No, I know, I KNOW, we said no more Harry Potter this year, but I forgot that I had accepted this ages ago, and I think you will enjoy it very much. And imagine the joy you’ll get from vociferously disagreeing with their choices in the comments!
Jane Austen
(Sorry – how many bedrooms did you say it has?!)
We’re starting off with a softball here – Jane, beloved Jane, is an easy choice. Her novels, occasionally dismissed by illiterate ninnyhammers as romances, are ultimately about the triumph of reason and order over flightiness, sentimentality, and impecunity. Her archly observant style, her mathematically precise sentences, her evident delight in a wry, cutting comment (“It is not everyone who has your passion for dead leaves“) — these things speak volumes. We’re talking about a novelist who openly mocks her heroine’s Gothic-novel addled naivete (Northanger Abbey), who saddles another capricious protagonist with an ancient naval colonel to keep her in check (Sense and Sensibility), and whose most familiar heroine famously falls in love only after seeing her suitor’s sweet-ass estate (Pride and Prejudice.) And if you will let me indulge in a little biographical criticism for a moment: Austen’s most impressive stylistic innovation is free indirect discourse, which is a structure all about peeking inside people’s heads and then getting to be the All Knowing, All Seeing Puppetmistress.
Verdict: Ravenclaw
Charlotte, Emily, and Anne (Poor Anne) Bronte
Charlotte Bronte: I mean. Are you joking. Like it’s even a question. We’ve all read Jane Eyre.
Verdict: Gryffindor
Emily Bronte: My first thought was Gryffindor because: hot-headed. Absolutist. Stubborn, oh god, so stubborn. But everyone– absolutely every single last character!– in Wuthering Heights is a monster. And not Gryffindorrish monsters like Harry Potter, who have at least some notion of moral righteousness that they ultimately warp or discard while casting Crucio curses on their innocent classmates. Like selfish, nihilist monsters who inflict pain on everyone around them because they cannot be bothered to do otherwise. Beyond her work, little is known of Emily, for she died so young and knew so few people. In her preface to Wuthering Heights‘ second printing, Charlotte attempted to hold Emily’s character separate from the book’s “horror of great darkness,” stating that Emily “having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done” and claiming that “had [Emily] but lived, her mind would of itself have grown like a strong tree, loftier, straighter, wider-spreading, and its matured fruits would have attained a mellower ripeness and sunnier bloom.”
But reading these words, I can’t help but agree with Anne Carson’s observation (from her flawless poem “The Glass Essay”) that “Charlotte’s preface to Wuthering Heights is a publicist’s masterpiece. / Like someone carefully not looking at a scorpion/ crouched on the arm of the sofa.” Read between the lines of this preface, and an image of Emily emerges that is so Tom Riddle I could just die: a “nursling of the moors,” with an imagination “more sombre than sunny, more powerful than sportive,” consumed by collecting the “tragic and terrible traits” of her neighbors’ lives, but speaking to no one, crafting ”vivid and fearful scenes” which “banished sleep by night, and disturbed mental peace by day.” No matter how hard Charlotte tries, it’s simply impossible to deny this plain fact: Heathcliff and Cathy could never have come from the warm heart of a Hufflepuff, the logic of a Ravenclaw, or the just mind of a Gryffindor.
Verdict: Slytherin
Anne (Poor Anne) Bronte: Poor Anne. Toiling forever in her tempestuous sisters’ shadows. Hardworking, scarcely noticed, staunchly unconvinced that any man who could keep a mad wife locked in his attic would ever be worth anyone’s time. Writing poems with lines like this:
Oh, I have known a wondrous joy
In early friendship’s pure delight,–
A genial bliss that could not cloy–
My sun by day, my moon by night.
– “Self-Communion” by Anne Brontë (1820-1849)
Can there be any real question?
Verdict: Hufflepuff.
Charles Dickens
(Sorry, Oliver Twist. You are highly symbolic, but do not get to be an actual person.)
“Oh, Charles Dickens? You mean the most famous social activist author of probably all time? The infamous puller of heart-strings? With all the starving orphans and broad-shoulder heroes? He is practically Godric Gryffindor’s right hand man.”
So you might assume. But have you ever looked at one of Charles Dickens’ plot outlines? Peppered throughout, you would not find thoughtful notes on how best to develop, say, the distinct character of Jo, the tiny orphan crossing-sweep from Bleak House. No. What you’ll find is Dickens’ consuming preoccupation with when Jo should die for maximum narrative effect. This is not the behavior of an author alive to the worth of every living human, but to the worth every person can have towards furthering his career if killed off at just the right moment. (The notes move from “Jo -… pointing hand of allegory”, to “Jo? Yes. Kill him.”) Poor people were only plot points to him and it shows.
As for how his social activism is depicted in his books, I don’t think I can put it any better than Philanthropy Daily, a conservative website for aspiring oligarchs:
“Dickens describes a comfortable philanthropy in which the rich can retain their status so long as they generously share their wealth…” In other words: Are you a wealthy middle-aged man looking to sponsor an attractive young ward? Bully for you! Here’s hoping she marries you someday! Are you a middle-aged wife and mother who has the temerity to concern herself with the plight of starving African people? ISN’T THERE SOME HOUSEWORK YOU SHOULD BE DOING?
And finally, no thorough account of Dickens is complete without a glance at his obsessive side-career as a performer of his own works, something he loved perfecting until he could drive his massive audiences into hysterical frenzies. Of particular note (or rather, concern) was Dickens’ monomaniacal focus on the Sikes and Nancy murder scene from Oliver Twist, which he absolutely delighted in reading aloud. In a letter, Dickens described the experience of reading the gruesome scene: “…there was a fixed expression of horror of me, all over the theatre, which could not have been surpassed if I had been going to be hanged to that red velvet table. It is quite a new sensation to be execrated with that unanimity; and I hope it will remain so!”
In short: Don’t be taken in by his Gryffindor drag. Charles looked out for #1. And was weirdly into playacting murder scenes.
Verdict: Straight-up Slytherin
Wilkie Collins
It would be easy to cast Collins as a Slytherin groupie a la Crabbe and Goyle. He was the kind of guy who clung to Dickens’ coattails as the most efficient and effective way to gain literary success. But unlike Dickens, Collins was not out there screaming about his success to the world; he was inside, writing letters to his mother, eating jam tarts with his tiny child-sized hands and doing tons and tons of opium. Collins worked hard, but he was paranoid and sickly and literally terrified of his own shadow (in the form of a doppelganger he named “Ghost Wilkie.”) He was also so bonkers that he could write a novel called Armadale featuring not one but four characters named Allan Armadale. The characters in his novels who make it out alive tend to be sensitive, loyal types who’ve been put in terrible circumstances through no fault of their own, and the villains are all grasping, greedy, maniacal charlatans with names like Count Fosco (Woman in White.)
Verdict: Hufflepuff
Elizabeth Gaskell
(Shocked – just shocked – at the state of the working conditions in this cotton mill.)
Mrs. Gaskell is initially a solid contender for Hufflepuff on the strength of her cozy pastoral novels Wives and Daughters and Cranford, where no one is evil and no one is cruel. They are just people being funny or getting into trouble because they are very focused on their needs and don’t understand anyone else. She manages to generate sympathy (not much– but some!) for a man who attempts to blackmail a girl into marrying him by threatening to publish private letters in which said girl wrote him when she was 16. THAT is some Hufflepuff kindness right there. PLUS she willingly published under the name “Mrs. Gaskell” for her entire lifetime, which is the Hufflepuffiest way to Victorian lady author. “No male pseudonyms for me, thanks– I don’t even need a first name! Just call me Mrs. Because, above all things, I am a wife and mother.”
But then, dear friends, but then. I remembered Margaret Hale. A character so canon Gryffinfor that I will never again be able to imagine her without eight S.P.E.W. buttons pinned to the front of the pointedly plain frock she’s surely wearing. The character whose life story (child of a dissenting minister, banished from the rural south, shocked and adrift in the callous industrial north, befriending labor firebrands left, alienating wealthy mill owners right) closely parallels Gaskell’s own and suddenly only one answer seemed reasonable.
Verdict: Gryffindor
Anthony Trollope
Trollope’s genius was in his reliability, his steady and apparently boundless ability to churn out novel after novel, and the quality of his work, which is simultaneously human and unassuming. Trollope sweated the small stuff. Time after time, his characters are stuck in some impossible social morass that they cannot escape but which started just because someone owed someone else a little bit of money (Framley Parsonage, and really most Trollope novels), or got an undeserved promotion (Barchester Towers), or wrote a slightly unkind anonymous piece about someone else in the newspaper (The Warden.) No one clutches poorly secured gutters while dangling from rooftops in Trollope. No orphans moan piteously as they whisper their true mother’s name with their last breath. And unlike some other guys we know, who tended to fly by the seats of their pants while constructing things slapdash for serial publication (*cough* DICKENS *cough*), Trollope wrote almost everything beforehand by following a strict personal timetable and often writing while riding the train. Once he became successful, Trollope claimed to be interested in all sorts of big achievements – “to sit in the British Parliament should be the highest object of ambition to every educated Englishman” – but look at the construction of that phrase. It “should” be. But was it, really? Wouldn’t it be better to just go hunting three times a week?
Verdict: Hufflepuff
George Eliot
Dear reader, you might think Eliot would be a shoe-in for Gryffindor, but you would be wrong. Oh sure, she ran off to Europe to live with her married lover because he wasn’t allowed to divorce his wife, and she writes with such indignation about social injustice and the plight of… unmarried pregnant women (Adam Bede), women in loveless marriages (Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda), the Jews (Daniel Deronda) – take your pick. These are the kinds of grand gestures that would seem to have Gryffindor written all over them. But the dominant quality of George Eliot’s prose is her unshrinking, unstinting observation of human character, shaped by a style that is unbelievably balanced, precise and gloriously meticulous. This is an author, after all, who breaks off from the momentum of her storytelling to deliver an entire masterful chapter on the art of the novel, comparing her work to that of a surgeon and a Dutch painter. (“The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin – the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, better; but that marvelous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion.”) And let’s further consider her relationship with George Henry Lewes: a real Gryffindor would’ve stuck it out in England doing a whole foolhardy campaign to change the divorce laws and generally making a stink about things. Eliot and Lewes chose instead to opt out of that whole social system, maintaining contact where possible without letting it consume their work or daily lives.
Finally, I give you the nail in Eliot’s Sorting coffin: Silly Novels by Lady Novelists. “To judge from their writings, there are certain ladies who think that an amazing ignorance, both of science and of life, is the best possible qualification for forming an opinion on the knottiest moral and speculative questions. Apparently, their recipe for solving all such difficulties is something like this: Take a woman’s head, stuff it with a smattering of philosophy and literature chopped small, and with false notions of society baked hard, let it hang over a desk a few hours every day, and serve up hot in feeble English when not required.”
Verdict: Ravenclaw
Thomas Hardy
In Gryffindor Tower, far from the warmth and laughter of the common room, there is a dark and dour corner where a select few gather. They are men of morals, men of character, men with too-full hearts in a too-cruel world. Men who burn with anger so brightly and so briefly, only to fade into ash forevermore. These men are the Saddest Gryffindors. Thomas Hardy sits among them, a group that includes David Foster Wallace, Vincent Van Gogh, and Charlie Brown, discussing the myriad ways this world can let you down; a sad dude among sad, sad dudes. And don’t you ever try to tell me otherwise.
Verdict: Gryffindor
Tags: books, british novelists, harry potter, margaret and kathryn, no really the last harry potter of 2014
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I got ahead of myself at first and was about to raise a big stink about all three Bronte sisters being sorted into Gryffindor but then I slowed down and saw that no, no, you had sorted them exactly right, and there they are in the houses they belong in. Good. Goooood.
We would NEVER have played you like that. We just couldn’t.
Even imagining them successfully living in the same PARSONAGE is tough.
I have a biography of the Brontes sitting on a shelf, unread, so I speak from a place of ignorance, but: Their writing, plus that intro by Charlotte always makes me think they must have had a hell of a sibling relationship.
I always assume that it’s one of those situations where only Branwell being the actual literal worst kept all of the Bronte sisters from murdering each other. They were united in common cause both taking care of him and (I imagine) dreaming of someday smothering him to death with a pillow and then like driving off a cliff, Thelma and Louise and Poor Anne-style. – Margaret
Oh yeah, that was definitely part of it – the united against a common cause thing. The other issue, of course, was the fact that they all kept dying off at alarmingly frequent intervals. Hard to work up the energy to turn on each other when clearly nature will take one of you out sooner rather than later. — Kathryn
Poor Anne.
<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3
ancient naval colonel OMG HE’S THIRTY-FIVE
that man needs a paper shade for his unkind light bulb
A little over half of all entertainment media available to me has conditioned me to think of thirty-five as older than the trees and everything else except tortoises maybe. Thirty-five-year-olds were teenagers during the Sealing of the Ancient Evil, four thousand years ago.
AND I’M THIRTY-SIX. Though everyone tends to take me for ten years younger.
I have rarely agreed with anything so fervently as the entire section on Emily Bronte. SLYTHERIN INDEED.
This whole article is worth it simply for Emily Bronte (though it was heartily enjoyable overall!).
Also v worth it for the linked poem- I had never read the Glass Essay before!
You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
She shifted to a question about airports.
THE GLASS ESSAY IS THE BEST/ so is Anne Carson. – Margaret
Also, I literally read this two minutes after teaching a hastily-researched introduction to Dickens, and it made me go, “oh. whoops.”
In support of Charles Dickens as Slytherin – was also a HUGE HUGE DOUCHEBAG to his wife who had like 100 of his children and apparently never said a word against him. I am generally in favor of talking more about how famous male writers, artists, etc. were absolutely awful to the women in their lives, because A LOT OF THEM WERE and more needs to be said about that. So.
We could have written a WHOLE ENTIRE BOOK just about how much of a Slytherin Charles Dickens is: Trust.
Oh, I believe it (and certainly didn’t mean to imply you both didn’t already know about that!). I just have to bring it up every time I see/hear him mentioned, because righteous feminist rage.
#Amen #MisandryForever – Margaret
Agreed — especially instead of, say, making movies about how great it is to have secret affairs with 18-year-old actresses. (Looking at you, Ralph Fiennes!)
UGGHHGHHHGHGH the trailer for that movie was SO GROSS. Please do not romanticize that whole shitty affair, Hollywood. We already know you think all old white men should get to fuck pretty 18-year-olds. Also Ralph Fiennes NOOOOOOOOO WHYYYYYY
I saw that trailer in front of Dallas Buyers Club and was like, “oh man, now I’m mad for TWO REASONS” (the second reason is that my family dragged me to see Dallas Buyers Club).
Welp, it was going to be a fun day, but now the Saddest Gryffindors are all I can think about.
Also among The Saddest Gryffindors: Jeff Magnum, for ever and for sure.
And Percy. Percy is their Prefect.
Are the underlined bits later on in the article meant to link to things, or are they just underlined for emphasis? (I ask because I tried SO HARD to click on the bit about Wilkie Collins’ “tiny child-sized hands” and was thwarted.)
Oh no, that is supposed to be a link! See, for instance, here: http://www.wilkie-collins.info/home_gloucester.ht… or here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/1991/nov/21/biog…
I think they should all work now? It’s a weird thing that happens sometimes with submissions that are in email bodies, but you should now be set.
Hooray! Thanks, Nicole. I’m looking forward to clicking through on these.
Nicole is the best; we are rubes. If we submit again, it’ll be GoogleDocs or bust!
Henry James, guys. Go.
What’s the Harry Potter house for people who are famously constipated and write to their doctor brothers about it in an elaborate code
Ravenclaw. I mean. He MADE UP A CODE to write to his brother. Ravenclaw is the only possible answer.
friendless ravenclaw who only feels acceptance when he solves a riddle at the door
the warmth- it never lasts
James is also Ravenclaw, absolutely, thanks to the prefaces he wrote for his novels. “Before you read this novel I wrote, please allow me to share with you the theory of writing novels as a genre. Let’s talk more about realism and representation, hmmm?” See also; George Eliot’s chapter in Adam Bede “In Which the Story Pauses a Little.” — Kathryn
I hate that I can’t like your comments, Kathryn. The system just thinks I’m being self-congratulatory. – Margaret
(You deserve to be self-congratulatory & you know it!)
(Hi you wonderful person & don’t think I’m not regretting not seeing this until today. I love every word. Y’all are superb!)
And William, too, right? Because Pragmatism, for reals.
SADDEST GRYFFINDORS. genius
You make your cases well, I disagree with none of them!
H.G. Wells: the quintessential Ravenclaw.
John Buchan: Gryffindor.
Max Beerbohm: Ravenclaw.
Rudyard Kipling: too enamored of power. Slytherin.
Robert Louis Stevenson: Gryffindor.
Margaret Oliphant: Hufflepuff.
George Gissing: Gryffindor all over.
HG Wells was definitely Ravenclaw, while Jules Verne (French, not English, I know) was totally a Hufflepuff with his head in the clouds.
Oh my god, Gissing. I wonder if he shouldn’t be a sad Gryffindor, though? (cf. the tombstone scene in The Nether World)
So true about Kipling. But the actual book Kim deserves an honored place on the Gryffindor common room shelves. It’s arrogant, but observant. For 19th c. writing it’s generous to its colonial subject. It involves derring do, loyalty, and high drama. The powerful spymaster wants nothing more than to be recognized as a Royal Society Fellow for his ethnology, which makes him as valorous and foolish as any other character.
Or, as my brother says, it’s “almost not racist.” But in interesting ways.
Kim is one of my favorite books, actually.
“It’s almost not racist” is such a beautiful thing to be able to say about Victorian novels. – Margaret
Yeahh… to me, “it’s almost not racist” is a classic Gryffindor move. A Slytherin Kipling would say “heck yes, White Man’s Burden is racist, that’s obviously what I meant!” But Gryffindor Kipling – the one I believe might be closer to the truth – would be all hurt that you even thought he meant it that way. — Kathryn
I agree with you on that. With children who grow up in a country other than the one the passport (third culture kids) there’s a strong tendency towards over-identification with the “home” country, which is intensified because few of their compatriots easily accept them (after all, English was not Kipling’s first language), so they have to be twice as good, hence twice as jingoistic. He wrote those incredibly bitter poems after WW1, realizing how tragic it was (personally and as a whole), when he probably wanted nothing more than to be Kim.
You are awesome. I said further down that Kipling would be Hufflepuff, because I think Kipling’s great strength is how well he understands people, what matters to them and what connects them – and that ultimately, that understanding is stronger than any of his political beliefs. Which is why Kim isn’t racist; Kipling is writing about all of these people as individuals, regardless of their race. And the best thing about Kim isn’t all the spy stuff and derring-do, it’s the relationship between Kim and the lama. I would accept Gryffindor too, though. But I think it’s complicated because Kipling admired people who were crafty Slytherin types, and he thought of that as a virtue connected to all the Gryffindor-type virtues. Stalky, for instance, is a Slytherin, but Kipling would probably put him in Gryffindor. (And King is Snape, or the other way around – but that, as Kipling would say, is Another Story.)
Robert Louis Stevenson: The Gryffindorriest. Amen. Forever. — Margaret
H.G. Wells’ relationship with Rebecca West places him firmly in either Gryffindor (She dares call me “the Old Maid among novelists” for my PIERCING dissection of contemporary monogamy? I must have her.) or Slytherin (Oh shit, you got pregnant? Let me just, you know, cut you off from your beloved family and stick you in a cottage somewhere.)
Kipling is a Hufflepuff. He just likes to pal around with Slytherins.
I had to give up on reading Wuthering Heights so many times because I could not handle how the characters refuse to take any actions that might make their lives, or the lives of others, slightly better. It shows what a great book it is, because I cared, but, just, ARGH DON’T DO THAT.
What do you guys think for Oscar Wilde?
J.M. Barrie is supposed to be in Slytherin, believe you me, but probably argued with the Sorting Hat to be put somewhere else. Self-loathing Slytherin.
Lewis Carroll is a Ravenclaw. How is a Ravenclaw like a writing desk?
Gryffindor for Wilde. No Ravenclaw in their right mind would bring libel charges against Queensbury.
I like this a lot cause it makes A Portrait Of Dorian Grey a self-critical Gryffindor book “Maybe being Awesome And Right And GLorious all the time isn’t great if it makes you do bad things like strangle dudes.” Plus, loving the performance of romance over actual affection.
omg these are spot on
Agreed on Barrie. Wilde was probably a Gryffindor full of potential who kept tripping on his own poor judgment. Brilliant, likable, and eventually overrun.
I always wonder with ‘sorting [group of people] into Hogwarts houses’ quizzes like… how bad, exactly, does one have to be before we declare them a Squib?
I love G.B. Shaw but I think he would have been a squib. his plays are funny, but it’s like, mechanical “ha ha this is joke” funny.
And he hated Shakespeare in a way that sounds like he was super jealous of his reknown. So. Filch all over, really.
(I love Arms and the Man.)
Arms and the Man is so CHARMING and I LOVE IT and maybe with the right cast that could infuse actual human emotion into it, it would be amazing??
Except for Saint Joan. I think the end of Saint Joan should get him into Gryffindor – at least for one day out of the year.
ALSO THOMAS HUGHES. he was SURE he would be a gryffindor but then his letter never came and he turned his long-seeing eyes to making Real Men out of christian boys in boarding schools. and probably like aggressively anti-wizard because magic lets you shortcut the Good Honest Toil that the lord wants from you.
HAHAHAHA I LOVE YOU (and thomas hughes) (but yes he can be a squib) (I have spoken)
I’m not sure I really get why Emily Bronte is Slytherin. Wuthering Heights is hardly an endorsement of the behaviour of its character. The exact opposite in fact. Heathcliff is never painted as anything other than what he is: a twisted victim of abuse that grows up to be a terrible abuser himself . He pays for that with a life of unhappiness. Hareton and Cathy Jnr find happiness because they are able to forgive Heathcliff and move on from the offences he inflicted on them. Even the novels closing lines suggests there are no ghosts and the dead are at peace and the past has gone with them. An author of a novel that ultimately values forgiveness and moving on from previous injustices just doesn’t seem very ‘slytherin’ to me.
I don’t think Anne Bronte is Hufflepuff either. She was the most radical of the Bronte sisters. She had a ‘plain’ heroine before Charlotte did in Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is one the most feminist novels of the 19th Century . Much more feminist than Jane Eyre.
“I miss you like Thomas Hardy missed Emma Gifford” was a frequent exchange between me and one of my college friends for a very long time.
I want to be friends with you and your college friends, is that okay? Can we retcon that? – Margaret
Yes. You can hang out with us and listen to Songs of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex by the Mellstock Band that we won at Thomas Hardy Jeopardy.
(This is the insanity that happens when you take a Thomas Hardy seminar.)
OH MY GOD did we actually go to the same college or does it just FEEL like we should have? I’m now hideously depressed that there was no George Eliot Jeopardy in my George Eliot seminar because I WOULD HAVE KILLED IT. – Margaret
Boo, my Thomas Hardy seminar was decidedly lacking in Thomas Hardy Jeopardy and Songs of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. 🙁
GHOST WILKIE. Love it.
I will say that I initially balked inwardly about putting Collins in Hufflepuff but upon reflection it’s really the only place I can imagine having stoners and that’s for sure what Collins was (opium-eaters were the stoners of the 19th century).
We knew Collins had to be in whatever house Professor Trelawney was in, but there is a surprising amount of uncertainty about that on various Potter-phile forums. Still, I feel pretty good electing them both for Hufflepuff. — Kathryn
Matthew Arnold is a total Hufflepuff.
hmm i don’t know- his lectures on translating homer kind of reads like slytherin/dick rich kid james potter beating up the nerdy classicist who translated the iliad accurately, not poetically.
I MEAN, HE’S NOT WRONG. BUT HE’S A HUUUUUUGE DICK ABOUT IT.
“And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
Total Hufflepuff.
OOH SAGE EDITION!
Carlyle: Slytherin for pure traditionalism, no doubt
Ruskin: Gryffindor
Pater: Head of a louche queer Ravenclaw harem
Mill: Ravenclaw who later writes moodily about how he wishes he had been a Gryffindor and learned to ~feel
I’m not positive about Arnold, I need to think about it for several more weeks, mostly because I’m positive that Arthur Hugh Clough was in Hufflepuff and that Arnold maybe razzed him about it.
This thread is making my Victorianist life!!!
theory of “The Celt” makes him Slytherin.
Anne Bronte #1 Fan Club Forever
She’s the only one in her family who’s plan for getting out of poverty was “I will get a job, yes? And then maybe in a few years we can open a school?” instead of “Let us paint, and sell the paintings, let us write and sell poems, let us wrote novels – that will lift us out of poverty.”
Nothing to add, really, but I love this!
All so spot on.
Mary Shelley: Slytherin or Ravenclaw?
Walter Scott: Hufflepuff?
William Godwin: Slytherin.
Mary Shelley: I might argue Gryffindor? I mean. FRANKENSTEIN ends with two characters like… dying on the artic tundra just because they’re so incapable of letting go of a fight, which is the actual essential Gryffindor trait. – Margaret
For Mary Shelley I could see Gryffindor (bravely striving against societal conventions) or Ravenclaw (so smart, so well read), but I think she was truly, secretly, Slytherin due to the precise and very calculated way she manipulated Shelley’s post-humous image.
William Godwin is a Ravenclaw, in that he values smarts and logic but isn’t particularly brave or kind or loyal. Badgering Shelley for money even while decrying his personal life and shunning his daughter/Shelley’s lover IS Slytherin-y, but he did it because he assumed that thinkers should be supported by others. It was *because* he was so focused on smarts above all else that he was so awful.
I have to disagree with Mary as a Slytherin. Yes, she manipulated Shelley’s posthumous image for many reasons but if you read the way it was manipulated – it was to show him as an angelic figure trying to do great things for humankind. That’s probably the most Gryffindor way of manipulating his image, so between the two I’d pick Gryffindor, though given her intelligence and how much she valued intellectual pursuits I’d say she would be a Ravenclaw.
I agree with William Godwin being a Ravenclaw and not a Slytherin. The Slytherin-y things he did were mainly out of valuing logic and knowledge above all else.
Darwin was a hufflepuff tho, right? Loving dad, dedicated naturalist. Look, hufflepuffs aren’t just nice and dumb, ok?! They’re intuitive.
Puffs are well-rounded folk. We can’t necessarily be described in broad strokes the way members of some of the other houses can be. It’s not to say that members of other houses can’t be complex, but our shades are more nuanced.
As Marshall Eriksen might say, “We’re cuddly, bitch, deal with it.”
I think Darwin could definitely be a Hufflepuff. There’s even Professor Sprout to back up the house’s biological leanings. And I think his consideration for his wife’s religious views really influenced how he presented his scientific findings in a way they would not have done for a Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, or Slytherin. I buy it. – Margaret
THE HELL DO YOU MEAN there will be no more Harry Potter pieces this year. That is only an acceptable statement at 8 PM on December 31st. FOR SERIOUS.
(PS: this was good.)
This is so dead-on to what I would have picked, it made my love for the Toast grow 15 times larger which was previously thought medically impossible.
<3 <3 <3– Margaret
See… haveya read Tenant of Wildfell Hall? Because that is some Gryffindor shit right there. And I’m a Hufflepuff, so I’d love to claim her if I thought I could.
All I came here to say is that Elizabeth I was definitely a Slytheirn and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise.
Oh my god, every time I am sad I am going to come re-read this post (including the comments) because everything here is perfect.
Why are we not doing this for Early Modern authors? It can’t be because we don’t have enough material if Anne Goddamned Bronte gets sorted.
Here are my entirely knee-jerk and uninformed sorts:
John Donne–I want him to be Ravenclaw, but he’s probably Griffindor
Ben Jonson–Hufflepuff but secretly Slytherin
Aphra Behn–Griffindor
John Webster–Saddest Griffindor Squad
Christopher Marlowe–the best kind of Slytherin
Philip Sidney–a middling kind of Slytherin
William Shakespeare–Ravenclaw who hung out with Hufflepuffs for material
Mary Wroth–Ravenclaw so she can hang out with George Eliot and talk about being knocked-up out of wedlock
Thomas Kyd–the rotten kind of Slytherin
George Herbert–should have been in Ravenclaw but sapped his way into Griffindor
“William Shakespeare–Ravenclaw who hung out with Hufflepuffs for material ”
Dead on, and rather hilarious.
Awesome. You are right on with these calls.
Okay, if you’re doing Early Modern, I’m doing 18th century.
Samuel Richardson — Ravenclaw, but the Sorting Hat debated Hufflepuff when it saw the inklings of Sir Charles Grandison in him.
Henry Fielding — swashbuckling Gryffindor all the way.
William Godwin — Slytherin — and a whiny one at that.
Mary Wollstonecraft — Gryffindor, obviously.
Frances Burney — tricky to call — I want to say Gryffindor? But that’s a tough call. Nope, going with Gryffindor.
Maria Edgeworth – comfortable with being a Hufflepuff
Ann Radcliffe — Slytherin, but a nice one. Likes dungeons.
Daniel Defoe – Ugh. Hufflepuff? Slytherin?
Tobias Smollett — Batty Ravenclaw.
Thomas Wyatt? HARD that one.
Thackeray – Ravenclaw, but Becky Shaw is clearly Slytherin
Conan Doyle – thinks he’s a Ravenclaw, but actually Gryffindor? Or maybe Hufflepuff?
And from Edwardian Era/Early Modernism:
WWI Wartime Poets – largely Gryffindor
E.M. Forster – a Saddest Gryffindor?
Saki – Ravenclaw
D.H. Lawrence – Slytherin, but thinks he’s Gryffindor
G.K. Chesterton – Hufflepuff
Conan Doyle: Total Hufflepuff, no Ravenclaw would have been taken in by those girls who pretended they’d seen the fairies. – Margaret
That was my reasoning too! Also, fond of food, prone to sentimentality and belief in hocus pocus, etc.
I feel like Chesterton was more of a Ravenclaw. Not all that nice and cuddly, was our Gilbert.
I love this! But I have strenuous objections! I am a serious Anne fan!
Tenant was a good success, despite the fact that some people were hostile to (1) the “profane expressions, inconceivably coarse language, and revolting scenes and descriptions by which its pages are disfigured” (a.k.a. Anne pulled no punches in describing what drunken dirtbags do) and (2) that the heroine refuses to do her wifely duty and locks her dirtbag husband out (the temerity, to think you have a choice in whether to have sex with your husband…). She defended vision as truthful and necessary in the preface to the second edition. Anne was a clear-sighted, brave, stubborn, grumpy, self-righteous woman who wouldn’t back down from what she believed in. I think Hufflepuffs deserve more credit for bravery, but let’s be clear here–Anne wasn’t the sweetness and light of that stupid poem that is quoted above. (Which Bronte isn’t guilty of sentimental poetic glop?)
Charlotte, Charlotte on the other hand…. Charlotte had a choice whether to have Anne’s novel reprinted after she died. It would have made money. The two editions printed in Anne’s life sold. But she said she wanted to preserve Anne’s reputation, but–Jesus H. Christ on a cracker–why didn’t she do the same for Emily… or herself? All three sisters were subject to a lot of criticism for not being proper lady novelists. Charlotte was stung by Tenant’s criticism of Charlotte’s penchant for romantic dirtbags (and not to mention pissed about some criticism in Tenant, in Anne’s other book, Agnes Grey, and IRL about Branwell’s alcoholic dirtbaggery and Charlotte’s enabling of it), and was probably a little jealous to boot. She threw Anne a lot of shade about her talent and personality after she died in letters and gave her a lot of seriously backhanded compliments in print.
TL; DR: If nobody reads Anne, it’s Charlotte’s fault. Slytherin.
OMG THIS. Thank you!
She was also the only Bronte who liked being a governess and was actually good at her (very tough) job. She must have had a gift for deadpan humo(u)r.
“Where are your feet, child?”
“On the floor, aunt.”
Terribly wonderful, every bit of it. I love this genius idea and the flawless execution. Kudos!
But now I want to know which house all of my favorite authors would be in! What about Maugham? Proust? Mann?! I need answers!
thank you for the trollope love. his likeness and autograph hang behind me/my desk, and you’ve reminded me why.
British mystery novelists:
Agatha Christie – Hufflepuff
Dorothy Sayers – Ravenclaw
Margery Allingham – Gryffindor
Ngaio Marsh – Hufflepuff
Josephine Tey – Gryffindor
P.D. James – Ravenclaw
Ruth Rendell – Slytherin
OH MY GOD.
Colin Dexter (RIP) – Ravenclaw
RD Wingfield (RIP) – Hufflepuff
MYCROFT – Slytherin
SHERLOCK – Slytherin
JOHN WATSON – Gryffindor
MOLLY – Hufflepuff
LESTRADE – Hufflepuff
Oh, I like a lot of that! I’d put Christie in Slytherin, though: she seems all cosy, but her view of humanity is incredibly negative, and she’s spectacularly lacking in compassion towards marginalised people at times.
I am very open to that! I am thinking Ellis Peters for Hufflepuff?
Hmm, not sure about that. By this reasoning, PD James is also in Slytherin, though, and I just can’t see that.
Also trying to think of a mystery writer with a positive view of humanity, and having trouble…
Heh, fair point! Ellis Peters I’d say was fairly positive about humanity. Lindsey Davis… some of the time. Certainly less outright negative than Christie. (I love Christie, but I occasionally want to shout at her characters to stop being so uniformly horrible to each other. But well, I’m totally a Hufflepuff myself, so I would think that. 😉 )
That’s true…I don’t know Ellis Peters as well, but she seems more positive. And as a Ravenclaw myself, I don’t mind when Christie’s characters are so horrible to each other. As long as I can read about it and then cackle over it with Austen, James and Sayers later. 😉
(Allingham is my forever favorite, though. I am more than a little enamored with Albert Campion.)
The great Sayers – Allingham tension summed up so neatly.
Love this. Sayers is just about the most Ravenclaw person I can imagine. But I do think Christie was a Slytherin – there’s something monomaniacal and impressively ambitious about the way she could churn out those Poirots.
But Lord Peter and Harriet are both Gryffindors who for some reason wish they were in Ravenclaw.
How about Joseph Conrad?
Saddest Ravenclaw
Agreed.
The Bronte sorting is absolutely on the nose, but what of poor Branwell??
Branwell was a squib, and that what screwed him up
“Shoo-in,” not “Shoe-in.” Sorry, that one drives me crazy.
I’m fine with Wilkie Collins being in Hufflepuff, but his books are delightful as hell, and his characters are much more finely drawn than the broad caricatures in Severus Dickens’ novels.
Anne is definitely a Ravenclaw: she’s all about clear vision & facing the facts, whatever they may be. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bronte/bro…
I’m wondering what house Byron would be sorted in to. Slytherin for his personal life? Gryffindor for his actions during the Greek war?
I can’t say where Wilkie Collins belongs in the Hogwarts scheme, as I’ve never read any of the Harry Potter books (insert audible gasp here). However, I must protest your portrayal of Wilkie Collins. True, he suffered from ill health most of his life, he consumed massive amounts of opium, and he and Dickens were close friends. However, when they met, Collins had already published a biography and two novels, and his contributions to Dickens’s publications were as beneficial to Dickens as to Collins. As for the opium, considering how much he published (not to mention his, um, social life) it doesn’t seem to have slowed him down much.
Collins was considered by those who knew him as a man of the world and a bon vivant; in addition to his literary work, he studied law and was admitted to the bar (although he never practiced). He had two mistresses, the first of whom he met in circumstances which he later used in “The Woman in White” and whom he married off to a plumber after taking up his second mistress, with whom he lived (under assumed names–i.e. Mrs. and Mrs. William Dawson)–along with her oldest child (born before Collins met her) and two others he fathered.
Collins was a prolific writer, essentially created the detective mystery novel, and his best-known books, “The Woman in White” and “The Moonstone”, have never been out of print since they were first published. Not my idea of a wimp.