually the person they've written to write back to him um nabokov wrote to his friend that critic edmund wilson said i've just read pride and prejudice um this is from one of my opinion one of the great stylists one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century i've just read pride and prejudice can you confirm that like all novels by women there's nothing in it and edmund wilson wrote that rather tactfully and said um well i can't comment on the larger issue but i think you're a bit wrong about the pride and prejudice so many said a remarkable thing and this is sort of 1950s kind of high sort of appreciation of modernism he said um something which i think is true so actually he said they're only she is along with james joyce she is the only novelist writing in english has a true sense of novelistic form you should appreciate that why don't you try again and then he says very kindly maybe not pride and prejudice because it's a bit funny but try mansfield park parts he went back and labored away at it and sort of back you know there's there's a great tradition of writers who sort of don't get it and get take pride in not getting it and who rail at it's the ordinariness and constrictedness apparently of it but that's just the frame in which she does her pictures isn't it i mean that's just it's a courtship novel you know that's like saying it's a shakespearean comedy it's uh i mean you know it's that's just the convention and those who don't like conventions often don't get the incredible subtlety of what's going on within them and mark twain mark twain's tormented by the fact that there is something there and it's making him very very angry now i'm i am mindful that we need to have some time um for questions from the floor we have uh roving mics i think do we want to bring up do we want to bring up the lights a little bit so i can see people and there's also a microphone uh for you guys up on top right there so um now's the time to ask your questions to challenge our advocates who's going to kick us off gentlemen over there and i am nicely done sir um uncle tony tanner traveled the world lecturing because that's what he liked to do and he said whenever he loved to travel whenever they asked him to go to somewhere um and they said talk about whatever you want because he was very eminent academic he said i would always do only one of two things uh shakespeare or jane austen because those were the two things you could be absolutely certain that wherever you were people would think they recognized he said and whenever you lectured on jane austen contrary to your view sir i mean i don't know about latvia but tony said to me wherever you went always the same thing happened at the end of his talk there'd be questions and then people would split up and somebody would come up to him at the end and they would say professor tanner thank you very much i think that probably explaining to your students in england the social conventions and so on and pride and prejudice must in the late 20th century be very difficult but i can tell you here in ecuador we and i was on a blinking discussion program about pride and prejudice on their centenary and one of the other critics was from india and i couldn't believe it he actually said that in front of me he said well i think that mrs bennett may seem but i tell you in india so i someone else who do we have this there's a gentleman over here well i think one of the um i was drawn to the fact that both uh panelists spoke about the idea of dialogue being so strong in both of these now in the modern day obviously we have a lot of media that work without needing so much description we have film we have television where you can see a lot of what would need to be described in a book such as the settings that all of these take place in which of the two or perhaps both do you think have had a stronger impact on the modern media types outside of their own work so not including for example pride and prejudice on television kate do you wanna well it's it's very interesting i think that i suspect john and i would draw um entirely opposite conclusions from um the same information on this i don't know for me i think that the fact that everybody knows heathcliff and kathy they under they that is a byword i'm like taking what that gentleman said as well the sense of the great love story of all love stories in the end people understand that as a shorthand which is about passion and love not simply courtship but the fact that nobody tries to polign the characters that nobody tries to rewrite different bits of it to write a slightly different ending to take it on for me shows that wuthering heights is an exceptional work of art because it is complete it is absolutely complete so you can't start telling other stories so from that point of view it has been filmed several times and of course i mentioned kate bush you know many of us will remember that but also actually there's a very strong genesis album which is all particularly the bits that sam was reading at the end you know with the unquiet slumbers and the the the sleepers in the earth but actually it is itself it is so extraordinarily and magnificently itself that it hasn't been picked up and modified and morphed into other things whereas i think that what is very interesting about jane austen is that because it is it is forgive me john but it is confined in that it is a certain sort of courtship in a certain sort of environment for certain sort of people actually you can take lots of bits out of it you can take characters you can write them again in a different sort of way and i suspect john will show think that that shows austin is is more important whereas i i think it shows the opposite but i would say austin probably has had more adaptations and been taken into media more than weathering heights whether in heights is itself yeah well endless adaptations aren't there clueless is the only good one i think yeah but i think but kate makes her cakes makes a very interesting point about what does it say about these characters that one is able to kind of take them out of their setting um whatever you think of these death comes to pemberley and there's an adaptation on the radio right now um strength or weakness of these characters well i mean it's it's it's it's it's like you know those shakespeare plays which endlessly provide material for sort of hollywood films i mean on the one hand jane austen will survive all this and and and um although i sometimes wince a bit you know it that's silly because it's also tested me to the fact that of course you know elizabeth bennett and mr darcy it's in a fantastically reusable thing and it's reusable because it's brilliant because it's absolutely brilliant and you can strip away you can still do it without a single word they actually say in the novel and still we'll recognize it and get a little bit of the sort of voltage the voltage of these kind of characters who you can tell how much they fancy each other because of how sure they are that they don't really like each other that sort of thing um and we all and that you know that's just one example so um and yeah she is very very usable and of course she's useful because of that other thing which is the thing which makes one wince with a bit which is the sort of the the heritage aspect of it which is always interesting because actually journalists hardly describes anybody's clothes or any houses or anything like all that stuff that is lavished on us by film and tv she's not that interested in really but that is part of what makes her alluring to people and up there on the heights it's not quite so lush is it i wonder if any of our distinguished performers want to comment on that um the adaptation that specifically issue i was very pleased to be a small part of persuasion in 95 um partly because i think it's a very good adaptation but partly because uh thank you partly because roger michelle is actually not a floral bonnet kind of guy um there are precious few wigs in that piece there's almost no makeup and um it's mostly about what happens between the people uh i think it was you're absolutely right about the um uh about the the she's not interested in flora bonnets anymore or at least if somebody is interested in floral bonnets they're not a very interesting person in jane austen are they turned out this is mrs elton actually wears a special bonnet it's referred to her and a basket for effect sean petra and it's referred to as her apparatus of happiness now now our i have to say our apparatus of happiness is the voting boxes um which are about to be passed um among you you have cards that look like this you have to tear them in half i'm demonstrating you can only win you can only i don't think so jane won 50 now i can lose you were just brilliant john really lovely such excitement let me see what they look like we can because we can keep talking i'm very pleased that you are so excited about voting but it means that while you vote um we can take a couple more is there any anyone at the top that i'm missing there's a question here a lady here sort of in the middle keep your hand up until the microphone comes to you and of course charlotte bronte did do a certain amount of uh slightly toning down of emily's you know bothering heights because when you see the original one that was published and then of course the 1850 edition she was so worried this idea that she was unwomanly it was inappropriate for a woman to be writing this sort of thing that she was vulgar she was coarse that she tried to just a little bit softly wasn't there a dialect sort of a dialect in particular particularly with joseph the servant and zilla um at the at the end and that nobody would understand it and of course again that's the same sort of sense of making it acceptable the idea that a yorkshire dialogue or working class dialogue is inappropriate and unacceptable and that you know nice readers wouldn't really want this sort of thing particularly from a woman so you know that that's always the issue with editing because you know i'm sure you feel the same john i'm always delighted when my editor's got a book think thank you save me you know this is what so you know there is a relationship there which is you know it depends whether where the power is but often the idea that you don't fight to the last minute over that comma that your editor says i've never met a writer that gives in on things they believe in like that but you know this lady now has a microphone i would i'm a a pretty avaricious reader and um i've read most of austin and most of the brontes and all i could after following the discussions it made me think turn my head to the to the bearing books and i know the finesse of the writing is what has been talked about much more but the ones that stick out in my mind through the color and the description and the vividness and its unforgettableness will always be the brontes whether it be emily charlotte or anne because the picture that they paint is far more vivid to me than any of jane austen's however much i love them well thank you i feel the same exact for the same week but i think there is an element and we avoid all of this because obviously we're we're being put in this debating uh situation and that's not what it's like with books you know we all read lots of books and and it's not it's not actually a gladiatorial competition but there is an element of taste of course in there that it is very straightforward that if you like beautiful delicate perfect work you will make one choice and if you like big bold splashes of paint everywhere you will make a different one and for me that was exactly why i thought i'd come and give it a go for bronte because in the end i think that epic enormous power the idea of what artists can produce is more to more appealing to me than the perfect but for me in the end slightly bloodless sense of perfection i mean that literally john you know obviously were you wishing to interject uh no i was i wanted to follow up because we started with kate bush which was my way into wuthering heights as well it was very interesting on the history of punk recently to hear that john lyden thought that kate bush was a vanguard of the punk movement it's quite odd to hear that from a member of the sex pistols but i also know that kate bush wouldn't have written a song she apparently hadn't read the book that she has now she wouldn't have written a song inspired by jane austen bronte is the punk and when i was to carry the musical thing along i was trying to think don't make me choose between these two and i'm very pleased i don't have to vote but there is something about if you think of pride and prejudice as cosifante for instance you have to be in the right mood for mozart do you know what i mean and if he's not if you're not you want to throw him across the room and i have just thrown northanger abbey across the room whereas if you're not in the mood for the right of spring which is the weather which is wuthering heights it will make you be in its mood it doesn't care on the other hand i'm very pleased i live in a world where they both exist and i don't think one of them is better than the other that's pretty good there's a question the brontes are punk i think it's a good t-shirt we can work on that one there's a question here um you were talking about adaptations of austin and bronte before and i was wondering slightly fancifully and this goes to the actors as well as our experts people talk about uh some of our best tv shows like the wire being the novels of the age um considering that a modern day austin and bronte could be doing anything theoretically working in film or for tv or doing social observation from the pages of a newspaper what would you imagine them being brilliant at well i i mean is that one of those kinds of would shakespeare be writing eastenders type thing i mean i suppose i think that for both austin austin and emily bronte and charlotte bronte too have have certain things in common and one is that they weren't especially emily bronte and jane austen they weren't as it were popular figures in their own lifetime jane austen died relatively young too she was 41. and if she'd lived he'll say she was 51 i think she undoubtedly would have become quite famous um and would have become and would have met coleridge i mean god knows everybody else had met coleridge um and but she didn't she didn't and i think both i mean kate's a wonderful description i think true description of emily's emily bronte's kind of um intense fierce you can hear it's all fierce fierce fierce isn't it totally fierce um something a bit unrelenting but fantastic about that she fiercely attended to and produced this extraordinary novel um and i don't think that i mean she and jane austen that's what they were interested in yeah they weren't you know they weren't interested in doing something else i mean jane austen liked to make some money from her novels she'd like people to read them but from her own recordings of what people said about them most of the things people said about them were blinking stupid and you know she must have not felt particularly she had some huge appreciative audience so i don't think they're the right ones to write eastenders at all dickens yes if you're talking about dickens he would have been interested in whatever got the biggest audience whatever got the biggest check definitely and he would have been a genius at it um but i don't think austin and no no like that i mean you know they're they're when i was sort of reading around your your bit as it were for this you know there are a lot of quite silly comments often made about austin that she would be the carrie bradshaw or the black you know the idea that somehow um which are very no exactly um so there's the idea that somehow the observation the sense that she was observing and then putting an artistic gloss on the world she saw would make her more suited to things who knows because i think you're right that she was publishing under her own name she was clearly potentially in some form of society and would probably have met other writers if she'd had longer to to go i think the thing about emily bronte is that actually people talk about her a lot um that she wasn't this sort of difficult weird person that is sometimes presented a lot of that comes down from gaskell's biography of charlotte bronte and she'd never actually met emily bronte and there was this myth partly about her death you know all these things that actually emily bronte was the tallest of the bonte she was the thinnest it you know she clearly was in modern language anorexic every time she was somewhere she didn't want to be she simply stopped eating in wuthering heights almost everybody who wishes to affect their own death stops eating in order to die heathcliff dies because he just stops so you know she all of these things played into it and the fact that when she was buried it was the smallest coffin ever made for an adult and 17 inches wide um all of these things sort of contributed almost to a pathology of emily bronte's this like weird difficult person with mad red staring eyes but actually she was just completely an artist and you know who i think she'd be i think she'd be tracy emin you know she would be just going this is what i'm doing that won't come from well no i like that no she'd just do her thing regardless because it would be the art that mattered regardless of anything else so tracy emin and emily bronte truly you heard it here first so we're just there's a question at the back while we're waiting for the votes to arrive it's a comment um i think it's not them really against cheddar and we're so lucky we've all agreed that this is we're lucky to have them both but i really think jane austen was definitely not about just marriage or marriage as a goal i think she was she inspired me as a teen when i was single she still inspires me as a you know an older person um as a woman and i think she was possibly the first feminist and she's she's been brilliant and i think it's more difficult and potentially a higher testament to the craft to do something with humor and an absence of tears and drama although that was the performances of the actors were just amazing so thank you very much and so just saying it wasn't just about the marriage i think and she she was single they both i guess died single so hey um still left something behind right i think that shows that austin is still still speaking to plenty can i just say very quickly about that the point is i know it's pedantic thing she wrote comedies comedy's ending marriage that's what they do as you like it has four people don't complain about oh shakespeare comedies oh very conventional they all end in marriage you know whoa terrible that he was such a conservative honestly so limited as well i mean that's what comedies do they but the thing is of course shakespeare wrote leah and macbeth and othello and you know as well it it's that isn't it it's the idea of the what yeah but we don't think twelfth night's a worse a work of genius because he wrote lear as well it's a total work of genius it's as good as leo there i think we're going to disagree on that as well john i like a high body count surely you've picked this up by now yeah yeah can i just ask how much you think the differences you're discussing are due simply to the period of time at which both women live yeah it's true it's true i mean emily bronte this is the thing i didn't say because it would have lost me loads of votes but i mean emily bronte are you still voting hang on um emily bronte wrote wuthering heights in her 20s jane austen did write a couple of novels in her 20s and they didn't get published and then she got a chance to rewrite them and she wrote novels in her mid to late 30s and by the time she was writing them she'd had a go and had to go and had a go and it's not surprising that even her second novel pride and prejudice is a masterpiece whereas emily bronte what would she have written if she'd gone on into her 30s i think that's a fair thing she didn't write them so we don't know but to me wuthering heights is quite a rackety novel it's a work a genius but it's quite rackety and chaotic and she would have gone on to write even better or possibly not because i think there is something about the one great work of art and there are many people who produce that one great novel um and sometimes that's enough you know when you've said what you want to say yeah that's it and now the audience has said what they want to say i have just been handed the vote so we remember before the debate 55 austin 24 bronte with a don't know of 21 the ukips as we've decided after the debate jane austen 51 emily bronte 47 yes thank you so that's a swing john we have i would just like i would just like to thank everyone for coming tonight i would like to thank kate and oh it's very there we go swing 13 that's that would get you john god you'd win liverpool south east i'm going for west writing all of our participants all of you intelligent squared thank you so much for a splendid you

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 569,193

Keywords: Intelligence Squared, Debate, great oratory, Intelligence Squared debate, speech, top debates, best debates, most interesting debates, educational debates, intelligence2, intelligencesquared, is debate, iq2, iq2 debate, iq squared, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Sam West, Dominic West, Kate Mosse, John Mullan, Mariah Gale, Eleanor Tomlinson, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, Heathcliff, Mr Darcy, Sense and sensibility, Catherine Earnshaw, etnorbnetsua

Id: mP8dllTkpEg

Length: 114min 4sec (6844 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 05 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/valpal12]

So after watching this, would you have changed your vote? I am not a Bronte fan, however the debate was a powerful one. I feel like they missed the mark on some of the answers they provided from the audience questions though.