World Enough and Time

I don't know: I find some of the ones created by female novelists utterly unbearable. I don't like Austen at all (the men are Regency furniture – elegantly carved but solid mahogany), and I hate Charlotte Brontë's "teacher-student" obsession (the Heger affair seems to colour every male-female relationship she writes, including Jane and Rochester). Perhaps it's an orientation thing: essentially, I find that straight women's ideal is not mine. There seems to be a fixation with "polar opposites attract", which – unless the narrative goal is tragic disharmony and dysfunction, in which case one roots for only one character – strikes me as a recipe for disaster. (Perhaps it's simply a dramatisation of heterosexuality taken to its most extreme.) If happiness is the goal, I don't see how conflicting temperaments can work. Surely likeness is better?