Outsiders in up-lit

Scroll (India) tries to describe the 21st-century heroine.

Publishing’s latest passion is for redemptive, feel-good fiction, known as “up-lit”, and this also reinterprets existing tropes. Gail Honeyman’s lonely Eleanor Oliphant hits the vodka behind closed doors and attempts to conceal her dysfunctionality and traumatic childhood from the world, but is stronger and more able to grow than we first realise. One of the reasons for Eleanor’s wide appeal may be that she springs from a line of literary heroines – that of the spirited outsider.
Honeyman draws parallels between Eleanor and Jane Eyre, another abandoned child who finds her own path. Readers are engaged not only by Eleanor’s predicament, but by her determination to transcend disaster. Her most recent antecedent is Helen Fielding’s Chardonnay-swilling Bridget Jones, who is herself the direct descendant of Jane Austen’s best-loved heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. (Sally O'Reilly)

Much as we love Bridget Jones, we truly don't think she's the 'direct descendant' of Elizabeth Bennet. Nor does she need to be.

Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World by Lyndall Gordon is one of the 11 new books The New York Times recommends this week.

OUTSIDERS: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World, by Lyndall Gordon. (Johns Hopkins University, $29.95.) Gordon links five visionaries who made literary history — George Eliot, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf — through their shared understanding of death and violence. “Gordon is best known for her brilliant studies of Woolf, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson,” our reviewer, Lara Feigel, writes. “As a biographer, she’s been a visionary herself, mind-reading her way into these figures’ creative processes. She displays the same insight here.” (Gregory Cowles)

Publishers' Weekly has a Q & A with writer Lucy Strange:

What are you working now? I’m working on a book set in the north of England in the Lake District in 1899. It’s going to be a bit more gothic and a bit more ghostly than my previous two books, so I’m getting to revisit some old favorites like Rebecca and Wuthering Heights. (Ingrid Roper)

The Times looks into why 'villages in the Peak District are on a property market high'.

“There is so much history here,” says Chris Charlton of Savills’s Nottingham office. “As well as the tourist attractions such as Chatsworth and traditions such as county shows, there’s also a degree of privacy — with some of the most beautiful large country houses and small stately homes — that is difficult to replicate in other parts of the country.”
Moorseats Hall, an imposing mansion dating from the 14th century and believed to be the inspiration for Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, is one such property. On the outskirts of Hathersage, it has six bedrooms, more than 25 acres, a swimming pool and tennis court, and is on the market for a guide price of £3 million to £3.5 million with Eadon Lockwood & Riddle. (Jayne Dowle)

A contributor to La opinión de Zamora (Spain) thinks Charlotte Brontë is right in her approach to happiness in Jane Eyre.

 Por cierto, la felicidad si no es compartida, no merece el nombre de felicidad; es insípida. La reflexión es de Charlotte Brönte [sic]. Y no le falta razón a la autora de 'Jane Eyre'. No hay que guardarse la felicidad para uno mismo olvidándose de los que nos rodean, vivirla a tope es compartirla con los demás. (Carmen Ferreras) (Translation)

The Yorkshire Post has an article on what caused the Brontë siblings to die so young.

Literature students have long been familiar with the premature deaths of the Bronte sisters, who were all cut down before the age of 40.
Despite living in relative comfort, by 19th-century standards, in a rural parsonage in Haworth, Charlotte, Emily and Anne - as well as their less famous siblings - succumbed to some of the infectious diseases that characterised the Victorian age.
The Brontë siblings were mainly raised by their father Patrick, a clergyman who outlived all of his children and who seemed to enjoy the robust health that his family did not. His wife, Marie, died of uterine cancer at the age of 38.
Charlotte Brontë's profession is listed as 'wife' on her death certificate
Two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died of tuberculosis in 1825, when they were boarding, along with Charlotte and Emily, at a school for the daughters of clergymen in Cowan Bridge.The damp conditions at the school were said to have played a role in their susceptibility to the illness (...) (Grace Newton)

 U Discover Music lists Kate Bush (and her take on Wuthering Heights among others) as one of 11 'Musicians Who Are Poets'. The Must Reads discusses why Jane Eyre is 'More Than Just a “Boring” Classic'.