Writing Issues

Some newspapers publish on writing issues and use Brontë-related examples.

Edward Docx in The Telegraph talks about dedications and quotes something that we published just yesterday:

Authors agonise over their dedication as it is the most revealing page in the whole book, says Edward Docx (...)
A respectable second in the ructions stakes is the dedication to William Thackeray, which appeared in the second edition of Jane Eyre (1847). Charlotte Brontë must have been the only person in literary England who did not know that Thackeray (like her fictional Mr Rochester) was married to a woman who had gone insane. This wasn't helped when it came to light that Thackeray had just published a novel in which a scheming governess attempts to seduce her employer. Needless to say, sections of the press were not slow in imagining that "Currer Bell" had worked for Thackeray and the two were lovers.

Lynne Truss in The Guardian focuses on character studies. More precisely, on their physical descriptions:

When writers are describing a face, discretion is generally the best rule, but with artists it is all in the detail. Lynne Truss reflects on the difference between capturing real and imaginary people. (...)
Listing every feature will not only fatally hold up the narrative, but may antagonise the poor confused reader who can't remember what "aquiline" means and thinks that an "almond" eye must be brown and nutty. Besides, what purpose will it serve to expend 500 words on the tilt of this particular nose and the set of this particular jaw? No, indeed. Facial detail is rarely kept in mind at all by a reader. A devotee of Jane Eyre tends to remember that, say, Mr Rochester is a dark sort of man, and that Jane is a short sort of woman, and this is quite enough to go on - especially when one's attention keeps being caught by such things as cackles from the attic and beds catching fire.

Finally Joanna Kavenna dicusses in The Times one of those eternal topics: why don't men read novels written by women? Apart from a passing reference to Jane Eyre what we really like is this final comment of the article that seems to have been written by Charlotte herself:

It is hard to write freely, to write with real ambition, when you are stymied by such concerns, when you write knowing that half the race will be reluctant to read you, simply because of your sex. Yet much has changed in recent years; the circumstances for women who write are better than before. Perhaps it won’t be too long before the epithet “women writers” can be discarded altogether, and there will just be “writers”, expressing the manifold complexity of life on earth.

Categories: Charlotte Brontë, In the News, Jane Eyre