Building to thunder

The London Review of Books has an article on the exhibition Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World.

For a long stretch​ of her long life, Jean Rhys was thought to be dead: drowned in the Seine, they said. For some of it she was thought to be a fraud. In 1949 a neighbour in Beckenham who knew her by the name of her husband (who was a real fraud) accused her of impersonating the famous author Jean Rhys. ‘I feel rather tactless being still alive,’ she wrote to her daughter. She often said she felt like a ghost, and sometimes like a ghost’s technological equivalent: ‘A writer is only a telephone.’

Hilton Als, who has curated exhibitions inspired by Joan Didion and James Baldwin, has now created one about Rhys. Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World, recently on display at London’s Michael Werner Gallery, does not try to cover all Rhys’s glimmers in and out of vivacity. Nevertheless there is a spectral quality to this ‘collective portrait’, which includes no actual portrait of Rhys herself. Paintings, sculptures, photographs – and one dress – from the 18th to the 21st century are shown alongside extracts from Rhys’s writing, without further explanation. Als has said he wanted to make ‘an emotional transcription of how she makes me feel’. Which raises the question of who this exhibition is about, whose postures these are. [...]

There is a thin line between the tangential and the bafflingly oblique. Celia Paul’s simmering portrait of Charlotte Brontë – eyes down, mouth set, raw-boned, wary, building to thunder – is a hot line to the person who created Bertha Mason. (Susannah Clapp)

The Spectator reviews Queen Esther by John Irving., which features 'a solitary, determined heroine, who – Jane Eyre-like – is a moral force unbound by conventionalities'.

Esther’s unconventionality is expressed in two striking ways. First, she wants a tattoo. Not just any old tattoo, but a quotation from Jane Eyre: ‘The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.’ This is, you will agree, a lot better than ‘No regrets’, but it’s pretty unusual for pre-second world war America. (Esther was born in 1905.) (Nicholas Lezard)

Times Now News has an article on '2026's biggest book adaptations', including Wuthering Heights.