Austen and Bronte

When comparing Sense and Sensibility with Pride and Prejudice or Villette to Jane Eyre, it becomes obvious to me why one book in each set is wildly popular on its own whereas the other in the set, while still a classic, probably would not be as well known without the established reputation of the respective authors. The latter books in each set have complete unadulterated happy endings for their heroines while the former books have more modified happy endings--the heroines have to adapt their pursuits of happiness to reality.

Maybe these endings are indicative of the fact that Elinor Dashwood and Lucy Snowe are more passive heroines who tend to retreat into themselves whereas Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet are far more vocal and active in pursuit of their goals.

This is not to say that books with tragic endings aren't classics on their own. For instance, most of the endings of Shakespeare's plays end tragically with everyone dead or happily with everyone married. There isn't that sort of half-happiness: Lucy Snowe becomes her own person but the ending is ambiguous at best as to whether she gets everything she wants. Both Elinor and Marianne in S&S get their men (it's Austen so not surprising), but Marianne doesn't get the man of her dreams while Elinor loses out financially to get her ideal man. Hell in S&S the one character that gets her perfect happy ending is...Lucy Steele, the villain of the piece. Could you imagine if P&P ended with Lady Catherine De Bourgh getting Darcy to do her bidding, or causing Darcy to lose his fortune? Merits of the book or not, I seriously think P&P's popularity would have been seriously compromised with such a turn of events. Same with Jane Eyre. I don't think the book would have been so widely popular if she just got the money or the man "as an equal." She wanted both and to deny her one of her dreams...well, then you get Villette.

I know this is a bit incoherent (it's been a while since I've read these books), but some other threads around here gave me the idea for this comparison.

NocturnalBlue,
I'm glad for your comparison just as it is. I've always confused the books and their authors, but now I finally have the framework in which to pair them up and imagine them. And I think it must be true that the more complex characters and outcomes are what lead to the more interesting and better remembered books. So I suspect that you have caught the essentials for the comparison.

NocturnalBlue,

While I don't doubt that the happy ending and strong character has played into P&P's overall popularity, I still feel P&P is the more mature book stylistically. One thing I love about Jane Austen is that you can see the evolution and maturation of her style across books. S&S is much less cohesive and less nuanced in presentation than P&P, Mansfield Park or Persuasion. Where S&S contains long passages of summary and exposition, the later novels cleverly weave social criticism into immediate action.

Another thing about Villette vs. Jane Eyre - in the latter, Jane has a sense of moral certainty about her place in the world from the very beginning. Though she has a great deal to learn about how to adjust what she chooses to say and when, in order to get along in a world that punishes assertive girls and women, she is extraordinarily "modern" in her approach to life. I have to admit my memory of Villette is fading, perhaps largely because I didn't find it as emotionally moving as Jane Eyre. But I felt the protagonist of Villette was far too willing to defer to her teacher and attempt to mold herself into the sort of woman he wanted her to be. His character was not sterling enough to merit it, even supposing this were an appropriate way for women to live.

I think Brontë was making the same point in both books (both autobiographical in part, though Villette was probably more so): that it amounts to moral cowardice for women to let men make their decisions for them. While both characters are flawed, so the reader gets to watch them grow, Jane is a more positive example to root for and deserves her happy ending. The protagonist in Villette, by contrast, is probably a cautionary example of what not to do. Assuming my memory is not leading me astray.

Jane Eyre is one of my most beloved books of all time. I read it as a teenager and re-read it perhaps once a decade or so.

Margad, I never thought about the moral cowardice aspect of the novels. It does make for an interesting comparison especially when you consider the scenes with M. Paul "educating" Lucy and St. John trying to groom Jane to be his missionary wife. One could get the sense that if Lucy were in Jane's position, she would have followed St. John and accepted her lot in life. Then again, that seems to be the core aspect of Lucy's character: her belief that she was not meant for happiness whereas Jane was much less likely to settle for what she was originally given. Since both novels were autobiographical to an extent, I wonder how much the change in the proactiveness of Jane and Lucy could be attributed to Bronte's mindset (Villette having been published 6 years after Jane Eyre).

Sniv, I agree with what you say about P&P being more stylistically mature than S&S, but I've always had something of a soft spot for S&S probably because I could so thoroughly identify with Elinor, even more than with Elizabeth. Granted I have not read all of Austen's books (I am partway through Persuasion and was thoroughly turned off by Mansfield Park), but I do find it interesting that while it can be argued that perhaps Emma or Persuasion are better novels than P&P (which I've seen done), it's P&P that is the most well known of all of Jane Austen's novels.

It's very interesting that Villette was written later than Jane Eyre. If I had nothing but the novels themselves to go on, I might be inclined to guess that Jane Eyre was the second book, because it seems more complex and mature. But Villette, I understand, was much more autobiographical than Jane Eyre. Brontë did go to school in France and fall in love with one of her professors there. It's possible that, during the time she was writing, the subject matter of Villette was more scandalous (Jane Eyre was already quite scandalous for its time), and so she didn't dare tackle the subject matter until Jane Eyre became successful.

A heartbreaking thing I recently learned about Charlotte Brontë is that she did finally marry, and died of severe morning sickness after she became pregnant. She was not cut out to be a wife and mother during the age when she lived. Rochester may have had his flaws, which made him such a wonderful character for the plot to revolve around, but Brontë was probably aware she had presented an idealized picture of a man able to accept a woman as his intellectual equal. In doing so, she may truly have begun changing the world for the women who came after her.