'Like Brontë trying to come to terms with her own social defects'

The Times asks writer Kaliane Bradley about her favourite books.

What is your favourite book by a dead author?

Because this question is impossible to answer — I like too many dead authors too much — I’m going to use this space to say I think Villette is the best novel Charlotte Brontë — or any Brontë — wrote. It’s a superb portrayal of loneliness and the sobering daily work of sanding fantasy down to fit reality. Lucy Snowe — priggish, humane, loyal, introverted, socially awkward yet great for barbed repartee — is a pleasingly frustrating narrator, who reads, to me, like Brontë trying to come to terms with her own social defects. To say Villette is one of the greatest novels ever written about disappointment — you will throw your book across the room when you hit that ending — does not give it enough credit for also being very horny. Lucy’s experience of the erotic powers of Dr John Graham Bretton and Ginevra Fanshawe are written with passion and hunger, and M Paul Emanuel is the focus of the kind of yearning that should have set the pages on fire.

Which is mostly a modern, positive way of saying what Harriet Martineau said in her review of the novel and which caused the rift between her and Charlotte Brontë.

Sky News tells about the rightful anger of British writers after having found out that their books have been used to train Meta's AI.

"It's every single book I have ever written," says novelist Rowan Coleman, who has had about 40 books published since her first in 2002, including the Sunday Times bestseller The Memory Book in 2014, and The Bronte Mysteries series under a pen name [Bella Ellis].

"I felt absolutely sick… I have no way of knowing how much revenue that has cost me. Like most writers, I struggle to pay the bills. I have three jobs, I have children to support and a mortgage to pay. And there are tech billionaires who are profiting from my work and the work of countless other authors as well. How can that be right?"

Meta, Coleman says, allegedly decided to obtain "what they needed cheaply and quickly".

But financial compensation aside, she says there is a bigger issue. "It's a threat to this profession even being able to continue to exist. We are, I think, at genuine risk of not having any books for people to actually pirate - at least not any written by humans." (Gemma Peplow)

The Brontë Sisters publishes a video about the Brontë animals and their influence on their writings. The  Behind the Glass podcast interviews Claire O'Callaghan.