The light of evening

The New York Times publishes a review of Edna O'Brien's The light of evening (Houghton Mifflin Company). This time is not that the book is being compared (with more or less accuracy) with Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. This time is that the actual book contains explicit Brontë references:

Edna O'Brien seems to say it plain at the very end of this, her 20th book: "Remember love is all bull, the only true love is that between mother and child. All them paintings Italians do with mothers holding their infants and angels above them like the beautiful one in the chapel in Limerick can't be for nothing." These words appear in the sequence of letters from Dilly - she is dying in a hospital at the novel's opening - to her wayward and estranged daughter, Eleanora, a writer. "The Light of Evening," a passionate book, a tormented book, a confused book, is a brave attempt to portray the terrible force of mother-love as it runs in both directions, as it is pulled and changed by the other loves that drag women out into the world and back into themselves. (...)

Eleanora, wanting to make her way as a writer and both haunted and consoled by literature, endures a fatal confusion between what she reads and what she lives: "Then there was Jane Eyre, in thrall to the inscrutable Mr. Rochester, and Jane Eyre's creator, Charlotte Brontë, falling in love with Monsieur Heger, a married man, the iniquity discovered and she and her sister Emily dispatched from Brussels back to the moors, later on, their forlorn lives transmuted into visions of shattered love." (Erica Wagner)

Although there is some confusion here about the timing of Charlotte and Emily's return to Haworth, it's nice to read the quote.

Categories: Books, References, Jane_Eyre, Charlotte_Brontë