Scholarly ambitions

The New Yorker features Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series.

Although social issues aren’t excluded from French’s first two novels—both involve schemes to raze a rare old property in order to build a profitable new one—they cluster at the periphery of a crisis with deeper roots. The images and language are archetypal, the stuff of ballads (“And who is it waiting on the riverbank . . .”) and fairy tales (Cassie imagines sewing herself and Lexie “together at the edges with my own hands,” like Wendy reattaching Peter Pan’s shadow). This is the terrain of the gothic, a fictional mode that, at its best (“Jane Eyre,” the novels and stories of Shirley Jackson), scrutinizes the boundary between the inner self and the outer world and finds it permeable. Identity is its abiding theme, and the house, a proxy for the psyche, is its organizing motif. (Laura Miller)

This columnist from The Chronicle of Higher Education talks about his early ambitions:

Like most would-be academics, I had dreams of a library book with my name on it. A book with a colon in the title and footnotes at the back. A book lodged in some quiet corner of a university library, to be discovered generations hence by an earnest graduate student researching the influence of intelligent design on Charles Darwin, and/or the poetry of Emily Brontë (my scholarly interests were somewhat in flux.)
Alas, it was not to be. (Noah Berlatsky)

Aftenposten (Norway) tells of the conclusion drawn by a professor after reading Claire Harman's biography of Charlotte Brontë.

Marianne Egeland, professor i litteraturvitenskap ved Universitetet i Oslo, understreker at virkelighetslitteratur slett ikke er noe nytt fenomen.
– Selv satt jeg i sommer og leste en biografi om den engelske dikteren Charlotte Brontë i forbindelse med 200-årsjubileet for hennes fødsel. Det viser seg at mye av det hun skriver om, har hendt. (Halvor Hegtun and Kristin Jonassen Nordby) (Translation)

An alert from the New Bern-Craven County Public Library via New Bern Sun Journal:

Let’s Talk About It is scheduled at 7 p.m. for a discussion of the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. The session will be led by visiting scholar Helena Feder from East Carolina University. (Charlie Hall)

The Silver Petticoat Review posts about Jane Eyre 2006 on its tenth anniversary (!!). AnneBrontë.org discusses Anne Brontë's trip to the opera.