Virginia Woolf on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre & Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights | NOVEL ANALYSIS

Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s essay on Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre & Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights, from Virginia Woolf’s critical book The Common Reader (1925). In the essay, Virginia Woolf outlines what makes the writing of these two novelists so majestic & intense, & describes Charlotte Brontë’s & Emily Brontë’s most intrinsic qualities. What is fundamentally different about the writing of the two sisters (including the aim, scope, focus of their writing)? Virginia Woolf contrasts the Brontës’ to Jane Austen’s narrative style. The lecture examines Virginia Woolf’s analysis in relation to John Keats’s egotistical sublime and chameleon poet (what we might call High Romanticism), and to Charlotte Brontë’s & Emily Brontë’s use of ‘Pathetic Fallacy’ in their symbolic use of nature.

EMILY BRONTE WUTHERING HEIGHTS ANALYSIS
CHARLOTTE BRONTE JANE EYRE ANALSYS
VIGINIA WOOLF THE COMMON READER ESSAY

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[DrOctaviaCox]

Do you agree with Virginia Woolf’s assessment of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights?

[EmoBearRights]

It occurred to me that Woolf really understood why the Brontes worked and also why Charlotte couldn't appreciate someone like Austen, who Woolfe could appreciate. It's like the difference between the two different movements in the Renaissance - the Florentines painted frescos which required you knowing exactly what you needed to paint before you applied your paint to the wall before it dried, so those artists were intricate draftsmen who thought their rivals the Venetians couldn't draw properly. Whereas Venice was too moist for frescos so their artists painted in oils and created effects using colour and light and found the Florentines dull. Austen is a Florentine like Botticelli and the Brontes Venetians like Titain.

[Susu-spvu]

First of all i wanna say as a German male i dont have many friends or family that share my interest in these books, so i am very excited about this channel so i can get some insights into my favorite books. Since i am not an expert on literature i do apprechate the insights of one.
Secondly i got to say that the Bronte sisters are my favorite authors by far, because their works go so well together and are so passionate. When i red the first few chapters of "Jane Eyre" i felt every single possible emotion. I was angry, i cried and i laughed .... it was intense. While Charlotte is much more focused on the personal and shows us what we are missing out on, if we dont find true love (soulmate) And then makes us feel it like noone else, Emily created a storm a warning of what might happen to a society if it does not allow for love regadless of class (or other circumstances). I feel like they both approached the same issue just from different angles, and its amazing.

Thank you very much
If u feel like i have butcherd your language i do apologize. As i have mentioned before i am not a native speaker.

[marijeangalloway]

What else might Emily Bronte have created had she lived! Charlotte described first hearing Wuthering Heights as "like breathing a wonderfully descriptive phrase! Emily was truly the ultimate poet of the sublime, that beckoning, unreachable beauty that exists just beyond our normal senses. Woolf's friend and Bloomsbury colleague, novelist and critic E.M. Forster, also wrote of Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights in his analytical work "Aspects of the Novel." He called her a "prophetic" novelist, whose subject cannot be expressed in speech, but must be "sung" to convey its meaning, which I think was his way of expressing the presence of the sublime in her writing.

[tonyausten]

I think the word "Indignant" really explains Charlotte in a nutshell. There is a ferocity of power in her immediate feelings expressed in her words. She would rather hop on a horse and run into the wild and feel the breeze. She would be the first to accuse Jane Austen for being "elegant". Both Emily & Charlotte live in the nature. Woolf is correct to say the sisters are a product of their lonely rural lives. Ironically- Charlotte called Jane Austen's characters as elegant & confined. I think Ms Austen would smile. :)

[SlightlySusan]

I don't find Mr. Rochester's call for Jane to be unrealistic. I was driving from the grocery store when I knew that the divorce of a man I loved deeply had been finalized that day. In less than a week, I received a letter from him, telling me of his divorce. I was Jane to his Rochester.

[sweetwoodruff]

I think the tragedy and pain of living with an addicted family member is always glossed over. You grieve every single day watching them go away, killing themselves and there is nothing you can do. It’s a dark, excruciating thing to witness when you love someone.

[orlamckeown]

What an overlooking of Woolf's was her non-mention Anne Brontes Tenant of Wildfell Hall! A mighty book! I'd have been interested in her thoughts on AB. As indeed I would be if you tackled this particular one. Someone below has already called it "chilling". Agree totally.

[pamelahall]

Wow, I never knew Virginia Woolf had such strong and introspective thoughts about the Bronte’s works! Her words made clearer the appeal of the Bronte sister’s novels in ways I never thought of. Though I feel Anne Bronte’s novels are just as genius and powerful and was sad to see her works overlooked.

Virginia Woolf hit the nail on the head with her observation of being led or accompanied by Charlotte Bronte into this world she created. I have often put myself inside her characters, wondered about their lives outside the strand of time we are given in the novel. Because Charlotte’s personality is so strongly felt in every word and her invitation so inviting, I want to ask her as we walk though her pages what happens next, what led you to use these expressions, or what were you experiencing in life as you wrote this masterwork?

Emily’s genius is evident and her poetry enthralling. Even her novel's expressions and descriptions are superb, yet I take no walks with her through Wuthering Heights. I do not want into this wild and supernatural, beyond reality universe. Often I don't even want to be an observer. And why?

Heathcliff and Catherine never grow from their experiences as do Charlotte’s characters, they instead digress. I agree theirs is not love in the romantic sense. But this is not how to love at all! Love is kind, it does not keep account of the injury.
So, I don’t find Cathy at all lovable as Woolf supposes. Cathy is callous and self-serving. Who says “I am” someone and abandons them so readily? In addition, Heathcliff is no Byronic hero to me. All he does is give a lesson on revenge’s destructive nature. These situations of revenge and hatefulness do happen in real life. I don't think their situation transcends anything. It is a despairing novel.

Woolf was correct in thinking of these characters as extraordinary people and hard to relate to. However, I don’t agree with Woolf’s conclusion that Emily leaves the eternal questions asked but unanswered. I got answers as I find Emily’s gift, her truth, is that she uses the characters as warning examples. Heathcliff & Cathy’s terrible behavior takes them only to despair and ruin. It seeps into everyone they touch and eventually to three headstones on the slope on the moor. We despair only for what might have been had they not made such stupid decisions. It is Hareton and Catherine’s actions that transcend this utter cruelty, this poison and we have loving people and their love quietly prevailing at the novel’s end. So, despite its wildness, Emily’s work contains moral lessons like her sister’s but with a very different approach. And why would there not be moral lessons? After all, Emily too was a parson’s daughter. I was glad to see Virginia’s deep thoughts on the Bronte sister’s literary masterpieces though.

Thank you for bringing attention to Woolf’s work about them and for your wonderful analytic and illuminating post.

[KevTheImpaler]

I agree that Emily Brontë was more a poet than Charlotte. Wuthering Heights is one long prose poem.

[annakermode]

I loved this analysis of Virginia Wolfe’s analysis! I agree with Wolfe that Emily writes with some sort of magical pen that makes you care intensely for these utterly unlikable characters! Wuthering Heights has fascinated me for decades.

[njensen]

I wrote a paper in college disagreeing with Woolf’s comparison of the Brontë sisters in A Room of One’s Own; it was fun to think about it again...and apparently to be inspired to write an essay-length YouTube comment!

Woolf is unfair to Charlotte. I think the superior poet writes in a way that makes it EASIER to understand the intended meaning. I also can’t relate to the notion that writing about love, hate, and suffering as abstract concepts should be more highly regarded. Just look at modern-day news stories: you can read a headline about a natural disaster causing massive casualties and feel a general empathy for those affected, but the story of just one person, or one family, makes it possible to truly understand and personally feel the gravity of the situation. One video of a sea turtle with a straw stuck in its nose has resulted in more legislation than any infographic describing the massive amount of trash in the ocean.

I think this is the reason I scoffed a bit at the assertion that Jane Eyre “does not attempt to solve the problems of human life”. She’s an underdog from the start and I think the “I love, I hate, I suffer” approach only helps the reader to see how incredibly capable she is, and how limiting her circumstances are.

We are by Jane’s side as she is raised by her abusive aunt, then gets shipped off to live in deplorable conditions at a school where she loses her best friend to an outbreak of disease (which in turn is the only reason better management finally takes over the school). The reader has to face that suffering and is naturally lead to wonder what their life might be, given similar circumstances.

Jane’s palpable frustration always read to me as an indictment on the limitations placed on women during that time period. Even in one of her happiest romantic moments with Rochester she chides him with her “I am not an angel” speech; she rejects all of his florid idealizations and insists he simply see her for the human being she is. If the book is not trying to change the world, it seemed to me it would at least challenge the accepted notions of contemporary readers.

I also find it interesting that at one point she says the writer who is able to act as an invisible observer is better able to create a world we feel we can visit. I agree Jane Austen creates a wonderful and vivid world, but then Woolf places Emily Brontë in that category while admitting that a reader would say a Heathcliff or a Catherine would never exist in the real world. Heathcliff’s “vivid existence” is a wild caricature of hatred and revenge, not a fully-realized human being.

Altogether I didn’t find the argument to hold together well (in either this or A Room of One’s Own). Should a writer aim to change the real world, to objectively describe it without intervening on it with one’s personal feelings (creating a mood), or should one be scrapping the entire real world and creating a new one independent of facts? Why are Charlotte’s characters less realistic drawn out in the scope of her observations (when all people exist in the way they are perceived by others), but Emily’s Heathcliff is more realistic and vital in his embodiment of only one human trait? The excerpts she provides from Wuthering Heights don’t really support this notion that Emily was trying to correct a “gigantic disorder” in the world either; the Catherine Earnshaw quote sounds like the dramatic kind of love-musing Jane Eyre would shut down in a heartbeat and the “repose of the dead” quote? I remember recoiling as I read it, especially because she goes on to diss people who cry for the loss of their loved ones!

[theladyfausta]

I completely agree with how Woolf describes Charlotte's writing! The first time I read Jane Eyre it felt like a spiritual experience--there was just something about it that made me feel like I was genuinely able to see the world the way Jane did, which was very different from the way my life was. Love this and it's so interesting to hear the commentary one famous writer has for another!

[nhmisnomer]

I agree with Wolf's analysis entirely. I'd never heard/read it before. Thanks for presenting it!

[seventhsheaven]

You could say that Austen’s style is more “sense” and Bronte’s is “sensibility”. I much prefer Austen’s style, which has humour and is grounded in reality. Her romances are touching without being too dramatic to be within reach. I really enjoyed Jane Eyre, but I prefer Austen’s wider focus. Austen was clearly fascinated by people and society, while the Brontes were more interested in their own individual feelings and impressions.

I really despised Wuthering Heights, though. Too much melodrama.

[rmarkread]

I came to this essay rather late, and I regret my tardiness. How did Virginia Woolf do it? How did she even find the TIME for all her wide reading, let alone to compose, edit, and publish brilliant criticism and excellent novels!? And, not only was she prolific, but she is familiar with seemingly every period and genre of writing and displays an amazing an appreciation infused with delight at everything she reads—so long as it is good writing. (She never makes the mistake of calling something “great” without showing that it’s good.) I wish I shared her open-mindedness.

One problem I frequently run into as I listen to your essays is diction. I appreciate the OED’s definition of somewhat obscure terms, but I am dying to know what people in the nineteenth century meant by “sublime” and “ego.” How can we use “sublime” to describe something as transitory as a couture gown? How does Shelley’s use of “ego” word relate to Meredith’s “The Egoist, ” not to mention Freud? It seems that nowadays we mean something quite less than Shelley did at his time.

Isn't Nelly Dean also one of Emily Bronte’s great creations? Not because her passions elevate her to greatness, but because it is through her sensibilities that all the intensity and passion in “Wuthering Heights” are filtered. By use of this (seemingly) innocuous and artless frame, Emily Bronte puts the events of “Wuthering Heights” into the perspective necessary for the reader to accept the “impossible” characters and events of the novel.

You speak frequently of the Authorial Voice. It seems to me that we run a certain risk when we identify the Author’s observations and assessments with those of one of the characters. Jane Austen and Emily Bronte are very adept at that sleight of hand. I don’t think it is Elizabeth Bennet who speaks the famous first line of “Pride and Prejudice, ” and I find Nelly Dean’s descriptions so slanted, so intent on telling her audience what to think about and how to judge the characters and story of “Wuthering Heights” it verges on kitsch.

Is not George Eliot’s description of “Pathetic Fallacy” the same as T.S. Eliot’s “Objective Correlative”?

I guess I must ask your forgiveness for carping. That is not my intention. It’s just that in the forum you provide, I have found the opportunity to share ideas with people who may not be likeminded, but at least have READ the masterpieces I have long cherished. Thank you very much.

[renatanovato]

First, I do agree with Woolf. There is an intensity and a density to the narratives of the 2 Bronte sister. It feels like Austen's narratives are muslin and the Brontes' heavy, thick wool (and dark too).
In fact Nature plays an important part in both Brontes' books, in a way that Jane's mood is usually in consonance with the weather. Night has a important role gor Jane, because at night she flourishes as an artist an woman. And Cathering is the wuthering herself. She is part of that geography as is Heathcliff, even expressed in his name.
Jane Eyre is quite conservative in her views, and although she might disagree with the world, she lives by its rules different from the characters in Austen's novels who usually end up abiding to social rules, but learn quite a lot in tue process, overcoming prejudice, pride, weakness of character ....

[dream-mhbs]

I have read Jane Eyre and short after that Emma. English is not my first language I've read them translated so my understanding of the writer is different then you but somehow not fully distanced. I always wanted to understand the comedy in Austen's lines but I only understood what other readers were meaning after I read her in English ( The Northanger Abbey ). For me Jane Eyre is a better novel than any other novel I've read by Austen so far ( P&P, Persu., Emma, The N.A. ) because the character to me was so interesting. After reading many romantic novels Jane Eyre felt fresh and real to me. ( It still is a romantic one, destiny is all over the book ) Not because it showed suffer but because of how Jane reacted to things. Jane Eyre doesnt screams "I am an awesome book" it shortly says "This is the book I am and you are reading" It is unapologetic. It is interesting how different we understand books from each other because you said we dont read C.Bronte because of her characters. After J.E I've read Emma (before that I watched your video about it and tried to read it more deeply to truely understand the writers vision) and I agree about the mini world the writer creates. To me, that is a big reason why her novels are read a lot. It invites you in. It makes you feel like you just moved to the village and you get to know the people as you live. Maybe because of the translations I understood books differently then I would if I've read them in their original language. Great video !

[MurphysEveryWhim]

I just read this essay a couple of days ago, and so running across this video was fortuitous. Thanks for helping me get more from the essay.

[dianabart]

I absolutely love your channel! This is like someone (you) extracted my thoughts and put it in words.