Charlotte B. Austen Research Paper
“Anything like warmth or enthusiasm, anything energetic, poignant, heartfelt, is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstrations the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as outré or extravagant. She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well. There is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy, in the painting. She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her: she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood… What sees keenly, speaks aptly, and moves flexibly, it pits her to study: but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen scat of life and the sentient target of death - that Miss Austen ignores.”
Though Charlotte Bronte, one of the finest English novelists, contradicted with and criticized Miss Austen’s novel writing in several ways, it is the latter who has proven …show more content…
It is because of her interest in such themes that her novels are timeless and still read with great interest even today. Austen’s novels concern themselves with the landed gentry in England. Their social importance is primarily based on inherited property, the history of their families, and morals and manners. There is a very elaborate and subtle class-structure. She has fixed certain standards of reference by which manners are judged in her novels, the code of behavior being rather unyielding. This is why her novels are often identified as “novels of manners.” By modern standards, the world that she has created is too rigid and formalized. Such a class-structure and code of behavior is plainly beyond the understanding and of value to many modern
Though Charlotte Bronte, one of the finest English novelists, contradicted with and criticized Miss Austen’s novel writing in several ways, it is the latter who has proven …show more content…
It is because of her interest in such themes that her novels are timeless and still read with great interest even today. Austen’s novels concern themselves with the landed gentry in England. Their social importance is primarily based on inherited property, the history of their families, and morals and manners. There is a very elaborate and subtle class-structure. She has fixed certain standards of reference by which manners are judged in her novels, the code of behavior being rather unyielding. This is why her novels are often identified as “novels of manners.” By modern standards, the world that she has created is too rigid and formalized. Such a class-structure and code of behavior is plainly beyond the understanding and of value to many modern