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Martha Nichols's avatar

This is quite wonderful, John, and I agree that the empathy these writers spark is still meaningful in 2024:

"Here Wordsworth suggests that the empathy of the poet extends outwards both to the poetic subjects and to the readers: at the heart of his poetry is the desire to convey the emotions and perspectives of others (and of himself) and so to allow us to feel them at a distance. This is what Aristotle claims is the great power of poetry—his famous catharsis.... We feel with Emma; we feel with Wordsworth and with, for example, his 'Old Man Travelling' in Lyrical Ballads."

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Melanie Bettinelli's avatar

My first encounter with Austen was not love at first sight. My high school teacher swooned over Pride and Prejudice and declared it her favorite book and dwelt on the romance and in short did everything she could to prejudice my young ming against Austen.

But my SECOND encounter with Austen was as an undergraduate English major taking Romantic and Victorian literature. We had oodles of Wordsworth-- all of the Prelude, as a matter of fact, not that I finished it. And then we read Sense and Sensibility and I learned to love Austen's wit and social commentary and became a lifelong Austen lover.

Which is a long winded way of saying that in my mind Austen and Wordswoth have always been in conversation with each other, if not in quite the same way you discuss here. (I really couldn't tell you much about those long ago lectures. 30 years ago! But I know we discussed some of the ways Austen pushes against the Romantics. I really like what you say here about interior drama and empathy.

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