The Classic Debate: Austen vs Brontë
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You're listening to the Sunday Debate on Intelligence Squared. This week, we revisit a lively discussion about two literary greats, Jane Austen versus Emily Bronte. Our chair, Erica Wagner, was joined by guests, including the author Kate Moss, Professor John Mullen, and actors Maria Gale, Samuel West, and Dominic West. They discuss and debate each writer's influence. And now let's go to the podcast with the host, Erica Wagner.

Well, thank you all very much for coming. I am delighted and excited to be here. Welcome to this Intelligence Square debate, Jane Austen versus Emily Bronte, the queens of English literature. We'll see whether our conversation remains as civilized as one of our authors tonight or grows as wild as the other.

For this evening, we'll be setting two of the greats of English literature against each other. In one corner, Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, I don't have to tell you more. In the other corner, Emily Bronte, whose sole novel was Wuthering Heights, published just a few months after her elder sister Charlotte's bestseller, Jane Eyre.

However, though Emily only wrote one novel, as we all know, it turned out to be one for the ages. As with all Intelligence Squared debates, you've been polled as you entered the hall, and you'll have the chance to vote again at the end of the evening when you've heard the arguments. So be prepared to change your mind. And to make the arguments on behalf of our queens, we have two highly distinguished advocates.

For Jane Austen, we have John Mullen, Professor of English Literature at University College London, who specializes in 18th century literature. He is the author of What Matters in Jane Austen? 20 Crucial Puzzles Solved. And for Emily Bronte, we have Kate Moss,

one of Britain's most celebrated historical adventure novelists. Her Languedoc trilogy, Labyrinth, Sepulcher and Citadel, has sold millions of copies worldwide. Kate's next novel, which was unveiled only today for publication in September, is a gothic psychological thriller, The Taxidermist's Daughter.

She is a lifelong devoted Bronte fan and a member of the Bronte Society. To illustrate their argument and help persuade you to vote for their chosen writer, our speakers have four wonderful actors at their disposal who will be bringing the works to life with their readings.

First, we have Samuel West, acclaimed actor and director who has starred on both stage and screen and played Mr. Elliot in the 1995 film of Jane Austen's Persuasion. We have Eleanor Tomlinson, a rising star who played Georgiana Darcy in the recent BBC One adaptation of Death Comes to Pemberley, P.D. James' sequel to Pride and Prejudice. She also appeared in Kate Moss' first play, Syrinx.

Mariah Gale, who has been hailed as one of the most distinctive actors of her generation. She played Ophelia in the RSC and BBC Two productions of Hamlet with David Tennant.

And finally, Dominic West, who has played leading roles in international film, American television, and on the London stage. He is perhaps best known for his role as McNulty in HBO's The Wire, one of the most critically acclaimed television programs ever made.

and as well as giving the readings, our actors will be joining in our discussion later. So I'm going to begin by asking each of the advocates in turn to just tell us a little about how you came to your passion for these two authors. John, why don't you start? Shamefully, belatedly. I read Jane Austen. I studied it at school when I was 17, and I thought it was rather trivial. And

I thought it was all about people trying to get married, and I didn't realize that was quite an important topic at the time. And I'm afraid, like many things in life, I was taught by, inadvertently perhaps, by the people I went on to teach.

how utterly brilliant she was. And it dawned on me slowly through my 20s, and I came like Saul to Damascus, really, finally to realise what a blithering fool I'd been as a teenager. So a relatively late conversion. Yes, I'm afraid so. And Kate? Well, just picture this. 1978. An amazing 18-year-old Kate Bush dancing in a red dress...

Me sitting in my home with a terrible tape recorder trying to quickly tape it off the top 40. And it was one of the set books I had alongside Emma. And I remember sitting doing my O-level, sitting in the school gym, you know, the smell of all those ghastly gymnastic-y things and the scratch of all those pencils, hundreds of people doing it. And the questions were, one for Wuthering Heights,

Is it a moral, an amoral, or an immoral book? I realize I couldn't spell amoral, looking back. And the other one, I'm afraid, John, I'm sorry to say, was about Emma, and it was about the importance of the piano.

And for me, I thought, there's got to be more to fiction than the sodding piano. There's so much in that. No, I don't. So, and my mum, I didn't do very well in my O-levels. And we have a tradition which is an unbirthday present. And my O-level results came out about the time there was a birthday. And my mum bought me this, which is a wartime edition of Wuthering Heights.

with the 1921 introduction by May Sinclair and Charlotte Bronte's own. And I've had it ever since. And I still think it's the best book in the world.

That's it. Very good. Well, that's an excellent background for the argument that you're about to hear and the extract also you will hear superbly acted. So, John, take it away. Thank you very much. I've got to make a confession to start with, which is I love Wuthering Heights. Sorry. And I slightly love Kate, actually. Oh, hooray. Obviously.

That was rhetorically quite clever. So I'm going to try in my little slot to say things about Jane Austen and in favour of her novels and not against Wuthering Heights although we might be drawn into fisticuffs later in their sort of questions and question and answer but I'll try and remain chaste for now and think positive and

I'm going off piste already because I couldn't resist from what Erica said. She said the polite or the genteel versus the wild. And actually, and everybody laughed as if they recognized what those two were. Of course, the wilds, Emily Bronte, isn't it? But wild occurs in my favorite sentence in Pride and Prejudice.

And as I actually know this sentence and the word wild has been used, I will give it to you as an example of what I'm going, I hope will be demonstrated in our first reading, which is that there's plenty of emotional stuff going on in Jane Austen, if you're ingenious enough to realize it. That's shameful. My favorite sentence is about Lydia. Oh.

Don't you love her? I mean, you know how it is in life. People like Lydia or Mrs. Bennet or Mrs. Elton or Mrs. Norris, they are ghastly. Being with them would be hell.

But in Jane Austen's novels, you cheer every time they come into the room, don't you? And whenever Lydia comes in, aren't you delighted? And there's a wonderful bit near the end of Pride and Prejudice where Lydia, who has disgraced herself, who has risked her reputation, who has risked everything. She has been off for a month and a half with a practiced rake.

unmarried, she is a month past her 16th birthday. Okay? Those of you who feel liberal about this, about Lydia, and who are perhaps parents of daughters, think about this. A month past her 16th birthday, she has been living with this man for a month and a half, and he is, Wickham, blackmailed, bribed, call it what you will, into marrying her. He's paid to marry her. And they come back to Longbourn.

And Elizabeth and Jane are waiting to see what she's going to be like. And we're seeing it all through Elizabeth's eyes. And there's a wonderful sentence, among many other wonderful sentences, because one of the things about Jane Austen is her sentences are wonderful. Yes. I can't prove this, but almost every Jane Austen sentence just has her DNA in it and couldn't have been written by anybody else. But there's a wonderful sentence. You're looking at Lydia. She comes back and it says, Lydia...

Was Lydia still? Easy, isn't it? You could all write that. You can do that in creative writing, surely. Yes. Lydia is genius. But then it goes on. Lydia, was Lydia still? Untamed,

unabashed, wild, noisy and fearless. It's poetry. Yes, it's fantastic. Wild she is and that's why we all find her so interesting. There's lots of wildness in Jane Austen's novels and it throbs often beneath the surface and we're about to hear a passage I think where it's going to a different kind of wildness throbs beneath the surface. But I also wanted to

to pick up on the piano. Well I'm sorry, I've got a script, I could do that, but you know, the piano, I can't resist it, the piano. Virginia Woolf, there are lots of great writers who have not got Jane Austen. Especially men, but not just men. Virginia Woolf, a genius herself, got Jane Austen. She knew that she was the greatest novelist in the English language. And she said, of that greatness,

She said something I think really true. She said, of all great writers, she's the hardest, the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness. Yeah? I think that's a profound thought. And that's why it's very easy to think, oh, nothing much to it. It's why it is that, as I heard a great Jane Austen expert say recently on the radio, well, the thing is, it's very, very simple to

And it's very, very complicated. And you know that thing about Jane Austen, which perhaps she shares in a funny sort of way with Ruthering Heights, that an intelligent 13-year-old can read Pride and Prejudice and totally get it. Especially if it's a girl. Boys have to wait a bit longer, in my case, to the age of about 26. But a 13-year-old who likes books will totally get it. And then...

a 50-something prof who has read it 15 times before will pick it up to read it again because of a seminar he's got to give the next week. And within about a page, we'll think, God, that's brilliant. I never saw that before. And those of you here, I don't know if there are some of you here like this, who regularly read Jane Austen, will know that experience. That every time you read it, you thought you knew it, but you don't. It's so simple, but it's so complicated. And the piano thing,

You can pick up anything in Jane Austen, any thread, and you know that when you think about the piano, which Kate was a little bit satirical about, that actually, oh, the piano...

The piano that matters, the pianos that matter so much everywhere, that nothing is accidental or incidental or not part of this beautiful design. Her books are like wonderful, tiny, minute, almost wickedly ingenious Swiss watches. And as soon as you start thinking about pianos, if you know and love Jane Austen, there's no chapter about pianos in my book. I say, but there should have been. Why isn't there a chapter about pianos?

Think about Anne Elliot, whom we're about to hear. Think about her in Persuasion, condemned by her brilliance and talent and the fact that she's 28 and her bloom has gone, to play the piano while the man she still loves flounces around with these two fluffy girls. Yes? She has to play for them.

And the piano is a kind of part of her sort of fate. My, how your fingers fly up and down, says Mrs. Musgrove. The piano in Emma, of course, which is the sort of weird love gift that Frank Churchill has given to Jane Fairfax and that foolish Emma thinks has come from somebody else. Pianos always mean a hell of a lot in Jane Austen. Everything means a hell of a lot in Jane Austen.

We're going to go to the first reading now. Now, I'll just say quickly what it is and why I've chosen it. Eleanor's going to do most of it. It's from Persuasion, and it's in Persuasion, as some of you will know, Anne Elliot, who's 28 and lost her blue,

has eight years before the novel begins been persuaded by her friend and mother substitute, her own mother being dead, her friend and mother substitute Lady Russell, to turn down the proposal of marriage from Captain Frederick Wentworth, even though she loves him and he loves her. And she's persuaded to do this because she's convinced not only that it would be foolish for her to rush into it,

actually it would be bad for him, for his career, which is at that moment non-existent in the Navy. And he is sorely offended and goes off. But then he comes back. Eight years later, Anne is staying with her sister Mary and Mary's husband, her brother-in-law Charles. And Captain Wentworth is visiting and he's at the Musgrove's house.

And she knows that he's there. And she hears that he's going to come down. He's going out shooting with Charles and Henrietta and Louisa, the fluffy girls. And he's coming down and she's about to see him. And it's been eight years. And I chose this because, well, I'll tell you afterwards. LAUGHTER

Mary, very much gratified by Captain Wentworth's attention, was delighted to receive him. While a thousand feelings rushed on Anne, of which this was the most consoling, that it would soon be over. And it was soon over. In two minutes after Charles's preparation, the others appeared. They were in the drawing room. Her eye half met Captain Wentworth's. A bow, a curtsy passed. She heard his voice.

He talked to Mary, said all that was right, said something to the Ms. Musgroves, enough to mark an easy footing. The room seemed full, full of persons and voices. But a few minutes ended it. Charles showed himself at the window. All was ready. Their visitor had bowed and was gone. The Ms. Musgroves were gone too, suddenly resolving to walk to the end of the village with the sportsman. The room was cleared, and Anne might finish her breakfast as she could. It is over.

"It is over," she repeated again and again, in nervous gratitude. "The worst is over." Mary talked, but she could not attend. She had seen him. They had met. They had once more been in the same room. Soon, however, she began to reason with herself and tried to be feeling less. Eight years, almost eight years had passed since all had been given up.

How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness. What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals all, all must be comprised in it, and oblivion of the past, how natural, how certain too. It included nearly a third part of her own life.

Alas, with all her reasoning, she found that to retentive feelings, eight years may be little more than nothing. How were his sentiments to be read? Was this like wishing to avoid her? And the next moment she was hating herself for the folly which asked the question. The other question, which perhaps her utmost wisdom might not have prevented...

She was soon spared all suspense, for after the Miss Musgroves had returned and finished their visit at the cottage, she had this spontaneous information from Mary. Captain Wentworth is not very gallant by you, Anne, though he was so attentive to me. Henrietta asked him what he thought of you when they went away, and he said, you were so altered that he should not have known you again. LAUGHTER

Mary had no feelings to make her respect to her sisters in a common way, but she was perfectly unsuspicious of being inflicting any peculiar wound. Altered beyond his knowledge, and fully submitted in silent, deep mortification. Doubtless it was so, and she could take no revenge, for he was not altered, or not for the worse. She had already acknowledged it to herself, and she could not think differently.

him think of her as he would. No! The years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look and no respect lessening his personal advantages. She had seen the same Frederick Wentworth, so altered that he should not have known her again. These were the words which could not but dwell with her. Yet soon she began to rejoice that she had heard them.

sobering tendency they allayed agitation they composed they consequently must make her happier thanks very much so well i hope you heard in that brilliantly rendered last line must make her happier um the two things which are kind of quite common in jane austen but which i think are

especially illustrated in this passage, which is, first of all, that despite what Emily Bronson's sister Charlotte said about Jane Austen, Jane Austen did do feeling. She was interested in feeling, and Persuasion, the last of her novels, the most autumnal, is about sort of strangulated passion.

But also, and I hope you won't mind me being sort of a little bit sort of academic or dusty about this, that's no virtue in itself if it weren't for the second fact, which is her incredible technical audacity. Because the thing about Jane Austen is that...

She wasn't just an elegant writer and a funny writer. She was also technically and formally one of the most experimental novelists in the history of English literature. And lots of the later novelists, from Henry James to Nabokov, who condescended to her later, nicked all her techniques, actually. And the technique you heard in this piece, which was one she invented, she invented it at a parlor table in Hampshire. She invented it

Without knowing any other writers, or belonging to literary circles, or even having clever and interesting siblings who were writing novels as well. She just invented it on her own. And it's called Free and Direct Style, and it's the most important invention in the history of the novel, actually. Because it's the means by which, as you heard Eleanor brilliantly do, Jane Austen appears to tell you a story...

and yet lets the feelings of the character sort of bend and warp the narrative. That brilliant bit at the end, this must make her happier. Yes? Oh, I'm really pleased. He says I'm ugly. Oh, that's good. That's really, really good. Because what it means now is I won't have any illusions about him coming back to me. Yes, yes, that's very good. And Anne Elliot, you'll know if you've read Persuasion, has a certain strain of self-punishments.

which is both painful and yet incredibly familiar, I think, to any adult reading it. And here in that passage, you can hear the drama of her own fluctuating feelings, but through Jane Austen's narrative. And it's kind of a miraculous thing that she did and that nobody had ever done before. And that must, in the last sentence, nobody had ever written that before she came along.

The thoughts of other, I couldn't resist looking at some other musts, which nobody would have written for Jane Austen. There's a wonderful one, I know she's a favourite character of many people, so I'll offer it to you quickly. Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice. Yes, Charlotte Lucas, after she has accepted Mr Collins' proposal, after the lightning courtship of about six hours, which has lasted the length of a dinner...

at the Lucases, entirely in the company of the clamorous Bennett clan, but somehow she's intuited what his designs are, two days after he's been turned down by Elizabeth, and she's accepted his proposal, and she's thinking about it, and she thinks, well, I'm going to be married, that's good. And then she also, it says, his society, Mr Collins' society, his society was irksome.

And his attachment to her must be imaginary. Brilliant. Any novelist, apart from Jane Austen at the time, would have written, his attachment to her was imaginary. But no, his attachment to her must be imaginary. Must be because suddenly you're thinking with her. And that's why Charlotte Lucas is such a famous and vivid character.

Not because we see her in a sort of feminist light as a woman who has to sacrifice, sort of has to give up so much in order to kind of get material stability. Has to sleep with Mr. Collins. She's pregnant by the end of the novel, you know.

Do you know that? She's pregnant by the end of the novel. Yes, she is. She spends the whole day separate from him. She arranges the rooms so they never bump into each other. She sends him down the garden to do the chickens. He enjoys doing the chickens and the gardening. But at night, she shares a room. Sorry, I got diverted there. But you know that you do with Jane Austen.

That example that Eleanor read, you then get at the end of the chapter in which it appears, Jane Austen takes you to Captain Wentworth. She leaves Anne Elliot. She takes you to Captain Wentworth and says that he did indeed say something like that, but of course with no idea that it would be carried back to Anne, because Captain Wentworth's not a cruel man.

And he did say that. And she has him talking with his sister, Sophia, Admiral Croft's wife, Mrs. Croft. And he's talking about how he wants to get married. Doesn't mind who, as long as they're nice about the Navy. And he says, I only need two things, a strong mind and sweetness of manner. And you think, oh, that's quite a tough call. But anyway, you've got to have both.

And you're told that he's still cross about Anne Elliot rejecting him. And then Jane Austen writes this very innocent sentence. But her power with him was gone forever. And that's the last thing in the whole book you're told about what Captain Wentworth thinks. And it's not true. Clever, isn't it? It's the last thing you're told about his inner world.

And it's not true. And you're left with her to watch his slowly, unwillingly at first, but then stimulated by jealousy, because she's brilliant on that, his feelings returning to her. And that too is a wonderful example of how narrative gives you somebody's self-deception as much as somebody's thoughts. Now the next piece is a kind of example of the consequences of self-deception. It's from Emma.

And it's Christmas Eve, and Emma has been persuading herself and her stooge, the stupendously dim-witted Harriet Smith, that Harriet, although she is the illegitimate daughter of a mere somebody...

should be aspiring to marry the new vicar, Mr. Elton, slick Mr. Elton, and that Mr. Elton is really interested in her. We actually know, any decent reader knows that Mr. Elton's interested only in the Queen of Highbury, Emma herself. But Emma doesn't see this. And then on Christmas Eve, after a bibulous party at the Westons, she finds him in the back of a carriage with her on the way back,

And in a phrase that I sometimes have to explain to incautious first-year students not used to Regency English, making violent love to her. And we're going to have some of this scene, please. She tried to stop him, but vainly. He would go on and say it all. Angry as she was, the thought of the moment made her resolve to restrain herself when she did speak.

she felt that half this folly must be drunkenness and therefore could hope that it might belong only to the passing hour accordingly with a mixture of the serious and the playful which she hoped would best suit his half-and-half state she replied i am very much astonished mr elton

This to me? You forget yourself. You take me for my friend. Any message to Miss Smith I shall be happy to deliver, but no more of this to me, please. Miss Smith? A message to Miss Smith? What could she possibly mean?

And he repeated her words with such assurance of accent, such boastful pretense of amazement, that she could not help replying with quickness. Mr. Elton, this is the most extraordinary conduct. I can account for it in only one way. You are not yourself. You could not speak either to me or of Harriet in such a manner.

LAUGHTER

perfectly knew his own meaning, and having warmly protested against her suspicion as most injurious, and slightly touched upon his respect for Miss Smith as her friend, but acknowledging his wonder that Miss Smith should be mentioned at all, he resumed the subject of his own passion for it, and was very urgent for a favourable answer.

as she thought less of his inebriety, the more she thought of his inconstancy and presumption, and with fewer struggles for politeness replied: "It is impossible for me to doubt any longer. You have made yourself too clear. Mr. Elton, my astonishment is much beyond anything I can express. After such behavior as I have witnessed during the last month to Miss Smith, such attentions as I have been in the daily habit of observing,

Good heavens, what can be the meaning of this? Miss Smith? I never thought of Miss Smith in the whole course of my existence. Never paid her any attentions but as your friend.

Never cared whether she were dead or alive, but as your friend. She has fancied otherwise. Her own wishes have misled her. And I'm very sorry, extremely sorry, but Miss Smith, indeed. Miss Woodhouse, you can think of Miss Smith when Miss Woodhouse is near. No, upon my honour, there is no unsteadiness of character. I have thought only of you. I protest against having paid the smallest attention to anyone else.

Everything that I have said or done for many weeks past has been done with the sole view of marking my adoration of yourself. You cannot really, seriously doubt it. No! In an accent meant to be insinuating. I am sure you have seen her in this. It would be impossible to say what Emma felt on hearing this.

Which of all her unpleasant sensations was uppermost? She was too completely overpowered to be immediately able to reply. And two moments of silence being ample encouragement for Mr Elton's sanguine state of mind, he tried to take her hand again as he joyously exclaimed... Charming, Miss Woodhouse. Allow me to interpret this interesting silence. LAUGHTER

It confesses that you have long understood. No, sir, it confesses no such thing. So far from having long understood you, I have been in a most complete error with respect to your views till this moment.

"'As to myself, I am very sorry "'that you should have been giving way to any feelings, "'and nothing could be further from my wishes. "'Your attachment to my friend Harriet, "'your pursuit of her, or pursuit it appeared, "'gave me great pleasure, "'and I have been very earnestly wishing you success. "'But had I supposed that she were not "'your attraction to Hartfield, "'I should certainly have thought you judged ill "'in making your visits so frequent.'

to believe that you never sought to recommend yourself particularly to Miss Smith? That you never thought seriously of her? Never, ma'am. Never. I assure you. I think seriously of Miss Smith. Miss Smith is a very good sort of girl and I should be happy to see her respectably settled. I wish her extremely well. And no doubt there are men who might not object to everybody has their level. LAUGHTER

As for myself, I am not, I think, quite so much at a loss. I need not so totally despair of an equal alliance as to be addressing myself to Miss Smith. No, madam, my visits to Hartfield have been for yourself only. And the encouragement I receive... Encouragement? I give you encouragement? Sir, you have been entirely mistaken in supposing it.

I have seen you only as the admirer of my friend. In no other light could you have been more to me than a common acquaintance. I am exceedingly sorry, but it is well that the mistake ends where it does. The same behavior continued. Miss Smith might be led into a misconception of your views, not being aware, probably any more than myself, of the very great inequality which you are so sensible of. But, as it is, the disappointment is single.

Sadly, we didn't have time. We had to cut the wonderfully painful following paragraph with zigzags of embarrassment, as Jane Austen calls them, as they silently go back to

to ditch Mr Elton outside his parsonage. I did, I think, forget to mention Jane Austen's very funny. Yes, that's quite a skill. Difficult to know what to say about it, but rather funny. And wonderful how the very ordinariness of it is the point. That wonderful line that Samuel read to such effect. Everyone has his level.

In some works of literature, evil is like Iago or Satan, isn't it? But in Surrey, evil's like that. There is, I think, nobody worse in the whole of literature than Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park. But she never says anything you might not hear in Northamptonshire to this day. LAUGHTER

It's a wonderful bit of dialogue. I've used too much of my time, probably, so I'll just say that we're going to end with another bit of dialogue, after which I'll just say a couple of sentences, and then that's it. And Jane Austen, I think, was the greatest writer of dialogue in the history of English fiction, anyway. And difficult to prove that, but I will offer you one thought, which is, I think, which is something Alexander Pope, the poet, said of Shakespeare, which I think is only true of Jane Austen amongst...

which is, he said, every character, however little they have to say, sounds only like themselves.

And the great thing about Jane Austen, I think, and her dialogue is that every character speaks only like themselves. And there are some characters who only speak once in the whole of their novels. And yet, from what they say, you know that nobody else would have said it. My favorite is Mr. Hearst in Pride and Prejudice, who says, when Elizabeth declines to join their card game because they're playing for high stakes, says, do you prefer reading to cards?

That is rather singular. That's the only thing he says in the whole novel. And that's him, isn't it? That's him for all eternity. But this, what I thought I'd give you, is a slight trick. I'm going to give you, we're going to have read now, the opening chapter of Pride and Prejudice, but minus the It is a Truth, universally acknowledged, the single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife.

And because that's a very famous bit, but if you listen to what follows, it's an extraordinary sort of

exercise in wonderful dialogue. We've never met these people before. Of course you have. You've seen them on telly and all that stuff. You've read the book. But in 1813 nobody had met these people before. Elizabeth's not there. It's just Mr and Mrs Bennet on their own. And we hear them talking. And we hardly have a single he cried, she... If it was D.H. Lawrence it would be he asseverated, she retorted curtly. But no. No.

We haven't cut anything except those first sentences of the chapter. We just let you have a dialogue. And by the end of this, it's brilliant. Such economy. You know everything you need to know about the set-up for the novel, but also, in a way, you know these two people. My dear Mr Bennett, said his lady to him one day...

Have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last? Mr. Bennet replied that he had not. But it is, returned she. For Mrs. Long has just been here and she has told me all about it. Mr. Bennet made no answer. But do you not want to know who has taken it? Tried his wife impatiently. You want to tell me and I have no objection to hearing it. This was invitation enough.

Why, my dear, you must know Mrs Long says that Netherfield is to be taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England, and that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it that he agreed with Mr Norris immediately that he is to take possession before Micklemas, and some of his servants is to be in the house by the end of the week. What's his name? Bingley. Is he married or single? Oh, single, my dear, to be sure.

A single man of large fortune, four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls. How so? How can it affect them? My dear Mr. Bennet, how can you be so tiresome? You must know that I'm thinking of his marrying one of them. Is that his design in settling here? Design?

How can you talk so? But it is very likely that he may fall in love with one of them, and therefore you must visit him as soon as he comes. Oh, I see no occasion for that. You and the girls may go. Or you may send them by themselves, which perhaps would be still better, for...

As you are as handsome as any of them, Mr. Bingley may like you the best of the party. My dear, you flatter me. I certainly have had my share of beauty. But I do not pretend to be anything extraordinary now. When a woman has five grown-up daughters, she ought to give over thinking of her own beauty.

In such cases, a woman has not often much beauty to think of. But, my dear, you must indeed go and see Mr Bingley when he comes into the neighbourhood. It's more than I engage for, I assure you. But consider your daughters. Only think what an establishment it would be for one of them.

Sir William and Lady Lucas are determined to go merely on that account, for in general you know they visit no newcomers. Indeed, you must go, for it would be impossible for us to visit him if you do not. Oh, you're over-scrupulous, surely. I dare say Mr Bingley will be very glad to see you, and I will send a few lines by you to assure him of my hearty consent to his marrying whichever he chooses. LAUGHTER

Of the girls. Though I must throw in a good word for my little Lizzie. I desire you will do no such thing. Lizzie is not a bit better than the others. I am sure she is not half so handsome as Jane or half so good-humoured as Lydia, but you're always giving her the preference. Well, they've none of the much to recommend them. They're all silly and ignorant like other girls, but Lizzie has something more of...

than her sister. Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion for my poor nerves. Oh, you mistake me, my dear. I have a very high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. Oh.

I have heard you mention them with consideration these last 20 years at least. Ah, you do not know what I suffer. But I hope you will get over it and live to see many young men of 4,000 a year come into the neighbourhood. It will be of no use to us if 20 such should come, since you will not visit them. Oh, depend upon it, my dear, that when there are 20, I will visit them all. Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick part, sarcastic humour, reserve and caprice, that

that the experience of three and twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married. Its solace was visiting and news.

Well, I suppose I should just end by saying I rest my case, shouldn't I? But let Jane Austen do it for me. But just very briefly to say, well, you heard them. There they are. They exist, don't they? God knows they exist. And a marriage exists in front of you, an extraordinary, strange marriage between two people, one of whom fails to comprehend the other.

And two characters, and I love that phrase, I love those phrases in Jane Austen, those odd combinations of words which you know that nobody has ever used before. Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserve, and caprice.

Well, he must exist. I mean, he's the only person like that who has ever existed. Quick part sarcastic humor, reserve and caprice. And that, of course, is what in the end everybody feels about Jane Austen, which is beyond all sort of criticism and debate, which is that the people exist themselves.

but they exist because she so brilliantly and technically, amazingly audaciously makes them exist. Thanks very much.

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Thank you, John and Jane and all of our wonderful performers. But it's not over yet. Actually, I think it probably is. No, no, no. Come on. Kate, give us Emily. I will. I will. Well, you're just too funny. And she's too funny. But everything that John has said about Jane Austen, and I'm now standing in front of you rudely, I agree with.

It's daft. We all know it's daft. Every one of us in this room know that these are incredible novels, all of them. So it's a strange business to be here. Not a critic, not an academic, not a professor. I've never spoken about Emily Bronte in public before, but it is the novel that is the reason I'm a novelist. And it's the novel that made me a reader, a real reader.

And 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. But I'm going to tell you a little bit about Emily Bronte before I start to talk about all of her writing, not just the one novel, but her hundreds of poems and the diary entries that she did. Because without knowing a little bit about who she was, the fact that she is one of the great writers of imagination is lost.

because 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 in those days, if you like. She grew up, she was the fifth of six children. She was the second youngest daughter. And for most of her life, she lived in a parsonage in Haworth in Yorkshire.

In that parsonage she had an older sister and an older sister and an older sister and Maria died when she was 10 and Elizabeth died when she was 9 or 10 and they were away at a school where Charlotte, the next sister and Emily were too

And imagine everything that you have heard about the worst of the way that children were treated, and girls in particular were treated, and the environment in which those four children sent away, their mother was dead, to that place. So she had already seen, when she was very young, the death of her mother and her two older sisters.

She came back to that parsonage and although she left it three more times, she went to teach, once to Dewsbury, once to Halifax and once to Brussels. Basically when she was not there, she was homesick. She was dying for not being there. She is one of those people who everything that she needed, she could create out of nothing in her head. So she was born

One year after the great and brilliant Jane Austen died. They have more in common than people often think. John mentioned the difference of the lack of society around Jane Austen in terms of writers, but they did both have sisters, one in Jane's case, several in Emily's case, who loved them and talked to them and worked together with them.

So what is it that makes, for me, this particular writer more important than Jane Austen? Jane Austen, I agree with John, is probably the best at dialogue of that generation of writers and possibly ever. She is funny. She is witty. Everything that is thrown against Jane Austen, this idea that she didn't feel, is clearly ridiculous. But in the end, for me,

What she was writing about was the purpose of romance, the happy ever after ending, the idea of marriage, that amount of any of our lives, if we're lucky, that will occupy, however, a small amount of what life is. For me, when I read Emma and Pride and Prejudice and listening to it this afternoon and hearing everybody acting,

The world is a lighter, better place because of Jane Austen's novels, no doubt.

But when I read them, I was left thinking there must be more than simply the pursuit of marriage. The unhappiness of marriage, the small world about which she was writing. All of us as novelists write about the worlds that we can write about. We cannot be anybody else. We can only write the stories that we have it in us to write. And you will not be surprised to know, because I write big adventure stories about war and faith, that I like the epic.

I like melodrama. I like the big emotions, not the perfectly delicately drawn ones. But in Wuthering Heights, I think it was Calvino that said, a classic is a classic book because it has never finished what it has to say. And I have read Wuthering Heights every generation of my 50 plus years. And every time I read it, it is a different book. So we think of it as a love story. Is it? It's not a love story.

It's a story of obsession, yes, but it's also a story of ghosts, a story of haunting. And the first extract that I'm going to hand over to the wonderful actors comes from very, very early on in the novel, in Chapter 3. And the story, you all know this, it is told by two narrators who swap backwards and forwards, a man called Lockwood, who, if you like, is the representative of the middle class, the ordinary, the respectable, the acceptables.

And he has come to this part of Yorkshire and has taken a house, a beautiful grange, and he has gone to meet for the very first time the strange landlord of whom he has heard a lot of talk but knows nothing about him. This man is called Heathcliff.

And he goes to find him and he finds a set up with a young girl who appears to be the mistress of the house, but to whom is she married? A boy that appears to be somehow connected, a master of the house, but he is treated like a servant and he speaks like a servant in a local accent. And there is no delineation between the servants and the people who run the house. And there are animals everywhere and there is this threat of something, something not right.

and accept it. And then, of course, this is Wuthering Heights. And the storm comes in and Lockwood cannot leave. And so he is shown to a room that has never been used for a long time. And it's musty. And there are little words written on the sill, a name over and over again, Catherine Linton, Catherine Earnshaw. And he goes to sleep and he has a terrible nightmare and he wakes up. And then he goes to sleep again. And again, he wakes up.

And so Samuel is going to read Lockwood, and Mariah is going to read The Ghost of Catherine Cathy, and Dominic is going to read Heathcliff. This time I heard distinctly the gusty wind and the driving of the snow. I heard also the fir bough repeat its teasing sound. It annoyed me so much that I resolved to silence it. I rose and endeavored to unclasp the casement. The hook was soldered into the stapled.

I must stop it, I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch, instead of which my fingers closed on the fingers of a little ice-cold hand. The intense horror of nightmare came over me. I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed. Let me in. Let me in. Who are you? I'm Catherine Linton. I've come home. I'd lost my way on the moor. As it spoke...

I discerned obscurely a child's face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel, and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist onto the broken pane and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes. Still, it wailed. The fingers relaxed. I snatched mine through the hole, hurriedly piled the books up in a pyramid against it, and stopped my ears to exclude the lamentable prayer. It's twenty years!

20 years. And Lockwood shouts, disturb Heathcliff, who doesn't know that he's been put in this room. And of course, Heathcliff is ruined by grief and vengeance and all the things that have spoiled the person that he might have been. And he rushes into the room. And there he finds this guest he hardly knows who starts to burble about

someone at the window, a woman at the window, a girl at the window, someone called Catherine. And he tries to explain why he's in there and apologise, but he can't actually get any further because Heathcliff immediately looks at him and sees that Lockwood is in a state of shock and Lockwood doesn't know what to make of Heathcliff. What can you mean? By talking in this way, it's me. How dare you? Under my roof? God, he's mad to speak thus. Heathcliff gradually fell back into the shelter of the bed as I spoke.

Finally, sitting down, almost concealed behind it, I guessed, however, by his irregular and intercepted breathing, that he struggled to vanquish an access of violent emotion. Mr. Lockwood, you may go into my room. Your childish outcry has sent sleep to the devil for me. Take the candle and go where you please. I shall join you directly. I obeyed, so far as to quit the chamber, ignorant where the narrow lobbies led.

i stood still and was witness involuntarily to a piece of superstition on the part of my landlord which belied oddly his apparent sense he got on to the bed and wrenched open the lattice bursting as he pulled at it into an uncontrollable passion of tears come in kathie do come do once more oh my heart's darling hear me this time katharine at last

The spectre showed a spectre's ordinary caprice. It gave no sign of being, but the snow and wind whirled wildly through, blowing out the light. Blowing out the light. Now that is the beginning of this novel. It is a novel that is about ghosts and haunting, as I said, but it's also a novel that is about grief.

and men being allowed to have their emotions too. Not everything being kept down and kept controlled and kept in a certain sort of dance that makes it appropriate and nothing is unseemly. The shock when people first read this novel of seeing men weeping and talking about this is as important as the shock of seeing these wild women, if you like, who did not conform to the standards.

So the first bit of the novel is Lockwood. He arrives and he goes back after this strange experience. And he goes back to the Grange where he's staying, where Nellie Dean is there. And he says, tell me about this man.

He wants to know the whole story of Heathcliff, the strange household. And this is how the novel, if you like, gets going. And it's one of the great critics, Lord David Cecil, said it is one of the most effectively structured novels in the English language. So it is set up all the way through. If you like, principles of light and dark. There is the storm,

that is Wuthering Heights. There is the peace and the calm that is the Grange. There is the danger and the violence and the emotions that are shared between men and women at Wuthering Heights. The fact that servants and masters are on equal footing, both despised or both loved. Everything at Wuthering Heights happens in the kitchen and the servants and the masters and the mistresses eat together or starve together in the kitchen.

If you like, it is the unacceptable face of the world in which Emily Bronte and her sisters had seen a little bit of, and if you like, had withdrawn from. In the Grange, the principle of calm, the principle of light, there is Edgar Linton. There is the sense of everything is done properly. There are servants there, but they are out of sight. They do not eat with the family, but everything is calm and gentle. And of course, what happens is we start to hear the story from Nellie Dean.

And we learn that Catherine's father had gone to Liverpool one day and had come back with a child that is described in a way that he might be of mixed race. He's certainly described as very dark-haired and dark-skinned. Liverpool is, of course, the great and terrible slave port for Britain. And he comes back with this child and throws this child into the household of his spirited daughter and his sullen and rather surly son.

And from that moment, there is the cuckoo in the nest. It is the idea that you cannot, if you like, just simply decide to do something differently. There will be consequences to everything that you do.

And Cathy and Heathcliff, as you all know, they form a bond against the violence of the brother who beats her and beats him. And the sense that the father, Wuthering Heights, much like Austin in some ways, but Wuthering Heights is filled with children with no parents, with violent parents, with dead mothers, with no one who teaches them how to love.

And that, of course, is what people like Emily and Charlotte Bronte were seeing around them. They knew that this was the common treatment, if you like, in many of those clergymen's schools, the docks, the slum children. But, of course, when Kathy goes, she sees this different life.

They tiptoe down, she and Heathcliff, they see the Grange, they see a different sort of world, and they are caught, they run away. Another theme in the novel is the way that the dogs and the animals, if you like, are dangerous and violent. They are not pets, they are not to be petted, and Cathy is caught and bitten by the dog, and she is kept there at the Grange. Another theme throughout the novel, the idea of being kidnapped, kept in these two different places.

And because of that, she starts to see a refinement that she lacks in Heathcliff. And in the end, as they grow older and Heathcliff gets angrier and angrier and puts up with the punishment that's meted out to him, but every single time he's becoming a little more brutalized, Cathy in the end decides that she will marry not Heathcliff, but someone else. And she does it, if you like, for the best of reasons.

But she tries to explain this in the next excerpt we're going to hear, which again is quite early in the novel. It's in chapter nine with a conversation with Nellie. Nellie is the servant who has been at Wuthering Heights. Nellie is in the Grange. Nellie represents the good Victorian servant, the person who knows that things at Wuthering Heights are not as they are supposed to be, that people do not behave as they're supposed to behave. And Catherine tries to explain why she is going to make this strange decision and not marry Heathcliff.

And Heathcliff doesn't hear all of the conversation. He only hears the bad bit of it. And because of that, he leaves and almost everything else is set in train in the novel. So we're going to hear an extract. Eleanor is going to read Nellie and Mariah is going to read Catherine. I was superstitious about dreams then, and I'm still. And Catherine had an unusual gloom in her aspect. It made me dread something from which...

I might shape a prophecy and foresee a fearful catastrophe. She was vexed, but she did not proceed. Apparently taking up another subject, she recommenced a short time. If I were in heaven, Nellie, I should be extremely miserable. Because you are not fit to go there. All sinners would be miserable in heaven.

But it is not for that. I dreamt once that I was there. I tell you, I won't hearken to your dreams, Miss Catherine. I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home. And I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth. And the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heap on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke, sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret as well as the other.

I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven. And if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff solo, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now. So he shall never know how I love him. And that not because he's handsome, Nellie, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

And Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning or frost from fire. I cannot express it, but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning.

My greatest thought in living is himself. If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be. And if all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath.

the source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff. He is always, always in my mind, not as a pleasure any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.

So, a ghost story, a social novel, a novel that investigates the society in which people were in, a novel about race, a novel about the relationship between different classes of people, a novel about money, about why women do marry and why men do marry. But also, as you heard there, it's a novel about what it means to be human.

what it means to have a soul, what faith is. It isn't the Christian faith that is shown in the novel through Joseph or to a lesser degree Lenny who thinks that Catherine is too wicked to be in heaven, but it is the sense of the very great idea of nature, of the idea that we are part of the world not separate from it. It is quite astonishing to think of this woman writing a novel of this great pantheistic brilliance, if you like,

Her language is always infused with the sense of something more, something other. She is not content simply even in an extract, which is actually about whether a woman should marry the right man or the wrong man, if you like. She's not content for that to be the dialogue. The dialogue is about light and dark. It's about the way that love changes. It's about the fact that if you deny your essential self,

you will be cast out of a heaven and you will be left in somewhere that is irrelevant to you. Nothing will matter if you are untrue to yourself and you're untrue to your nature. So it's all these different sorts of novels and certainly the idea of nature writing. Without Emily Bronte, would there be the great Willa Cather? Would there be the great Jack London? She, if you like, was the heiress of the great romantic writers of Coleridge and Wordsworth.

Byron, yes, of course, Sathi, Shelley. And I think that that sort of sense of being in a tradition of writers that she was nothing to do with and would not have cared for because she was solitary. She was a true artist in that she cared only about the work. I think that makes Wuthering Heights one of those completely different sorts of novels that very few people have ever managed to succeed in writing before or since.

But everything that you have heard so far, and I do understand that it sounds dramatic and a bit too much, if you like, in the confines of a room like this, taken out of context. But all of the brilliance of her writing, her metaphors, her language, the extraordinary visionary mysticism of her thought is there in her poems. And of course, you all know that she was a very great poet. She was considered a great poet.

And Charlotte Bronte came upon her poems, and Emily Bronte was furious at first that she had read them. And then little by little over many weeks, Charlotte Bronte persuaded her to let them be published. And so they took on men's names, as you all know, Cora Ellis Acton Bell

and there was a volume of poetry published in 1846, and they paid for it themselves, and it sold two copies. And we all know what that's like. But it was that sense that, again, the language, the idea of Heathcliff, the idea about trying to work out what made women and men the same emotionally. That, for me, I think is the most important part of it.

The idea that she didn't see any difference between men's emotions and women's emotions. She did not think women should not be allowed to speak their minds or feel, feel sexual love, feel romantic love. But she felt that men should feel the same. She did not feel that men were not allowed to have romantic love either.

And Isabella, one of the great characters, I think, in Wuthering Heights, who is Edgar's sister and makes the mistake of marrying Heathcliff. And Heathcliff marries her in order to spite Catherine and everybody else. And it is a very clear story of very extreme domestic violence, if you will. But Isabella leaves.

Even Isabella, who comes from the peaceful, the quiet, the acceptable way of being a woman in the Victorian period, she does not stay. She leaves and she takes her son and refuses to conform as well. So all the way through the novel there is the doubling back of different sorts of standards, the challenging of a double standard, round and round it goes.

I wanted to, I suppose, to share some of the poetry with everybody. Because I think that, as Erica did in her introduction, and I completely understand it, John's got more novels to play with than I have. And I'm aware that I am simply saying why I think this one novel is such an important novel.

But as a writer, the poetry mattered just as much. And if you have your time and you go back and you will read, for example, No Coward's Soul is Mine, the poem that the great American poet Emily Dickinson asked to be read at her funeral, and you will see that there is a sense of mysticism and religion that is infused with the love of land, the sense of the soul and the spirit that very few poets ever attain.

As Wuthering Heights goes on, you will all have seen it on the television or on film or read it yourselves. It is a book of two halves. It is an extraordinary structured novel. There are structures of parallel lives, as I've said, parallel colors, parallel emotions, parallel philosophies. But there is also the first story, the Heathcliff and Cathy story, and then the result of that non-liaison later on.

And so the second to last extract that you're going to hear now is still in that first part of the book when we are still hearing Nellie Dean telling Lockwood what happened all that time ago in Wuthering Heights. And it is the scene between Catherine Earnshaw, who is dying,

And Heathcliff, who has been away and has left her and has come back with money and nobody knows quite where he got it from. And Catherine has married Edgar. And in fact, she is pregnant. She will die that night giving birth to a daughter.

But the pregnancy is never mentioned. Heathcliff has heard that she is dying, that it might be the last time that he can be with her and she can be with him. And so he has burst down into the Grange and he has terrified Nellie into letting him in. And it is the last dialogue between them. And Edgar Linton, Catherine's husband, has gone to the church with the servants because they are the acceptable face of Victorian Yorkshire.

And there is a race against time to say everything they need to say before it is too late. So in this, Catherine is going to be read by Mariah and Nellie is going to be read by Eleanor and Heathcliff is read by Dominic. You and Edgar have broken my heart, Heathcliff, and you both come to bewail the deed to me as if you were the people to be pitied. I shall not pity you, not I. You have killed me and thriven on it.

How strong you are. How many years do you mean to live after I am gone? I wish I could hold you until we were both dead. I shouldn't care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn't you suffer? I do. Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say 20 years hence? That's the grave of Catherine Earnshaw. I loved her long ago and was wretched to lose her, but it is past.

I've loved so many others since. My children are dearer to me than she was. And at death, I shall not rejoice that I'm going to her. I shall be sorry that I must leave them. Will you say so, Heathcliff? Are you possessed with the devil to talk in that manner to me when you're dying? Do you reflect that all those words will be branded in my memory and eating deeper eternally after you have left me? You know you lie to say I have killed you. And Catherine, you know that I could as soon forget you as my existence.

Is it not sufficient for your infernal selfishness that while you are at peace, I shall ride in the torments of hell? I shall not be at peace. I'm not wishing you greater torment than I have, Heathcliff. I only wish us never to be parted, and should a word of mine distress you hereafter, think I feel the same distress underground. For my own sake, forgive me.

You never harmed me in your life. Nay, if you nurse anger, that will be the worst to remember than my harsh words. Won't you come here again, do? You teach me how cruel you've been. Cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I've not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You've killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me and cry and wring out my kisses and tears. They'll blight you. They'll damn you. You loved me.

then what right have you to leave me? What right? Answer me! For the poor fancy you felt for Linton because misery and degradation and death and nothing but God or Satan could inflict would have parted us. You, of your own will, did it. I've not broken your heart, you've broken it, and in breaking it you've broken mine. So much of the worse for me that I'm strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you... Oh God!

Would you like to live with your soul in the grave? Let me alone. Let me alone. If I've done wrong, I'm dying for it. Isn't it enough? You left me too, but I won't upbraid you. I forgive you. Forgive me. It's hard to forgive and to look at those eyes and feel those wasted hands. Kiss me again and don't let me see your eyes. I forgive what you've done to me. I love my murderer, but yours? How can I? They were silent.

Their faces hid against each other and washed by each other's tears. I grew very uncomfortable meanwhile, for the afternoon wore fast away, and I could distinguish by the shine of the western sun up the valley, a concourse thickening outside Gimmerton Chapel porch. Ere long I perceived a group of servants passing up the road towards the kitchen. Mr Linton was not far behind.

Now he is here. Oh, for heaven's sake, hurry down and be quick. Stay among the trees until he's fairly in. I must go, Cathy, but if I live, I'll see you again before you're asleep. I won't stray five yards from your window. You must not go. You shall not, I tell you. For one hour. Not for one minute. I must. Linton will be up immediately. No, oh, don't. Don't go. It's the last time. Edgar will not hurt us. Heathcliff, I shall die. I shall die. Damn the fool. Hush. Hush, Catherine. I'll stay.

If he shot me so, I'd expire with a blessing on my lips. I do understand that it is just insane to ask you to do that in front of a lovely audience who were laughing just 10 minutes ago. To sort of, I suppose, get to the end of my pitch for Emily, all of these things, for a novel to be all of these different things, that Calvino idea that a classic is a book that hasn't yet finished.

I think that Wuthering Heights is one of those novels that every single time you read it, you see something more in it. But when it came out, just imagine this. They had the volume of poetry that came out, and then Jane Eyre was published, and then a few months later, a dual volume that had Wuthering Heights and Anne Bronte's novel, Agnes Grey.

And the reaction to Wuthering Heights, even for someone like Emily Bronte, who lived outside the world and quite careless what people thought about her, was extraordinary. One of the reviews, we know nothing in the whole range of fictitious literature which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity. Or Graham's Lady magazine.

How a human being could have attempted such a book as The Present without committing suicide before he had visioned a dozen chapters is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors. And so it went on. And one of the, I think, the most touching things was to know that after Emily Bronte died, clippings from five of those reviews were found in her desk. So she did care.

it, maybe. But this is where I suppose I think Wuthering Heights matters most. It changed what it was possible for women to write and for women and men to be and for men to write. There was the sense, I think, following after Wuthering Heights, that all the things that we as people feel

are not so different just because we're a woman or a man. The idea that women must write acceptable things, that the only proper subject for a woman writing is love and marriage, this goes out the window with Wuthering Heights. The idea that men should not be grieving, should not be full of passion, should not be allowed to be vengeful, if you like.

is also completely unparalleled in any part of Victorian literature. Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is not a moralising novel. The only people who moralise are the Christians and they are hypocritical and they are violent and they turn a blind eye to everything going around them that is wrong, but worry about appearances and again that same word, respectability. Because of Emily Bronte, it was quite clear

that a woman who was an artist and a man who was an artist had the same mission. And what is that? To write what we think is true, to write what we think matters.

So it's not that I am bored with Jane Austen at all, but for me, that business of finding a husband, that moment of the happy ever after that finishes with the lead characters, not the secondary characters, of course, but finishes at that moment of Prince Charming is there. What about the rest of life? What about all of those other emotions?

And so Wuthering Heights, I think, is one of those novels that we read it at different times in our lives. Every time we read Jane Austen, we laugh and we smile. Yes, of course, a brilliant stylist. Yes, of course, brilliant at dialogue. But in Wuthering Heights, you see what it is to be an ambitious writer. Is it perfect? No novel is perfect. But is it right for an artist to be ambitious, to write the one thing that feels true? Yes, I think it is.

So I think in the end, Jane Austen was a writer of brilliant wit, brilliant observation. I think Emily Bronte was a mystic. I think she was a writer of exceptional imagination, of exceptional faith and understanding, a writer that saw everything in the world as being part of the experience that makes us human. And after the whole of the story of Wuthering Heights,

is over. And we have seen the parallel storylines, the narrator 20 years ago, and then we have seen the whole story running down, if you like, of young Cathy and her marriage to Linton. They've all got the same names. It's very confusing. And then we've seen Hairton, who is Heathcliff's son, has been made brutalized, and Cathy and he little by little fall in love. And they will, at the end of the novel,

Quit Wuthering Heights, the principle of stall, the principle of calm. And they will go to the Grange and they will be married on New Year's Day. And the next generation has finally, if you like, come out of the shadow of the violence and the grief and the obsessive love that never gave anybody happiness at all. And the novel is left in the final paragraphs. For my money, I think they're the best three paragraphs in any novel.

The novel is left to Lockwood to finish. The outsider who came in at the beginning and was told the story about Heathcliff and his Cathy. And it is left to Lockwood when he is leaving Wuthering Heights, leaving the Grange for good. He is the restoration of order, if you like. But he can't quite resist going one last time to look at the graves of those three people, Catherine and Shaw.

Heathcliff, the man with only one name and no history, and Edgar Linton, who was a gentleman and an important man because again, he is the, if you like, the cuckold in that story, but he is a gentle and a good man too. And so all types of men, I think, are in this novel and all types of women are in this novel. And the critics were wrong because Emily Bronte wrote a novel like that. It meant that all of us coming after

could be as ambitious as we want. And so Samuel is going to finish off as Lockwood with the final three paragraphs of Wuthering Heights. My walk home was lengthened by a diversion in the direction of the kirk. When beneath its walls I perceived decay had made progress even in seven months. Many a window showed black gaps deprived of glass. Its slates jutted off here and there, beyond the right line of the roof, to be gradually worked off in coming autumn storms.

I sought and soon discovered the three headstones on the slope next the moor, the middle one grey and half buried in the heath, Edgar Linton's only harmonised by the turf and moss creeping up its foot, Heathcliff's still bare. I lingered round them under that benign sky, watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers.

for the sleepers in that quiet earth. This brings tears to your eyes. I'm going to leave Samuel's beautiful voice in everybody's ears to say that most novelists show us a little bit of life. They show us a little bit of a world. They show us a slice of society, a slice of emotion. They divide up women and men into women over there and men over there. For me, Emily Bronte showed us the world.

And then she showed us the sky. And then she shows us everything else above that. Thank you. Well, that was immensely stirring stuff. I think you will all agree. It will be very interesting now, I think. I'm going to tell you what the votes were as everyone was coming in. And then in about 12 minutes, you're going to vote again.

We'll talk a little bit. You'll have your chance to ask questions. And it will be interesting to see the transformation, if there is one. So before you all came in, for Jane Austen, 55% of you put your cards in the box. 24% of you went for Emily Bronte. That leaves a crucial swing. You kick. The rest of you kick. You kick, yes.

Of 21%. So we're definitely in an underdog, you know, situation. There's always hope.

You know, I just thought I would start. I think that Kate was very honest in drawing our attention to some of the criticism that was leveled against Wuthering Heights. It would be therefore, I think, unfair not to mention a letter that my compatriot, Mark Twain, gave.

wrote in 1898 to a chap called Joseph Twitchell about the novels of Jane Austen. "'I haven't any right to criticize books,' he said, "'and I don't do it, except when I hate them. "'I often want to criticize Jane Austen,'

But her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader. And therefore, I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shinbone. Disgust. Disgust. Yeah. It's funny, isn't it? Every time I read it...

I mean, there's something niggling him there, isn't there? Every time I read it, he kind of knows. He's in a cliche that's, I think, luckily passing out of the language somewhat. You might say he's in denial. I seem to remember Mark Twain, who was in literary terms an anglophobe,

was also rather unkeen on Shakespeare, actually, as well, and felt he'd been grotesquely overvalued. Well, what can I say? Yes, I mean, he is going back to it, and he's actually in quite good company. There are quite a lot of people who do this who are great writers themselves. You know, I mentioned Nabokov and Charlotte Bronte. There are lots and lots of them. There's a great letter from Joseph Conrad,

to HG Wells saying, and it's always Pride and Prejudice, I've just read it. There's nothing in it, is it? And then usually the person they've written to writes back and says, well... Nabokov wrote to his friend, the critic Edmund Wilson, and said, I've just read Pride and Prejudice. This is from one of, in my opinion, one of the great stylists, one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. I've just read Pride and Prejudice. Can you confirm that like all novels by women, there's nothing in it?

And Edmund Wilson wrote back rather tactfully and said, well, I can't comment on the larger issue, but I think you're a bit wrong about the pride and prejudice. And he said a remarkable thing, and this is sort of 1950s kind of high sort of appreciation of modernism. He said something which I think is true. He said, actually, he said, there are only, she is, along with James Joyce,

She is the only novelist writing in English who has a true sense of novelistic form. You should appreciate that. Why don't you try again? And then he says very kindly, maybe not Pride and Prejudice, because it's a bit funny, but try Mansfield Park. So he went back and laboured away at it. There's a great tradition of writers who sort of don't get it and take pride in not getting it and who rail at its...

the ordinariness and constrictedness, apparently, of it. But that's just the frame in which she does her pictures, isn't it? I mean, that's just, it's a courtship novel. You know, that's like saying it's a Shakespearean comedy. I mean, you know, that's just the convention. And those who don't like conventions often don't get the incredible subtlety of what's going on within them. And Mark Twain's tormented by the fact

But there is something there, and it's making him very, very angry. I have just been handed the vote. So we remember before the debate, 55% Austin, 24% Bronte, with a don't know of 21%, the UKIPs, as we've decided. After the debate, Jane Austen,

51%. Ooh! Emily Bronte, 47%. Yes! Thank you! A swing? John, we have both won. Exactly! We have both won. No. A happy ending. Jane Austen's won and you've won. LAUGHTER

just like to thank everyone for coming tonight. I would like to thank Kate and, ooh, there we go, Swing 13%. That would get you, God, you'd win Liverpool South East on that, wouldn't you? I'm going for West Riding. All of our participants, all of you, Intelligence Squared, thank you so much for a splendid round. Thank you.

This one's going to Thailand.

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