Triple-deckers and heart-ease

The New Yorker wonders whether Amazon may be changing the novel, but of course if they were, it wouldn't be something new as Victorian triple-deckers were also a creation of the industry not of the writers themselves, who simply had to adapt to that format.

As luxury items, unaffordable for outright purchase by most readers, triple-deckers were championed by Mudie’s Select Library, a behemoth of British book distribution. For its founder, Charles Edward Mudie, who often bought the bulk of a print run and could demand commensurate discounts from publishers, the appeal was plain: since his subscribers—at least those paying the standard rate of a guinea a year—could borrow only one volume at a time, each triple-decker could circulate to three times as many subscribers. Publishers were equally fond of the form, which allowed them to stagger printing costs. A tantalizing first volume could drum up demand for subsequent volumes, and help pay for them.\n\nA great many of the Victorian novel’s distinctive features seem expressly designed to fill up that “interminable desert” and entice the reader to cross it: a three-act structure, swelling subplots and vast casts, jolting cliffhangers, and characters with catchphrases or names that signal their personalities, rendering them memorable across nine hundred pages. (Dickens’s naming a bounder Bounderby, in “Hard Times,” is one shameless example.) Fictional autobiographies and biographies—“Villette,” “Jane Eyre,” “Adam Bede”—worked well with the demands of the triple-decker; a life story could enfold any necessary digressions and impart to them a sense of narrative unit. (Parul Sehgal)

The New York Times recommends 'eight knuckle-biting, nerve-ripping new tales, just in time for Halloween'. 

Caitlin Starling’s The Death of Jane Lawrence (St. Martin’s, 362 pp., $27.99) is a jewel box of a Gothic novel, one filled with ghosts and sorcery, great stores of romance, medical curiosities and so much galloping about in carriages that there is hardly a moment to catch your breath.

Jane Shoringfield needs a husband, and Dr. Augustine Lawrence fits her purposes to a T. But what begins as a marriage of convenience transforms into a love affair that pulls her into Augustine’s past. The problems begin on their wedding night. Although they had decided that Jane would never sleep at Augustine’s crumbling manor, Lindridge Hall, that agreement is broken when a storm hits, stranding Jane, and revealing Augustine to be a very different man than she had believed.

Half of the pleasure of Starling’s novel is the world she’s constructed. Set in an alternate postwar England of crumbling manors, bloody surgical theaters and hidden crypts, it would be easy to sink into the delicious gloom. But there is too much happening to get comfortable: Jane proves herself as persistent as Jane Eyre in overcoming an ill-fated marriage. And while Augustine’s past is more than she bargained for, she shows she is his equal in love and magic. (Danielle Trussoni)

Times of India shares an excerpt from Melissa Febos's latest essay collection Girlhood:

We are all unreliable narrators of our own motives. And feeling something neither proves nor disproves its existence. Conscious feelings are no accurate map to the psychic imprint of our experiences; they are the messy catalog of emotions once and twice and thrice removed, often the symptoms of what we won’t let ourselves feel. They are not Jane Eyre’s locked-away Bertha Mason, but her cries that leak through the floorboards, the fire she sets while we sleep and the wet nightgown of its quenching.

Woman (Spain) talks to writer Mariana Enríquez.

Siempre fui una fan del género, el gótico, el terror, todo. Pero para escribirlo, yo pensaba que viviendo en América Latina, con mis experiencias, no podía hacer un novelón a la Brontë, ni relatos tipo Lovecraft. [...]

Me parece que avanzar en eso es solo una cuestión de tiempo. A mí misma me costó antes de empezar a escribir narradoras mujeres, cuando empecé a escribir los cuentos. Al final todos son mujeres y creo que no son para nada arquetípicas. Yo pensé que por la cuestión esencial de tener la experiencia de serlo, yo podía escribir una narradora mujer, pero me di cuenta que no. Estamos muy acostumbrados a leer narradores hombres. No solamente los crean los escritores hombres. Puedes leer a Patricia Highsmith, por ejemplo, y casi sus personajes principales son varones. También me pasa con Iris Murdoch. Es natural, porque claro, ellas crecieron leyendo a narradores varones. Es lo primero que te sale hacer, lo más fácil, digamos. Algo narrado por una mujer que era muy raro. Las Brontë lo hicieron porque eran unas locas tremendas, quiero decir, que eran muy arriesgadas. (Paka Díaz) (Translation)

Elle uses a quote from Villette to describe “Sense of Blue,” an interactive installation by digital artist Maotik made in collaboration with skincare brand La Prairie, which was revealed at Art Basel in Switzerland last month.

"The cool peace and dewy sweetness of the night filled me with a mood of hope,” Charlotte Brontë wrote in her 1853 novel Villette. “Not hope on any definite point, but a general sense of encouragement and heart-ease.”

“Heart-ease” is exactly the feeling conjured by “Sense of Blue,” an interactive installation by digital artist Maotik made in collaboration with skincare brand La Prairie, which was revealed at Art Basel in Switzerland last month. Observers were invited into a pitch-black room illuminated only by a giant cobalt blue sphere of light, as the sounds of crickets and other nocturnal species engulfed you. The installation responded to the movement of people in the room, cycling through the many phases of night: dusk, evening, and deepest night. The result was an interactive environment that inspired serenity and calm, projecting an almost womb-like feeling of peace.

The Times Daily Quiz includes the question:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti described which 1847 novel as “A fiend of a book — an incredible monster”?

Wuthering Heights (Olav Bjortomt)

According to Mashable, Jane Eyre (2011?) will be back on Amazon Prime starting November 1st. Mujer Hoy (Spain) wonders about the fascination of literary boarding schools and mentions Jane Eyre in connection to them. The Sisters' Room takes a look at Brontë mentions on TV shows.