Noticing the unnoticed

Cranford is pretty much in the news these days. Some of the articles include mere passing references to Elizabeth Gaskell's friendship with Charlotte Brontë, but sometimes the articles dig a little deeper when it comes to mentioning the Brontës. The Manchester Evening News features Philip Glenister, who plays Mr Carter in the series. At some point Mr Glenister wonders about Elizabeth Gaskell's struggle for popularity nowadays.

"Gaskell was a woman ahead of her time in many respects. A social reformer who believed in equality for women.
"She was also extraordinarily underrated as a novelist compared to the likes of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, so I hope Cranford will help to redress the balance.
"She writes incredibly well, with great wit and pathos about an amazing period in our history, when radical changes were taking place. In that sense, there's a lot of relevance to what's happening in today's society." (Ian Wylie)

Indeed BrontëBlog finds it puzzling as well. As if books were not enough, Mrs Gaskell has three recent adaptations of her works, with North and South being extremely popular even years after being first broadcast. Will Cranford - with its discreet humour and its great cast - finally manage to bring Mrs Gaskell to the forefront of classic authors? We hope so.

Talking about people who tend to pass unnoticed. The Little Professor talks about Branwell Brontë while reviewing Douglas A. Martin's Branwell: A Novel of the Brontë Brother.

I must admit upfront to struggling with the book, in large part because Branwell, like John Polidori (who has unaccountably managed to spawn two novels), is not particularly charming company. He drinks; he takes drugs; he accomplishes virtually nothing; he seduces the Robinson family's young son (in Martin's version, that is). In other words, Branwell manages to simultaneously disappoint his family and the reader. At one level, of course, Martin's Branwell simply reiterates the now-mythologized Branwell's abject position within the Bronte household: the coddled son who disintegrated amongst a family of female geniuses. He is one of the legendary disappointments of British literary history. But in taking Branwell as his subject, Martin develops an anti-Künstlerroman, charting the disintegration of the would-be artist under the weight of his own fantasies of brilliance. (Even the poems Branwell manages to publish are pointedly dispersed among multiple newspapers; he cannot pull himself together, even in volume form.)
One of the most striking things about the novel is its style. Or, to be more precise, its refusal to engage in the kind of pastiche that frequently characterizes the neo-Victorian novel. Martin instead writes stark, minimalist prose, often relying on simple sentences. (A random example: "The color leaves our cheeks towards morning. But why. Why must it" [85].) He eschews the leisurely periods of Victorian prose style, along with the apparently endless paragraphs. Martin goes to the opposite extreme by keeping his paragraphs short, sometimes as short as a single sentence or sentence fragment. Offhand, I cannot remember a single colon or semi-colon, although Martin does use the occasional dash. There is virtually no dialogue; what little dialogue appears is abrupt, sometimes fragmentary, and often rendered in FID. The occasional bursts of speech frequently sit by themselves on the page, as though the characters talk into silence instead of to each other.

The review is very interesting. We suggest you read it in its entirety.

Anne Brontë sadly - and unjustly - qualifies for the 'overlooked person' category as well. But today her Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the subject of a lengthy review in German on Lesertreff.

The Coveted posts samples of Marci Washington's art. She quotes her describing her work as follows:

Marci Washington describes her haunting work as 'It's like I'm illustrating a novel that doesn't exist. If it did, it would probably be a lot like Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, or Bleak House- novels which function as social commentary as well as beautiful romantic epics.'

And finally for the weird, impossible quote of the day. Ben Katner from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer asks one Ambreal Williams (apparently she's 'definitely going down in America's Next Top Model history — but only as the first contestant to be eliminated twice.') the following question:

TVGuide.com: I was really annoyed on your behalf when Tyra said you looked hoochie during the Enrique Iglesias video shoot. They dressed you in a leather shoestring, said you were playing a vampire and put you in a sex dungeon! How were you supposed to slide down that pole, like Jane Eyre? [Answer not relevant.]

Because, you know, Jane Eyre is world-famous for sliding down poles constantly in all manners of puritanical, un-sexy ways.

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Books, Branwell Brontë, Movies-DVD-TV, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Weirdo