Unbecoming Edna O'Brien

Some recent Brontë-related papers:

The Common Review
Volume 9, Number 1
Summer 2010

Unbecoming Jane: Jane Eyre as Alter-Ego Gone Wrong
Leslie Haynsworth

Wait! I Have a Blog? talks about this article:

Haynsworth's essay is delightful.  She recreates that first wonderful reading experience, at 10, that awakened her to this wild and romantic world.  And then she recreates her first college reading experience of the same book, during which she had to reconsider everything.  It's marvelous to see how she handles the challenge, and the interpretations and re-interpretations that she finds necessary.

Elizabeth A. Chase
Rewriting Genre in The Country Girls Trilogy
New Hibernia Review - Volume 14, Number 3, Fómhar/Autumn 2010, pp. 91-105

On Edna O’Brien’s list of her “Top Ten” books in Women’s Review, number eight is Wuthering Heights; she calls the novel “an old favourite and one responsible for certain unwise attitudes of mine towards the opposite sex.”A number of critics have noted the significance of Emily Brontë’s novel, arguing for its centrality to what Amanda Greenwood calls “O’Brien’s analysis of the compromised nature of female subjectivity.” Yet, The Country Girls Trilogy owes a largely unexplored debt to the work of another Brontë sister: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. A central theme within the Trilogy is the refashioning of the romantic marriage plot found in the Brontës’ works. First published as three separate novels—The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964)—then republished in 1986 as a trilogy with a new epilogue, the Trilogy’s final incarnation critiques the options historically offered to literature’s female heroines and authors.

Kate Quealy-Gainer
The House of Dead Maids (review)
Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books - Volume 64, Number 2, October 2010, pp. 71-72

Categories: Journals, Scholar