Jane for president!

Let's start with one of the books that brought us here. Wuthering Heights, reviewed on Justin Tadlock.

This is a story about love. A love that is so strong, so intense, that it transcends life and death. It goes beyond what any of us mere mortals can even think to call love. Catherine and Heathcliff’s love is epic in a way that is arguably more epic than that of even Romeo and Juliet. And, I don’t say this lightly.

Reform Judaism reviews Kafka in Brontëland, released about a year ago, and interviews the author as well.

Reform Judaism: Your stories are so thoroughly English and Jewish at the same time. Yet you have said you feel a “creative tension” between your Jewish heritage and your Yorkshire roots.
Tamar Yellin: Yes. I’m very attached to the Yorkshire countryside; I grew up close by and was a devoted reader of the Brontë sisters who also lived in and wrote about Yorkshire. At the same time, I was raised with a strong consciousness of being Jewish—that Israel was my real home because my father was a Jerusalemite and the rest of my family was in Israel. During my childhood these contrary directions created conflict within me, but as a writer it’s worked creatively for me. [...]
RJ: In the title story, “Kafka in Brontëland,” a woman moves to a village in northern England to be closer to the landscape of Emily Brontë, a writer she loves. Yet she continues to read Kafka because, she says, “in order to be universal, you don’t have to leave out the Jews.” Why does Kafka emerge as such an important symbol for you?
Yellin: Kafka was the ultimate Jewish outsider. I strongly identify with the feelings of displacement, alienation, and lack of belonging that run through his writings. As a young woman I was drawn to the beauty of the Yorkshire countryside—and yet, upon moving out here to the village, I felt that as a Jew I didn’t belong, that I was a sort of lone figure moving through this landscape. I lived through a period of being quite obsessed with Kafka. I felt myself in a very strange sort of twilight, nightmarish terrain whenever I entered his world. It was alluring for a while, but now, when I pick up his stories, I feel panic, terror, suffocation.

Stevie Davies also wrote a review of this book.

BookBlogger chats with Diane Setterfield, author of The Thirteenth Tale, a novel which, as you know, has been much compared to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

4. The Thirteenth Tale is drawing comparisons to classics such as Rebecca and Jane Eyre. Was this intentional on your part?
Not at all. I didn't want to write a book that was like anyone else's book, only to write the best book I could. In my teens I was a big fan of nineteenth century English novels, reading and loving all the books Margaret so adores. Nonetheless the presence of so many of these books in The Thirteenth Tale took me by surprise initially. Looking back now I can see the reason for it. For more than ten years I had been reading intensively in French for my job, and much as I relished this I was aware that I had very little time for reading in English for pleasure. Once I had abandoned my academic career I began to make up for lost time by reading English novels of all kinds, and as I did this I began to feel all my old reading stirring in me again. Little by little these old loves found their way to the edge of my writing mind and soon into the writing itself.
I think the comparisons have come about because of the mood of my novel. My heroine Margaret reads the Brontes, Wilkie Collins, other c19th writers, and because she is such an avid reader her inner world has taken on the tone, the colour, the mood of the books she so loves. It stands to reason then, that when she comes to recount the story of Vida Winter, she presents it in a way that recalls the narratives she has absorbed. It is in keeping with Margaret's character that her narrative should reflect her reading.

Trashionista interviews yet another author, Sarah Bilston, who has just published Bed Rest.

Your favourite female heroine (if different from above!), and why?
Either Elizabeth Bennet or Jane Eyre. In my other life I teach and research literature, and actually I feel most at home in nineteenth-century novels. Strange but true.

Finally, Jane Eyre appears in McSweeney's - via Beancounters. It's a lengthy article about nothing to do with Jane Eyre, except that it is written in a mock Jane Eyre style. The best? Its title: Jane Eyre runs for president.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights