Don’t hold back, Ms. Bronte. <a href="http://thebennetsisters.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/when-other-authors-hate-pride-and-prejudice/"Tell us what you really think.
Of course, it’s hard to say what’s taste and what’s just reaction against “old-fashioned” books, when it comes to writers of different eras and aims. But it’s kinda sad when wit, humor, and sympathy can’t stretch between literary eras, or persons whom you’d think would have understood each other.
OTOH, Bronte may just not have been in the mood for what she got. It took me a while to appreciate Austen.
Acquired taste?
I used to take Austen very seriously, and couldn’t really see the humor. But then, I got old enough to appreciate her, or I got to know more people who were a little like her characters, and suddenly there were all these funny parts.
That Pride and Prejudice movie with K. Knightly was very Bronte-esque, I thought.
I agree. The whole “purposefully disordered” thing was going on a lot, plus they kept shooting the flick in a sort of storm-tossed, rocky way….
The thing is, if Austen had written Jane Eyre, we’d have known everything about all the major families in the district (and Jane Eyre would have heard about the wife somehow, and we can’t have that). If Austen had written Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff would have had a lot of funny things happen to him and Cathy, and things would have ended much more happily.