Nabakoff wrote to his friend, the critic edmund wilson, and said, i've just read pride and prejudice. Can you confirm that, like all novels by women, there's nothing in it? There we go. Swing 13 % us. That would get on. Emily bronte, forty seven years beinto jane austen's on. I have just been handed the vote. 55% austin, 24 bronte with a don't know of 21%. Kips, as we've decided after the debate, jane Austen, 51 percent. All our participants, all of you, intelligence squared. Thank you.
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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