Verbal Sparrings

The Times reviews House of Fiction: From Pemberley to Brideshead, Great British Houses in Literature and Life by Phyllis Richardson

For Charlotte Brontë, says Richardson, the country house is a space for emotional exploration, a testing-ground for her intellect in verbal sparrings with Mr Rochester. (John Walsh)

Los Angeles Review of Books talks about the work of Elena Ferrante:

Writers from Charlotte Brontë, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles, and Mary McCarthy to Emma Cline, Ottessa Moshfegh, Sheila Heti, and Robin Wasserman have written remarkable novels about female friendship, but no one has tackled the complex search for female personal identity, and the construction of a feminine self through lifelong friendship, that is at the core of Elena Ferrante’s project in the quartet of works known as the Neapolitan novels: My Brilliant Friend (2011), The Story of a New Name (2012), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015). (G.D. Dess)

Deccan Herald reviews The Other Half of Happiness by Ayisha Malik

When The Other Half of Happiness opens (with a sentence reminiscent of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre), Sofia is at a mosque with the newly converted Conall, waiting to get married. From there on, it’s something of a strange tale as they find themselves in the chaos of Karachi, Pakistan, living in a squalid flat with fears of bombs falling on them any minute. And then, disagreements follow, and Sofia is back in London on her own. (Parvathi Ramkumar)

A bookworm in The Hindu:

In my twenties, bookshops and libraries were the only places I used to visit. Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, the complete novels of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and the Brontë Sisters, the complete works of Shakespeare, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Glimpses of World History, An Autobiography and The Discovery of India, and the autobiographies of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and K.A. Abbas made my nights sleepless.

Quartz talks about cloud physics... in Dominica:

Dominica is known for a few things: bananas, being the first British Caribbean colony controlled by emancipated black slaves, the Jean Rhys novel Wide Sargasso Sea, and rain. Lots and lots of rain. (Georgia Frances King)

Cineseries Magazine (France) reviews the latest film adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel (directed by Roger Michell):

Adapté par Alfred Hitchcock par trois fois (Rebecca, les Oiseaux, l’Auberge de la Jamaïque), c’est dire si son œuvre suscite certaines passions, l’écrivaine britannique Daphné du Maurier est une sorte de descendante directe des sœurs Brontë ou de Jane Austen pour le côté romantico-gothique de son œuvre. (Beatrice Delesalle) (Translation)

The Post (Netherlands) mentions Wuthering Heights in an article about different kinds of love; The Inked Path is vlogging about Jane Eyre: here and here.