"Excruciatingly funny" tidbits

Today's newsround has turned out to be one of those where several Brontë mentions crop up. None of them are relevant or even to the point, but they do serve the purpose of showing just what a strong grasp the Brontës have in popular culture.

First of all, The Guardian reviews a book called Yesterday's Houses by Mavis Cheeks. Sally Vincent, the reviewer, writes this:

You can buy Mavis Cheeks in supermarkets. You can find them in posh bookshops as well, but that isn't the point. What's clever is the undaunting accessibility of a body of work packaged to look like a set, Mills & Boon-style. You might easily have got outside of half a dozen of them before you discover Mavis Cheek is generally acknowledged by those who generally acknowledge these things to be a writer of the genre known as "comedies of manners" who may count herself in the same class as Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. She describes, as they did, the relationship between herself and the society in which she finds herself, and is often, as they were, excruciatingly funny about it without ever being remotely arch or cutesy-poo.

We can see it applied to Miss Austen (somehow, anyway) - but we never thought to describe Charlotte's approach to society as "excruciatingly funny". Puzzling.

Then we move on to find the following in The New York Review of Books:

In such tales, for a moment, another Moody seems to displace the smart-aleck, ad-libbing satirist —a loser at love, an intimate of death, as if, inside his Marvel Comics costume (Don DeLilloMan!) Charlotte Brontë was trying to get out.

We dare you to make sense of that.

And of course, several other news sites echo yesterday's amazing news item, though no one as yet sheds any more light on it.

Categories: In_the_News, Weirdo, Charlotte_Brontë