Going tabloid and more

On this first December Saturday, a few Brontë mentions on the news:

BrontëBlog goes tabloid:

Emma Tennant, the author of Heathcliff's Tale and the recent Jane Eyre sequel The French Dancer's Bastard, is tired of bankers and moves to Notting Hill...

One of Notting Hill’s remaining genuinely arty types — novelist Emma Tennant — has decided to cash in on property values in the west London enclave. Tennant, author of a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and a spin-off of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, has put her three-bed maisonette in the area on the market with Bective Leslie Marsh for £1.3m. Tom Stoppard wrote one of his early plays in the house, but, Tennant tells me, the area is now “full of bankers”. Meanwhile, she and her other half, Tim Owens, plan to buy a smaller flat in Notting Hill and spend more time at their place on the Greek island of Corfu. (John Elliott in The Times)

And news from Keizer, Oregon, where a deputy city recorder is publishing pictures of her recent trip to England, including Brontë country.

She also got to fulfill a dream, walking on the English moors a place lovingly written about in the book "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë.

"I could picture Jane Eyre walking them, her long skirt blowing in the wind. It was wonderful," she said. (Erica A. Howald in Keizer Times)

BrontëBlog goes Thirteenth Tale's blog:

Because two new mentions appear on the press of Diane Setterfield's book:

[Diane Setterfield ] now lives in Harrogate, Yorkshire, and is, like the eccentric author depicted in this first novel, a denizen of wildest rural England. (...)

Like the Brontes, though, who shared the region, her imagination is all aflame with the feral Midlands traditional, gothic perversities. It is possibly for this reason that she has gone down a storm in the US, whereas Britain has been a touch more blase in its reception of her work. (...)

The novel shamelessly genuflects, whenever possible, before such idols as the Brontes, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, Daphne du Maurier.(...)

Seriously, she is a literary fundamentalist, an evangelist, and she knows it. You will find the expression of this in The Thirteenth Tale either invigorating or weird, according to taste.

At one stage, Margaret is in the library ready to listen to Vida's story. She finds a fanatical collection of editions, from rare to throwaway rubbish. Bizarrely, she asks Margaret to picture a conveyor belt about to carry editions of Jane Eyre plus all her favourite tomes into a furnace; all she has to do to stop it is shoot the operator. It's not so much Margaret's response as the question itself that brings you up short. It is indicative of that thread of provocative, bookish extremism that runs through the story. (Stella Clarke in The Australian)

The Times insists:

Anybody glued to the BBC’s recent Brontë adaptation will enjoy giving themselves up to Diane Setterfield’s acclaimed debut novel, in which an old novelist enlists a biographer to record her life story. A gloriously gothic, romantic tale about storytelling itself, it is steeped in the riches of Victorian literature. If they liked...

Categories: In the News, Books