Austen and Dickens

It may seem an unlikely pairing, but I would like to make some comments on and comparisons between two seemingly disparate literary heroines, Anne Elliot and Lucy Manette. In Charles Dickens novel, A Tale of Two Cities, the beautiful Lucy Manette marries Charles Darnay, the descendant of an aristocratic French family denounced by the revolutionaries, among whom are the memorably evil fanatic Mme. Defarge. While in Jane Austen's last novel, Persuasion, which was not published until after her death, Austen created a strong, mature, and independent heroine, Anne Elliot. Having foolishly broken off an engagement eight years earlier to Frederick Wentworth, a penniless naval officer, Anne at the age of 27 has remained unmarried--and secretly devoted to Wentworth. While written decades apart and depicting two different women, one of whom is substantially more "mature" than the other, I believe these characters share some of the same core values, the foremost of which is an enduring love for a man in whom each believes strongly. Lucy, as wife to Charles, is able to withstand the separation from him while he is imprisoned awaiting apparent doom buoyed by her love for him. Anne, after being "persuaded" to break off her engagement to Frederick when she was all of nineteen years old, did not abandon her inner feelings for him and found that in nurturing this enduring love she could attain the reward that she may not have imagined possible when he went off to sea. In addition to and complementing their love each woman demonstrates an extraordinary loyalty to her friends and family. We see this demonstrated in Anne's relationship with Mrs. Smith just as Lucy demonstrates a loyalty to her Father during moments when she cannot be sure that he recognizes her.

My comparison would not be complete if I did not also note some of the contrasts between the heroines and their respective novelistic worlds. There could not be a greater distance between the settings of the novels than these two with one focused primarily on two houses within miles of each other in England while the other is focused, as the title makes clear, on two urban centers in two different countries separated by the English Channel. One is focused on the internal workings of families seemingly immune to the world outside them while the other finds the characters and families buffeted by the winds of revolution and the politics of their respective countries. Fate and death intervene in the world created by Dickens with the express intent to mirror history; while fate is also present for Austen, and the threat of death is not absent, it is not nearly so overwhelmingly displayed. While the two heroines seem to share a certain reserve, it is in Austen's novel with its' narrower focus on family and marriage that we learn more about the details of the heroine's life. In many respects Lucy remains a cypher, not unlike some of Dicken's other fictional women, perhaps in part because, unlike Esther Summerson in Bleak House, we never are allowed to share her thoughts. In spite of the differences I believe that the fundamental character of each of these women has much in common. From my recent reading of these two novels they will remain among my fondest memories.

Thank you for the comparison, jwhenderson, I really enjoyed reading it.
:-))

I really like this comparison, because I love the works of both these writers. We think of them both as literary writers, and they both qualify, although I think for slightly different reasons. But they were both masterful at writing plots that keep readers turning pages because they are in suspense about what will happen next. Dickens' characters are not quite as rounded as Austen's, who gives all her characters a blend of faults and virtues that make them seem like living, breathing, flesh-and-blood people.

Compared with an Austen heroine, Lucy Manette seems just a little too good to be true. I can believe that a young woman who grew up without her parents, dependent on the charity of whoever took her in (I forget exactly who it was), would react instinctively by being as ingratiating and nice as possible to others. But Austen writes about characters in a similar position in at least one of her novels, who also take care to please the relations they're dependent on, and yet they come across as people with the full range of human emotions.

Even so, I do love Dickens. He compensates for the lesser complexity of his characters by a sort of luxurious delight in the foibles and petty malice of his villains!