Why we can’t seem to quit the Austen-Brontes

Last year I cherished a particular resentment towards people who were productive during the lockdown. The breadmakers were bad enough, but the people who wrote novels were the worst. This was probably because I was supposed to be writing a novel (my second).

My creativity was not charged by the combination of home-schooling, isolation and the feeling that time had evaporated into something laughably meaningless. Instead of writing, I read. Actually, I re-read – at my best friend’s suggestion, we went back to the classics of our girlhood – Austen and the Brontes.

Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre. Credit: George Richmond

I re-read Persuasion, Austen’s sombre, “middle-aged” novel (the spinster heroine is 27, and mouldering on the shelf).

I re-read Jane Eyre and found that the charismatic, mercurial Rochester of my 20s had morphed into a man who would be a nightmare to be married to.

I read for the first time The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the lesser-known novel by Anne Bronte – a novel with such scandalous themes for its time that her older sister Charlotte forbade publishers from reprinting it after Anne’s death in 1849.

Both Persuasion and Tenant have been the subject of recent adaptations. The former has been made into a widely panned movie on Netflix, and the latter into an interesting stage play produced at the Sydney Theatre Company. Naturally, I had to see both – not least because that second novel is now well under way.

I’m freshly interested in why we love some stories and authors so much that we can’t seem to quit them. The world did not need another Austen adaptation, any more than Netflix needed more content. This version, starring Dakota Johnson (who is too beautiful to play Anne Elliot; Anne is supposed to be “past her bloom”) is a very patchy attempt to update the story for a modern audience.

The attempted updates are achieved through TikTok tics – Anne, the novel’s reticent, introverted heroine, breaks the fourth wall and delivers sassy commentary direct to camera. The dialogue is a random hash of Regency-era talk and contemporary chat – the film’s most notorious line has one of the novel’s sillier characters, the social climber Penelope Clay, saying that “if you’re a five in London, you’re a 10 in Bath”.

When Anne is not addressing the camera, she is speaking to her pet bunny, who travels with her to Bath. Worst, she is portrayed as a Bridget Jones-style saddo single, who swigs wine from the bottle and cries in the bath.

Slate magazine called the movie “not only the worst Austen adaptation but one of the worst movies in recent history”. I liked it more than that because I could still see the original story fighting to get out – and it is a story with modern themes, or more accurately, themes that are still relevant.

Anne rejected a suitor in her youth and has spent eight years bitterly regretting it. She comes to realise she should have trusted her own judgment rather than allowing herself to be talked out of the match by people preoccupied with social status and material wealth.

But the reasons I like the book are its differences to the way we live now. It is about quiet longing and regret. Anne embodies constancy and devotion – both very unfashionable traits – and she is quiet and interior, which, admittedly, are difficult things to film.

Persuasion is all about the things that go unsaid, which is decidedly contrary to the 2022 zeitgeist, where we are cursed with knowing what everyone thinks about everything, all the time. The Netflix adaptation abandons these integral aspects of Anne’s character. Without them, nothing she does makes sense.

It seems to me the updates of Austen or Bronte fail when they promote style over character because it is the specificity of the characters which drives the plots and gives the stories a meaning which transcends time.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is actually very fresh on a modern reading because its themes are so contemporary. It depicts the deterioration of a charming, narcissistic suitor (Arthur Huntington) into an abusive, alcoholic husband. His cruelty is so realistically drawn it’s impossible not to conclude Anne Bronte must have known such a man. (Scholars speculate he was based on the dissolute Bronte brother, Branwell.)

Our heroine Helen flees with her son, an act that not only shockingly breaks the social norms of the time, it breaks the law – she and her child are the legal property of her husband. Their son is the reason Helen leaves rather than stay and sacrifice herself to her marriage. She can see the boy being inculcated into the boorish, misogynistic behaviours of his father. It is an early depiction of what we now call toxic masculinity, being passed down the patrilineal line.

The production of Tenant of Wildfell Hall at the Sydney Theatre Company is played as a comedy of manners before taking a bleaker turn.Credit: Prudence Upton

Helen tries to break the cycle, and when she escapes, many of her new neighbours think she is raising her boy to be a milksop, when really she is trying to grow him into a gentle man. She is also a spiky, modern woman who knows her own mind.

When explaining her rejection of a particular suitor, she says simply: “I have an aversion to his whole person that I never can surmount.”

The stage adaptation of Tenant played for laughs a little too much for my liking, which perhaps was a sop to modern audiences. It cut all the god-talk (of which there is too much in the novel). But it stayed true to the characters.

In the best literature, there is almost no space between the reader and the characters. We want what they want, we feel what they feel.

It’s no surprise we watch so hawkishly when a new auteur picks them up to create something contemporary.

After all, they belong to us.