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. i've never spoken about emily bronte in public before, but it is the novel that is the reason i'm a novelist. Without knowing a little bit about who she was, the fact that she is one of the great writers of imagination is lost. The things that she experienced were 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.
Jane Austen created the definitive picture of Georgian England. No writer matches Austen’s sensitive ear for the hypocrisy and irony lurking beneath the genteel conversation. That’s the argument of the Janeites, but to the aficionados of Emily Brontë they are the misguided worshippers of a circumscribed mind. In Wuthering Heights, Brontë dispensed with Austen’s niceties and the upper-middle class drawing rooms of Bath and the home counties. Her backdrop is the savage Yorkshire moors, her subject the all-consuming passions of the heart. To help you decide who should be crowned queen of English letters we have the lined up the best advocates to make the case for each writer. In this event, chaired by author and critic Erica Wagner, we invited guests including author Kate Mosse, Professor and author John Mullan, and actors Mariah Gale, Samuel West and Dominic West, to discuss each writer's influence.
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