Several newspapers (for instance,
The Times) have an obituary on 'critic, essayist and fiction writer"
Elizabeth Hardwick, who died last Sunday in New York at 91. She too was a Brontëite.
From
Los Angeles Times:
One essay in the collection [Seduction and Betrayal: Women in Literature (1974)], considers Emily Bronte and her 1847 novel, "Wuthering Heights." Hardwick contrasted Bronte's personal life as a "penniless intellectual" living with her lonely sisters and her explosive father, to her treatment of the novel's tormented main characters, Cathy and Heathcliff.
The harsh fate for the novel's unrequited lovers indicated that Bronte was "in every way indifferent to the need for love and companionship" in her own life, Hardwick argues. "'Wuthering Heights' is a virgin's novel," she concludes. (Mary Rourke)
Interesting conclusion, bearing in mind the amount of theories out there claiming that Emily Brontë must have led some sort of secret life in order to write Wuthering Heights.
From
The New York Sun:
But her essays were generally more serious, many of them addressing tortured women of literature such as Sylvia Plath or Charlotte Brontë, inspired on some level, many said, by her tempestuous marriage to the poet Robert Lowell. (Stephen Miller)
We would never have thought of defining Charlotte Brontë as a 'tortured woman'.
On
The New York Review of Books website there can be found some of her articles, including
Working Girls: The Brontës (Volume 18, Number 8 · May 4, 1972), reviewing Gérin's biographies of Charlotte and Emily Brontë.
EDIT:
The Telegraph also publishes an obituary.
Categories: Brontëites, In the News
Several newspapers (for instance, The Times) have an obituary on 'critic, essayist and fiction writer" Elizabeth Hardwick, who died last Sunday in New York at 91. She too was a Brontëite.
I don't think Charlotte was a tortured woman as was Sylvia Plath. The latter was very direct about what she suffered -- even to the point of being very dramatic about it. Charlotte pointed it out -- you see it in Jane Eyre -- but she was not so direct or dramatic. I think she would have hated other people's pity.
ReplyDeleteLove your blog by the way!
Thanks for your comment. I see what you mean perfectly well and agree with you. I also have trouble seeing Charlotte as an embodiment of a tortured woman. That is not to say I don't think she went through some VERY hard times in her life, of course.
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