Do you prefer Walter Scott or Jane Austen?

>>24542157 (OP)
Austen times 100

I can’t trust an author with two first names.

>>24542175
All this says is that you haven't read Scott. I prefer Scott at his best; my favorite Austens are Persuasion and Northanger Abbey; of the Scott I've read Kenilworth, Quentin Durward, Heart of Midlothian, and The Antiquary were the ones I liked most. I'll read Old Mortality later this year

>>24542157 (OP)

>>24542157 (OP)
100% Jane Austen, but I've not read Scott, so perhaps it is just that I want to bang Austen's minge.

>‘Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written ‘Pride & Prejudice’ or ‘Tom Jones’ than any of the Waverley novels. I had not seen ‘Pride & Prejudice’ till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers – but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy – no open country – no fresh air – no blue hill – no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.’

>>24542199
A lot of people today, if they’ve read Scott at all, have only read Ivanhoe and then judge him entirely on that one novel. It’s not bad, but it’s neither his best nor his most quintessential. It would be like someone judging Dickens solely by Martin Chuzzlewit.

Scott rarely gets through a novel without some lumpy bits. Heart of Midlothian goes on for an extra hundred pages after the plot has resolved. Waverley takes 60 pages to actually start. Ivanhoe has that ridiculous plot twist towards the end.
Bride of Lammermoor might be his best.
He’s not in Austen’s class (who is?) but he’s much better than his reputation. He suffers because he’s not quite modern in the way Stendhal and Austen are, but not quite an 18th century Sterne or Fielding type

>>24542211
Walter Scott on Jane Austen:

>Also read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen’s very finely written novel of _Pride and Prejudice_. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with.

>The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!

>>24542676
he is far, far better than austen

>>24542157 (OP)
Prefer — WS, every day of the week.

If Satan said he was going to destroy the entire oeuvre of one or other writer as though it had never been, and I could decide which — tougher call. I suppose one would have to keep JA.

Only read the start of Ivanhoe but wasn’t grabbed. Read P&P and S&S. I don’t love JA’s plots but her irony and characters are perfection. I didn’t notice any of that in WS.

>>24542676
Scott reputation was quite high and seems to have dropped more than any comparable writer. Schopenhauer, Wagner thought he was amazing, Hugo wrote a monograph on him. Perhaps you explain why, but is there some other reason for this. I'm thinking of reading him because all the people I admire liked him. From what I gather he was not a topnotch stylist, which always seems to age well (Joyce, whatever his flaws, still reads fresh and will continue to do so). Carlyle said he was a worldly, practical man -- not intended as an insult. I actually heard someone compare his to George Lucas
>>24542595
good quote thanks

>>24542815
Scott was a great writer but contray to what his admirers thought at that time, his work was deeply influenced and embedded in his times. He couldn't immortalize himself precisely because he knew his period to deeply. Austen's work on the contrary focuses more on emotions and their resolution through dielectics, her world isn't as real(real as in literary sense) which works for the benefit of her as she gets more time to focus on her emotional characters.

>>24542815
Scott's reputation initially dropped because tastes shifted from romanticism to realism.

>>24542676
>>24542829
You're being way too critical. Unironically I think this more reflects your own limited capacity for understanding what is culturally foreign than it does a lack of universality in Scott. Of course he embodied a Romantic vision of history, but that is no less true of Goethe or Hugo, and what appealed to them in Scott can still just as easily appeal to us. What stops modern people from appreciating Scott isn't a matter of substance, isn't that his stories contain any less truthfulness or insight for modern times, but that the initial mechanism for appealing to an audience has changed. Superficially, in the 19th century, someone was interested in a historical romance and picked up a Walter Scott novel, and was pleasantly surprised to find a great deal more depth. The entire experience, from beginning to end, including facets of both action-adventure and interior psychology, was an enjoyable one that sustained interest. The irony is that us moderns assume, by the exterior, that Scott is just romantic rubbish, and thus do not even begin to appreciate his vast depth and originality. He is never granted the good will and suspension of disbelief that fiction requires. Audiences today will, on the opening page, be more invested in the beginning of some tangent of psychological realism than in Scott's historical grounding, but I think this is a merely fashionable preference that has nothing to do with people's real tastes.

>>24542891
nah its just that tastes have changed
a guy looking to read a historical book is going to read bernard cornwell or other boomer guy historical fiction
a woman wanting to read a historical book is gonna want to read one of the thousands of churned out historical """"romances""""
scott sadly has no appeal anymore
And that's not even mentioning his poetry which nobody, not even most people into 19th century literature, reads anymore

>>24542929
You have a very superficial conception of the 'appeal' of literature. I, for one, am a great fan of his poetry.

>>24542891
>He is never granted..
This is absolutely true, but ironically the reason why I read beyond Ivanhoe in the first place (he was being bashed in pop science books as well; the poster boy for all that was considered 'rubbish' in Romanticism). But what I discovered after reading him was that none of his bashers had probably read him themselves; even further, that bashers of topics in general generally don't know what in the hell they're talking about, because THAT would imply more than a little study of what one claims to despise, which, as an endeavor, is almost always unlikely, unless forced-- and who is forced to read Walter Scott in 2025? Even beyond the undergraduate level in English, almost no one

>>24542929
>tastes
Not a matter of taste, but of marketing

>>24542934
>You have a very superficial conception of the 'appeal' of literature. I, for one, am a great fan of his poetry.
No, i genuinely enjoy scott's poetry and he is one of my favorite poets
But people generally aren't into poetry (unfortunately) and those who are get into the other british romantics like keats, byron, shelley, wordsworth, etc. scott's name is strangely forgotten despite his huge influence. this is probably because lyric poetry is seen as deeper or more intellectual than narrative poetry
you can browse scott threads on /lit/ and notice that nobody even attempts to discuss his poetry for some reason despite him being known principally as a poet in his day.

>>24542956
Weirdly, the same applies to Hugo, at least in France

>>24542595
>nobody puts women down nearly as much as other women
Why are they like this?

>>24542956
>>24542959
Novelists can be either classical or marginal. Poets get to be either fashionable or unfashionable.

>>24542948
>what I discovered after reading him was that none of his bashers had probably read him themselves; even further, that bashers of topics in general generally don't know what in the hell they're talking about,
Of course, that's always the case with people who deride the ideals of the past. Which I think is usually their real target, not ahistoricism, when they criticicse something like the stories of Scott.

>>24542956
>No, i genuinely enjoy scott's poetry and he is one of my favorite poets
Oh, I though you were actually trying to claim that there is no reason for anyone to read Walter Scott today. I wasn't denying that he's lost the popular readership, I just think that if the average person gave him a chance they would greatly enjoy him, hence what I meant when I said the change in taste is only a superficial one. A fundamental change in taste limits the whole possibility of enjoyment.

>>24542986
What does this mean?

>>24543008
The average person would find him too slow and ponderous. Eg Kenilworth has that breathless Hitchcock style denouement, but takes 250 pages to set it up. A modern reader won’t hang in with you that long.
Also the way he presents characters is very premodern, with the speeches and soliloquies and pedantic quibbling. People will swallow that in a drama, but not in a novel.
Compare with Austen’s more realistic dialogue and free indirect discourse. Not to make a claim about better or worse, but one is what we do now and modern readers are used to, and one is not

>>24543053
I don't think Austen is intrinsically any easier to read than Walter Scott for the average person today. You often see modern people complain about the difficulty of reading Austen, which makes me think their persistence in reading is more attributable to her reputation than to a natural affinity with her style. Albeit, since most of her readers are women, that reputation does exist because of the natural affinity women have for her subject matter, which they would find much harder to have for Walter Scott. But I can easily see Scott having an equivalent reputation among young men in the future that encourages them to persist through what is at first foreign or difficult to eventually enjoy reading him.

adore austen's prose but her worlds of aspirational landed people are about as relatable as a tibetan cloister

>>24543053
Nah. Compare:
> You have requested me, my dear friend, to bestow some of that leisure, with which Providence has blessed the decline of my life, in registering the hazards and difficulties which attended its commencement. The recollection of those adventures, as you are pleased to term them, has indeed left upon my mind a chequered and varied feeling of pleasure and of pain, mingled, I trust, with no slight gratitude and veneration to the Disposer of human events, who guided my early course through much risk and labour, that the ease with which he has blessed my prolonged life might seem softer from remembrance and contrast. Neither is it possible for me to doubt, what you have often affirmed, that the incidents which befell me among a people singularly primitive in their government and manners, have something interesting and attractive for those who love to hear an old man's stories of a past age.
With
>Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
>She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father, and had, in consequence of her sister's marriage, been mistress of his house from a very early period. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses, and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection.
Austen doesn’t beat around the bush. We’ve got the whole setup right there. What will that first novel be about? We don’t know, because Scott takes his sweet time to tell us

>>24543134
The Scott novel will be about a now old man's 'adventures' among a relatively primitive people. The opening is epistolary in form.
The setup of the second novel is 'right there' as you say, but so what? YOU seem to argue that impatience is a virtue and that the opening lines not only dictate what the quality of the novel will be as a whole, but are somehow more modern (than delay) which plainly false. The opening paragraph of Suttree:
>Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay entrapped each twig, each grain of sediment, long flakes and blades of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic strobes where motes sifted and spun. A hand trails over the gunwale and lies athwart the skiff, the toe of one sneaker plucking periodic dimples in the river with the boat's slight cradling, drifting down beneath the bridge and slowly past the mud stained stanchions. Under the high cool arches and dark keeps of the span's undercarriage where pigeons babble and the hollow flap of their wings echoes in stark applause. Glancing up at these cathedral vaultings with their fossil woodknots and pseudomorphic nailheads in gray concrete, drifting, the bridge's slant shadow leaning the width of the river with that headlong illusion postulate in old cupracers frozen on photoplates, their wheels elliptic with speed. These shadows form over the skiff, accommodate the prone figure and pass on.
What this cento informs us about the Scott cento as supplied by YOU is that some kind of mood is being established (in each of these cases) whereas Austen dispenses with any such need, but, as a result, comes to remind one very strongly of newspaper journalism, which, given it's easiness on modern eyes, is therefore the best species of writing for modern brains too. That despite a relative myriad of modern time-saving devices the modern brain just simply hasn't the time to be so drawn in, etc.
I do appreciate the little extra time spent on this, anon, but it's simply not a good argument UNLESS (relative) journalism IS in fact the best type of literary writing in 2025. Is it? Only Mansfield Park's a greater slog than Emma, btw, although I did like NA..

>>24542676
>Scott rarely gets through a novel without some lumpy bits.
But supposing now that we assume the existence of a really unblemished and irreproachable writer. Is it not worth while to raise the whole question whether in poetry and prose we should prefer sublimity accompanied by some faults, or a style which never rising above moderate excellence never stumbles and never requires correction? and again, whether the first place in literature is justly to be assigned to the more numerous, or the loftier excellences? For these are questions proper to an inquiry on the Sublime, and urgently asking for settlement.
I know, then, that the largest intellects are far from being the most exact. A mind always intent on correctness is apt to be dissipated in trifles; but in great affluence of thought, as in vast material wealth, there must needs be an occasional neglect of detail. And is it not inevitably so? Is it not by risking nothing, by never aiming high, that a writer of low or middling powers keeps generally clear of faults and secure of blame? whereas the loftier walks of literature are by their very loftiness perilous? I am well aware, again, that there is a law by which in all human productions the weak points catch the eye first, by which their faults remain indelibly stamped on the memory, while their beauties quickly fade away. Yet, though I have myself noted not a few faulty passages in Homer and in other authors of the highest rank, and though I am far from being partial to their failings, nevertheless I would call them not so much wilful blunders as oversights which were allowed to pass unregarded through that contempt of little things, that “brave disorder,” which is natural to an exalted genius; and I still think that the greater excellences, though not everywhere equally sustained, ought always to be voted to the first place in literature, if for no other reason, for the mere grandeur of soul they evince. Let us take an instance: Apollonius in his Argonautica has given us a poem actually faultless; and in his pastoral poetry Theocritus is eminently happy, except when he occasionally attempts another style. And what then? Would you rather be a Homer or an Apollonius? Or take Eratosthenes and his Erigone; because that little work is without a flaw, is he therefore a greater poet than Archilochus, with all his disorderly profusion? greater than that impetuous, that god-gifted genius, which chafed against the restraints of law? or in lyric poetry would you choose to be a Bacchylides or a Pindar? in tragedy a Sophocles or (save the mark!) an Io of Chios? Yet Io and Bacchylides never stumble, their style is always neat, always pretty; while Pindar and Sophocles sometimes move onwards with a wide blaze of splendour, but often drop out of view in sudden and disastrous eclipse. Nevertheless no one in his senses would deny that a single play of Sophocles, the Oedipus, is of higher value than all the dramas of Io put together.

>>24543398
What you as an individual prefer is besides the point. You can like anything you like. We are discussing the tastes of the general reader in 2025, and the relative popularity of these two writers among the general reading public, not you personally.
Austen is more widely read today, in 2025, because she is more attuned to what readers, in general, prefer today, in 2025, compared to Walter Scott. Is this controversial?

>>24542211
That sounds pretty ironic.

Scott for being a visionary schizo; Austen just cared about domestic drama. Her prose is nice; her aim too low.

>>24542211
Here’s the full quote:
>Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has Fame and Profit enough as a Poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it but fear I must.

>>24543466
It's not, but it's also self-evident, and not at all what you 'argued,' but so be it. I'm content to let things rest right here