A lovely book that deserves a wide readership

Stevie Davies publishes a very good review of Jude Morgan's The Taste of Sorrow:

(...)All biography is a form of "making alive again"; so is biographical fiction, a form Jude Morgan has made his own. His 2004 novel Passion recreated the women entangled with Shelley, Byron and Keats. The Brontë story is, if anything, more familiar. Since Charlotte's death in 1855, generations of powerful writers from Elizabeth Gaskell to Daphne du Maurier, Juliet Barker and Lyndall Gordon have rewritten the Brontës' narrative of early loss, child prodigy, group creativity, feminist aspiration, romantic passion, great writing and early death.
The Taste of Sorrow enters into dialogue with many voices. Morgan chooses a discreetly quiet, understated and subtle style, pensive rather than passionate, shifting seamlessly among a varied cast of characters. Making a tactful choice of manner and sombre tenor, sifting his research scrupulously, he holds his nerve and reason where many a Brontë biographer fails. The novel represents first and foremost an attentive, sympathetic and fair-handed reading of the Brontë lives. His style is perfectly suited to characterising Anne; rises memorably to the conflicted Charlotte; makes only the most tenuous feint at representing the guarded inner world of Emily; has a fair shot at the impossible Branwell.
It is a style rich in metaphor and simile, often surprising, yet always apt. The tears of Maria, the dying mother, hearing the "high, fluting voices" of her soon-to-be orphaned children, "did not flow" but "covered her eyes, like watch-glasses". The beauty of this perception, seen from Patrick Brontë's perspective, comes not only from visual accuracy but through its focus on mortal time. Maria's death opens the novel: she does not die with deference but blasphemously, raising her voice - the mother of her children's powerful voices - in rebellion against her lot.
Morgan invents in the interstices of the narrative, the gaps in the weave, and such inventions are nearly always felicitous. I found myself deeply moved by the way he breathes life into the two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth. His Anne is a spellbindingly lovely portrait: in the face of her failure in the working world, she "is still Anne; emotional apothecary, she investigates that bitter taste".
The world of The Taste of Sorrow is a dark one; it therefore situates itself in a long and lugubrious tradition. But I have a sharp sense that this was a family that enjoyed life to the quick. Sorrow is relative: in a world where millions of women were condemned to early death, illiteracy, child-bearing, pudding-making, these were educated women whose appetite for life was gratified by an uncommon portion of intellectual freedom, a chance to travel, to roam and write. The image of Emily kneading dough with a German book propped up before her is one of immense peace and wellbeing. When will someone write the antidote: A Taste of Joy?
This question apart, there is much to admire in Morgan's novel, especially when the style modulates to stream of consciousness. Emily's eye-view of the Ponden Bog Burst is brilliant writing; so are Branwell's opium lucubrations. The moving portrait of Anne sitting with the dying Aunt Branwell - prescient, proleptic, valedictory - is superb: it catches her real depth and unshowy virtue. This is a lovely book and deserves a wide readership.

BrontëBlog humbly agrees.

Also in the Guardian this week's Book corner choice: Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster (1912) is quoted with a reference to Jane Eyre:

[Jerusha] even gets to grips with last week's Book Corner book, Jane Eyre: "Mr Rochester talks about the metal welkin when he means the sky; and as for the mad woman who laughs like a hyena … it's melodrama of the purest, but just the same you read and read and read." (Lucy Mangan)

Stephenie Meyer's Twilight is the August book choice of The Telegraph. Expect a Brontë reference somewhere:

Next, she had to work out what to call her leading man, and turned for help to Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, borrowing the first name of Mr Ferrars (Sense and Sensibility) and Mr Rochester (Jane Eyre). As for the heroine, she has the name she had been saving for the daughter who never arrived (Meyer has three sons). (Christopher Middelton)

The article is not about Emily Brontë but about another Emily: Dickinson. Nevertheless if you ever have to explain to a kid from Alaska what a moor is, this can come in handy:

"I never saw a moor" was OK once I'd explained what a moor was. (They didn't read Wuthering Heights until the next year. And in Alaska we just explain that it is pretty much the same as tundra; they get that.) (Wayne Mergler in Official Wire)

The Wall Street Journal poses the question, are women writers able to write convincing male characters. Rochester appears:

Women buy considerably more fiction than men, and some significant number of them want to read about themselves. Also, until well into the 20th century, women authors were expected to write genteel stories with moral uplift, a possible encumbrance in imagining men. Mr. Darcy, Mr. Rochester and Maxim de Winter are all great characters, but are they real men? Compared to, say, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones? (Cynthia Crossen)

The Cornell University Chronicle also publishes an article about the Joyce Carol Oates's recent talk. The summary of what she explained about the Brontës is not very detailed... but here it is:

The Brontë sisters were motherless and "lived at the edge of the moors, in a very desolate place," she said. "They didn't have television, they didn't have the Internet. They did have books and magazines that came to the house, and they had one another, but most of all they had their extraordinary imaginations." (Daniel Aloi)

We don't know what mental image of Jane Eyre they have at The Toronto Star but their Jane is quite different from the one we have in mind.

It's so perfectly pretty you almost expect Jane Eyre to stroll up the lane to the rose-covered stone cottage, where you're sipping a pint on a sunny pub patio. (Cinda Chavich)

If you say so.

The San Diego Union-Tribune reviews the performances of The Mystery of Irma Vep at the Old Globe's Arena Stage:

The meager plot draws heavily from Daphne du Maurier's “Rebecca,” laced with Brontë-sister atmospheric gloominess and B-movie cheesiness. (Jennifer Chung Klam)

The Telegraph-Journal (Canada) interviews Heather White Brittain, new director of the Saint John Arts Centre (Saint John, NB)

q Your favourite hero of fiction?
a Emily Bronte's Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights. I remember reading this novel at a very young age because it was among an old collection of books that I found in our home and, looking back, probably because the street I grew up on was named for this novel.

The Göteborgs-Posten reviews the recent Swedish translation of Agnes Grey.

Vad tänkte Anne själv om sin framtid när hon gav romanen detta alltför välpreparerade slut med make, prästgård och tre barn, hon som ändå beträtt vägen ut? Att vi aldrig kommer att få veta det är skäl nog att läsa denna fortfarande märkligt sammansatta roman anno 1847. (Per Arne Tjäder) (Google translation)

And the Norwegian Oblad remarks that artist Jeanette Semb is currently immersed in Wuthering Heights.

The blogosphere brings us a review of Jane Eyre by Reading for Sanity and a post about Wuthering Heights in Spanish on Libros Gratis.

Categories: Agnes Grey, Biography, Books, Brontëites, Fiction, Jane Eyre, Talks, Theatre, Translations, Wuthering Heights