A Brontëite from Glass Town

The Hook publishes an interview with the poet Lisa Russ Spaar,

She's published four books of poetry over the years, and her work has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, the Yale Review, and many other literary journals. Presently, she's editing an anthology of poems about London that will be published by the University of Virginia Press in 2007.

The reason for being considered a proud member of the Brontëites club:

Favorite book? Jane Eyre, of course.

Walter Mitty fantasy: I play Emily Dickinson as guitarist and singer in an all-girl garage band. Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Sappho, and Zora Neale Hurston are also in the band.

But more than words are needed to be a real Brontëite. Lisa Russ Spaar has written evidence of her Brontë militancy. In her 1999 book Glass Town (not a coincidence), for which she received the Rona Jaffe Emerging Women Writers Award in 2000, she devotes a whole section to poems related with the Brontë sisters:

Glass Town

1. E. Brontë: Last Hours
2. "Buried Alive"
3. C. Brontë at the Sea
4. Writing Jane Eyre
5. T. Parson's Anne
6. Glass Town: A Childhood

(...) Finishing Jane Eyre on the Grounds of the University of Pennyslvania Hospital.

Even the book begins with this quote from Jane Eyre (Chapter 5):
"She looks as if she ever thinking of something ... beyond her situation... Her sight seems turned in, gone down into her heart".

Credits: PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO

Categories: Brontëites