I Used to Know That_ Stuff You Forgot From School - Caroline Taggart [6]
Other characters include two more Bennet sisters, plain and studious Mary and silly Kitty; their parents, the empty-headed Mrs. Bennet and introverted, sarcastic Mr. Bennet; Mr. Bennet’s cousin and heir, the bumbling clergyman Mr. Collins; and his haughty patroness Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who also happens to be Darcy’s aunt.
Sense and Sensibility: The Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, are completely different in temperament, and, when Marianne falls in love with the dashing Willoughby, the whole world knows it. Elinor, on the other hand, suffers her disappointment over Edward Ferrars in silence. Willoughby is summoned to London just as he appears to be on the brink of proposing to Marianne and instead becomes engaged to a wealthy woman. Marianne’s heartbreak is eventually healed by the less dashing Colonel Brandon, and Elinor gets Edward in the end.
Jane Austen also wrote fragments of two other novels, The Watsons and Sanditon, which have been published in their incomplete forms and variously completed by other authors.
☞ THE BRONTËS
There were three sisters who wrote novels—Anne (1820-49), Charlotte (1816-55), and Emily (1818-48). All, especially Emily, were also poets of some distinction. Charlotte wrote Shirley, Villette, and The Professor, but her most famous novel is Jane Eyre:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë: A poor orphan girl secures a job as governess to the ward of Mr. Rochester at Thornfield Manor, a place where strange noises tend to emanate from the attic. Jane and Rochester fall in love, but their wedding is stopped by the intervention of Mr. Mason, who announces that Rochester is, in fact, married to his sister, Bertha. And indeed he is, but she is mad and confined to the attic and watched over by the fearsome Grace Poole. Jane runs away and seeks refuge with her cousins, the Rivers; on the point of accepting a proposal of marriage from St. John Rivers, she thinks she hears Rochester calling her and insists on returning to Thornfield. There she finds that Bertha has broken out of her attic, set fire to the house, perished in the flames, and left Rochester blind, disfigured, and dependent. “Reader,” as she famously says, “I married him.”
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë: Although Anne wrote Agnes Gray, a story about the horrors of being a governess in Victorian England, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is slightly better known, perhaps for its public-television BBC series. This work could exemplify one of the first feminist novels, since it illustrates the inequities sometimes evident between men and women in marriage. The story involves the arrival of a mysterious new tenant, Helen Huntingdon, who with her young son moves to a small village in Yorkshire. A farmer falls in love with her, only to learn that she is still married to a wealthy man back in London. The husband becomes ill, inevitably from his life of debauchery, and eventually dies, leaving Helen free. You can likely guess what happens next.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë: This extremely dark tale of unrequited, misguided love and revenge oftentimes reaks with an uncomfortable intensity. Heathcliff is a wild orphan brought home to Wuthering Heights by kindly Mr. Earnshaw, Cathy’s father. The two fall passionately in love, but Cathy refuses to marry a nobody and instead marries their drippy neighbor, Edgar Linton. Heathcliff, in revenge, marries Edgar’s sister, Isabella, and cruelly mistreats her. Cathy dies in childbirth. Heathcliff goes a bit bonkers and ends up pretty much killing himself so as to be reunited with Cathy in death.
☞ CHARLES DICKENS (1812-70)
Love him or hate him, Dickens inspired many great films, and everyone knows what