Different ways of looking at Brontë poetry and novels

More books published these months that in some way or other quote or discuss Brontë works.

1. "Eliza's Babes: Four centuries of women's poetry in English", c. 1500-1900
By Robyn Bolam and Marion Lomax . Published by Bloodaxe Books.

This comprehensive anthology celebrates four centuries of women’s poetry, covering over 100 poets from a wide range of social backgrounds across the English-speaking world. Familiar names – Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontë sisters, Emily Dickinson, and Christina Rossetti – appear alongside other writers from America, Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand as well as the UK. (...)

Robyn Bolam’s helpfully annotated selection is illustrated with informative biographies. The texts are based on early editions or manuscripts but with modern spelling.

As you can see the Pillar portrait appears on the cover.

2- "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel" by Jane Smiley. Published by Knopf, Random House Publishers.

Over an extraordinary twenty-year career, Jane Smiley has written all kinds of novels: mystery, comedy, historical fiction, epic. “Is there anything Jane Smiley cannot do?” raves Time magazine. But in the wake of 9/11, Smiley faltered in her hitherto unflagging impulse to write and decided to approach novels from a different angle: she read one hundred of them, from classics such as the thousand-year-old Tale of Genji to recent fiction by Zadie Smith, Nicholson Baker, and Alice Munro.

Smiley explores–as no novelist has before her–the unparalleled intimacy of reading, why a novel succeeds (or doesn’t), and how the novel has changed over time. She describes a novelist as “right on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing,” yet whose “job and ambition is to develop a theory of how it feels to be alive.”
(...)
Engaging, wise, sometimes irreverent, Thirteen Ways is essential reading for anyone who has ever escaped into the pages of a novel or, for that matter, wanted to write one. In Smiley’s own words, ones she found herself turning to over the course of her journey: “Read this. I bet you’ll like it.”

The list of 100 novels includes Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights, and also Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.

Categories: Books, References,Poetry, Charlotte_Brontë, Jane_Eyre, Emily_Brontë, Wuthering_Heights