New and old books reviewed

Today, we find in the press several mentions to Brontë influence (or Brontë absence) in several books, some of them already presented on this blog. Let's begin with the old acquaintances:

The New York Times publishes in its Sunday BookReview two reviews of two books that have been mentioned profusely on this blog:

My Mother's Wedding Dress by Justine Picardie is reviewed by Sarah Churchwell.

The first black dress leads to stories about other meaningful garments, and this private history eventually intersects with more public tales, drawn either from Picardie's professional and social encounters with fashionistas (including Donatella Versace and Karl Lagerfeld) or reflecting on her favorite literary personages (from Pippi Longstocking to Sylvia Plath, Miss Havisham to Daphne du Maurier, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald to Sigmund Freud, and especially the Brontë sisters). (...)

In a sense, Picardie's book is about what constitutes a throwaway: it's about what we keep and what we lose; it's about perishability. Ghosts of the uneasy dead are everywhere, starting with that of the author's sister, lost to liver cancer. Before long, Picardie's thoughts turn to Charlotte Brontë, doomed to watch her siblings die before dying young herself; to the murder of Gianni Versace, to Zelda Fitzgerald's death in a fire.

Reader, I Married Him by Michèle Roberts (who just yesterday we quoted as the reviewer of Words of Love) is reviewed by Lauren Collins.

By including allusions to everything from the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell to Cosmopolitan magazine, Roberts positions Aurora somewhere between Bridget Jones ("Perhaps I should embark on a course of tranquilizers as well as a diet") and Jane Eyre. It's extremely gratifying to find a feminist intellectual who considers eating, drinking, making love and dressing well — and reading and thinking about them — worthwhile projects.

And now for the new additions to the more-or-less-sort-of-wedontknowbutsoundsprettycool 'Let's put a Brontë reference in this review" category:

The Guardian publishes two (probably the editors feel guilty after yesterday's article):

In the review of Gathering the Water (Robert Edric), DJ Taylor (another Brontë-related author as this old post of ours shows) as a matter of fact congratulates the writer for not following the mainstream novelist way:

Its protagonist is a freelance engineer, imported to West Yorkshire in the 1840s to supervise the flooding of a remote valley and the dispersal of its inhabitants, and its introductory trick is to encourage the reader to imagine how a mainstream historical novelist might have surveyed the scene.
What would such a novel contain? Well, those pages of enticing detail on mid-19th century hydraulics, for a start, those processions of ground-down rustics wandering on stage to air their creator's command of the local dialect, and that tumultuous, Brontë-esque love-affair careening to disaster amid a backdrop of lonely pathways and pale hills. Edric, alas, has no interest in this kind of approach.

Finally, The Guardian publishes an article about the recent discussion in its bookclub of Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. It seems that when she was asked what were her influences, she said:

Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were the titles that Waters mentioned. "They're probably all there in my books," agreed the author. The varieties of Victorian Gothic were especially fascinating, "all the archetypes of horror" are there.

Not a surprise if you check what were the Top 10 books in her Guardian's list.

Categories: In_the_News, Books