Stop the Press! Brontës at work

Two recent scholar books with Brontë content:

1.

Authors at Work: the Creative Environment
Edited by Ceri Sullivan
Edited by Graeme Harper
Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9781843841951
First published: July 2009

Writers often meditate on what physical situations they need to do the work in hand. A room of their own, bills, bed, procrastination, regular meals, Benzedrine and beer, office routines, walking and riding, even prison, can be machines that make them write. Trollope got 2,000 words done every morning, watch on the table. Clare composed en pleine air, jotting on his hat rim. Wesley's hymns came to him on horseback. The Bronte sisters paced round a drawing-room table. Donne was dismally prompted to write by nappies. Johnson needed the printer's devil knocking at his door.
On a grand scale, city planners try to entice the creative classes into a creative area: while at a local level, readers have a magical sense that putting themselves into the bodily position of a writer may allow them to join in her planning and plotting.
The essays in this volume examine the working habits of seven great authors, from 1600 to today: Jonson, Milton, the Brontë sisters, Trollope, Oliphant, and Auden. There are also interviews on the creative environment with the Poet Laureate of Great Britain, the British Library's Head of Modern Literary Manuscripts, the Director of the Hay Festival, research fellows at Stratford and the Globe, and a poet-web-blogger.

The Brontë essay is signed by Stevie Davies: Growing Up and Zoning Out: Charlotte and Emily Brontë.

2.

The Novelty of Newspapers
Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News
Matthew Rubery
ISBN: 9780195369267
Oxford University Press, US
June 2009

Rapid industrialization and new advances in technology marked the Victorian period as one of prodigious socio-cultural change. Chief among the many transformations of quotidian life was the swift and widespread dissemination of information made possible by the emergence of the daily newspaper, an unprecedented new media. The changes it wrought in politics, history, and advertising of the age have all been well-documented. But its influence on one area remains overlooked: the Victorian novel. Redressing this oversight, The Novelty of Newspapers highlights the variety of ways the changing world of nineteenth-century journalism shaped the period's most popular literary form.
Arising in the 1800s and soon drawing a million readers a day, the commercial press profoundly influenced the work of Brontë, Braddon, Dickens, Conrad, James, Trollope, and others who mined print journalism for fictional techniques. Five of the most important of these narrative conventions-the shipping intelligence, personal advertisement, leading article, interview, and foreign correspondence-show how the Victorian novel is best understood alongside the simultaneous development of newspapers. In highly original analyses of Victorian fiction, this study also captures the surprising ways in which public media enabled the expression of private feeling among ordinary readers: from the trauma caused by a lover's reported suicide to the vicarious gratification felt during a celebrity interview; from the distress at finding one's behavior the subject of unflattering editorial commentary to the apprehension of distant cultures through the foreign correspondence.
Combining a wealth of historical research with a series of astute close readings, The Novelty of Newspapers breaks down the assumed divide between the epoch's literature and journalism and demonstrates that newsprint was integral to the development of the novel.

Features
* Offers new understandings of seminal Victorian novelists, including Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Anthony Trollope, and other Victorian novelists.

Categories: Books, Scholar