Branwell unsuggests Gaskell's biography

Books, authors and readers in our Brontë newsround:

The Sidney Morning Herald reviews How to Read a Novel. A user's guide by John Sutherland. Besides being a regular columnist in The Guardian he is the author of the books: Is Heathcliff a murderer? Puzzles in nineteenth-century fiction, Can Janes Eyre be happy? More puzzles in classic fiction.

As evidenced by his literary sleuthing in Is Heathcliff a Murderer? and Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?, Sutherland is a meticulous reader and when it comes to the actual text of the novel he has lots of interesting things to say. Titles, first lines, epigraphs and idiolect all come under his magnifying glass, as do rather weightier topics, such as intertextuality and narrative unreliability. (Richard King)

Thanks to this post on Slashdot we have discovered UnSuggester:

LibraryThing, the social book-cataloging site, has used its database of personal libraries to create UnSuggester, which does exactly that. You type in a book you like, "It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest." (Selanit)

And this is what we have found for Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. You can try with the other Brontë novels:

Wuthering Heights --> ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham (apparently if you like WH you cannot program on Lisp)
Jane Eyre --> Patterns of enterprise application architecture by Martin Fowler.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall --> Wild at heart : discovering the passionate soul of a man by John Eldredge

Now a biographer that recommends a biography. Charles Shields, author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee and now preparing a biography of Kurt Vonnegut, recommends on this post on The Millions Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë:

I have two books tied for first place, but they excel for the same reasons: Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, and Lord David Cecil's The Stricken Deer (the life of the poet William Cowper). An unforgettable biography weaves together a subjects' characteristic traits, physical appearance, conflicts, and signs of self-awareness. Mrs. Gaskell and Lord Cecil are masters of the craft.

We don't know if the author of this this article in the Belfast Telegraph has read Gaskell's biography but he uses poor Branwell as a kind of synonymous for obscurity:

He's like the Brontë brother, whose name nobody can remember and who struggled in the shadow of three successful and talented sisters

Categories: In the News, Books, Websites, Biography, Branwell Brontë