Wuthering Heights was streets ahead of Charlotte's Mills-and-Boon-for-the-straitlaced-and-cobwebbed, but its characters are still too easy for English teachers to put into boxes: "what does Cathy represent? Self-indulgence and greed", "what does young Cathy represent? innocence", "what does Heathcliff represent? Some smelly nutter who lures women out onto the moors"... that sort of thing 
Jane Eyre is very much like Dickens, I couldn't agree more, maybe that's why it irritates me so much. And Bronte was kidding herself when she compared her own writing to Thackeray's -- she wouldn't have known satire if it bit her in her flat bodice.
I don't like the Bronte's much, can you tell?
(As an aside, if you haven't read Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron", I highly recommend it. It's hard to find the text online and this one's set out oddly in two columns, read one stanza in the left then one in the right for the proper order.)
To quote Auden:
She was not an unshockable blue-stocking;
If shades remain the characters they were,
No doubt she still considers you as shocking.
But tell Jane Austen, that is if you dare,
How much her novels are beloved down here.
She wrote them for posterity, she said;
'Twas rash, but by posterity she's read.
You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle-class
Describe the amorous effects of 'brass',
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.
Jane Eyre is very much like Dickens, I couldn't agree more, maybe that's why it irritates me so much. And Bronte was kidding herself when she compared her own writing to Thackeray's -- she wouldn't have known satire if it bit her in her flat bodice.I don't like the Bronte's much, can you tell?
(As an aside, if you haven't read Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron", I highly recommend it. It's hard to find the text online and this one's set out oddly in two columns, read one stanza in the left then one in the right for the proper order.)
To quote Auden:
She was not an unshockable blue-stocking;
If shades remain the characters they were,
No doubt she still considers you as shocking.
But tell Jane Austen, that is if you dare,
How much her novels are beloved down here.
She wrote them for posterity, she said;
'Twas rash, but by posterity she's read.
You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle-class
Describe the amorous effects of 'brass',
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.
It could be worse