Jane Austen Vs. Emily Brontë

Like many, I suppose, I fell in love with Jane Austen when I first read Pride and Prejudice and met the clamorous Bennet family. But it was Persuasion, and that beautiful combination of Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth -- their history, their emotions, the way they unfold in Austen's words, the way they re-meet after eight years, the letter he writes her towards the end -- that will forever endear her to me. Her dialogue. Her characters. Her humor.

Wuthering Heights was spectacular, though in a much darker and perhaps more wild way. The back-and-forth between narrators, the abundance of ghosts, the violence of everything from weather to emotion -- truly and profoundly affecting. 

With that, this podcast: it's simply impossible to explain how much I loved it. The arguments in favor of each author are so well constructed, and laced with passion. The readings are terrific (with Dominic West -- who played McNulty in The Wire -- as Wentworth, Mr. Bennet, and Heathcliff at different points), and though I'd like to say it made me consider Brontë's superiority, quite the opposite was the case: I could not be more firmly on team Austen. Her skill -- among many, of course, though this one I believe she shares brilliantly with J.K. Rowling -- is the same as what Alexander Pope said of Shakespeare: how every character, however little they have to say, sounds only like themselves. And she does it wittily, cleverly, and funnily, in a combination that still has audiences laughing and resonating today.

I will offer, though, in total agreement with the side that favors Emily Brontë: she forged a path for female writers that Jane Austen did not. In Wuthering Heights, the emotions of men and women exist in great parity, and those sensations normally (and almost exclusively) ascribed to women found a home in men, and vice versa. The darkness, too. The tearful, brooding, regretful dialogue. The tragedy (How can you not be in tears when Heathcliff and Catherine talk for the final time?). As the Brontë side argues in this podcast, "She changed what women could write about." In a single published novel, that is no small feat.

It's nearly two hours long, but worth every second.