Too shocking to read

The Guardian wonders whether American Psycho would be published today.

In retrospect, American Psycho, and perhaps Michel Houellebecq’s 1998 novel Atomised, look like the end of a long line. In the last century, a great novel was half expected to shock its early readers. Distinguished examples included Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, Jude the Obscure, Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Portnoy’s Complaint. Like American Psycho, many of these books had to fight their way into print, which was often perversely helpful. Hearing that a book is too shocking to read, people naturally become eager to read it. (Leo Benedictus)

The Yorkshire Post looks at the filming locations for Gentleman Jack. One of them was

2. Oakwell Hall
This Elizabethan manor house in Birstall, near Batley, has links to the Brontë sisters and appeared in another BBC drama, Gunpowder. It's also open to the public. (Grace Newton)

Los Angeles Review of Books features Julia Miele Rodas’s Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe.

Meanwhile, repeating phrases taken from other source material punctuate Rodas’s chapters in a manner that replicates the kinds of ejaculations and repetitions she examines in novels such as Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. Collected into an appendix or “accounting,” these phrases are meant to be “autistically interruptive, ejaculatory, distractive, perserverative, a kind of verbal embroidery that persistently challenges typical verbal intentionality.” (Travis Chi Wing Lau)

A contributor to The Jewish Chronicle tales about her early love of reading.

The older I got, the more challenging the book choices became, culminating in my mother reading Jane Eyre to me when I was 11.
This had somewhat mixed success. I was precocious enough to follow the story, but not sufficiently mature to even begin to appreciate the subtlety of the characterisation or the complexity of the ideas. It inspired in me, however, a love of the Brontës that burned brightly for many years. (Susan Reuben)

Finally, an announcement from the Brontë Parsonage Museum:

Exciting news! We're co-hosting a Symposium with @sheffielduni @shefenglish in Nov & our Call For Papers has just gone live! Looking forward to hearing keynote @waugh_JShttps://t.co/BTBOHq41g3

— Brontë Parsonage (@BronteParsonage) May 2, 2019