Elizabeth Gaskell at the Poet's Corner

The Independent reports that Elizabeth Gaskell will finally have her place at the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey:

The gossiping ladies of Cranford were embraced by the nation when they first graced our TV screens. Now the novelist who created Miss Matty and friends is to receive the ultimate recognition, 145 years after her death.
Elizabeth Gaskell is to be commemorated in Westminster Abbey next year after the Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr John Hall, agreed to add her name to a stained-glass window overlooking Poets' Corner.
Her details will appear in the window alongside memorials to such literary worthies as Christopher Marlowe, Oscar Wilde, Alexander Pope, Fanny Burney and A E Housman. A dedication will be held on 25 September next year, four days before the bicentenary of Gaskell's birth.(...)
Cranford screenwriter Heidi Thomas said Mrs Gaskell would be "thrilled to find herself in such a jostling spot. She was as great a social historian as Charles Dickens and as emotionally bold as Charlotte Brontë... she knew and loved them both and it is absolutely fitting that she should take her place beside them." (Kate Youde)

A review of Jude Morgan's The Taste of Sorrow appears in today's Sunday Express:

THE tale of the Brontë sisters is almost as well known as the stories of their fictional creations but Jude Morgan’s novel breathes imaginative life into the harrowing facts.
Morgan’s story is, unflinchingly, a tragedy, every incident bookmarked with bereavement. It opens with the death of Maria Brontë, leaving her six children to be raised by their unsympathetically drawn father Patrick. The eldest two daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, died of tuberculosis at Cowan Bridge School before reaching their teens (that deadly establishment is later fictionalised as Lowood School in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre).
Branwell, in Morgan’s view crippled by the weight of his doting father’s expectation, descends into addiction and debauchery, finally dying of tuberculosis aged 31. Three months later, Emily follows him , just a year after writing her unearthly masterpiece Wuthering Heights. Within six months, Anne’s death from the same disease has left Charlotte, once one of six close-knit siblings, an only child.
Charlotte is crushed and dazed with loss, deafened by that “everlasting silence” but Morgan allows Charlotte’s unbearably sad and short life to end happily with marriage to her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls.
The Taste Of Sorrow relates how these gifted girls were forced to endure humiliating governessing and teaching jobs, repressing their creative impulses. However, Morgan also captures moments of happiness and creative fulfilment and shows a rare facility for bringing the long-dead to life. (Charlotte Heathcote)

The Times publishes an excerpt from Shirley Williams's autobiography: Climbing the Bookshelves. Here she talks about the origins of her name:

My parents named me Shirley, not after the celebrated child film star of the time, Shirley Temple, but after Charlotte Brontë’s “gallant little cavalier” in her novel of that name, a champion of social justice. I never cared for the name, nor for the book, which I have never managed to read all through. Perhaps that was why my father called me “Poppy”, and Poppy became my childhood name.

The Ledger (Lakeland, FL) discovers a local Brontëite-in-progress reading Villette:

Salena Warnes, 20, is reading 'Villette' by Charlotte Bronte, first published in 1853. 'I started reading it because I enjoy classical literature,' said the Lakelander, 'and I haven't read much of this particular author.' The book, she said, explores cultural gender roles and the repression of women in 19th-century England. 'Overall, it is thought-provoking and insightful. It is excellently written,' she said. (J.R. Duren)

Associated Press has selected Charlotte Brontë for its thought of the week:

"Better to be without logic than without feeling."

The quote is from Chapter XXIV in The Professor.

Am doar 18 ani reviews Jane Eyre in Romanian and Littexpress does the same with Wuthering Heights in French.

Categories: Books, Elizabeth Gaskell, In the News, Jane Eyre, References, Villette, Wuthering Heights