Ellen Nussey's 209th birthday

The Guardian has an article on the female gaze on screen and on paper.

Do you voraciously read the pages of steamy romantasy bestsellers by Sarah J Maas or Rebecca Yarros? Or flood your group chat with breathless recaps of the latest goings-on in TV series such as Heated Rivalry or Bridgerton? Or even immerse yourself in the divisive and challenging cinematic worlds of Emerald Fennell? If so, you surely can’t have failed to notice that in pop culture, the female gaze – storytelling that highlights the meandering, textured, sublimely messy inner worlds and wants of women – is enjoying an explosion.

On TV, you can see it everywhere, in the interior lives and desires taken up by Big Little Lies, Sirens or Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington’s Little Fires Everywhere. Romantasy harbours it in the shape of powerful maidens and sex in fae (fairy) realms, while Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and Promising Young Woman are marketed with the promise of converting women’s experiences into dark beauty on the big screen. (Deborah Linton)

The Australian Women's Weekly reviews The Chateau on Sunset by Natasha Lester.

Instead of excavating the forgotten story of a heroic woman from history, Natasha has built a new story that fictionalises 1950s and ‘60s Hollywood and rests it on the foundations of Jane Eyre. The orphaned heroine is Aria Jones, and she, the modern iteration of Jane, has been transported from gothic England to the Chateau Marmont during the Hollywood studio era. This new setting is no less confining than 1800s rural England, and plenty of menace lurks behind the hotel’s many doors, from ghostly apparitions to sleazy film directors.

Natasha’s characters are undeniably contemporary. The young women who fill the Chateau fizz with ambition, potent beauty and unmet potential. Their stories are inspired by real stars who once graced the hotel, including Marilyn Monroe and Natalie Wood. Aspiring actresses Calliope (who cannot be called beautiful because the word is “wholly inadequate”) and Flitter, who is “chasing beauty but hasn’t caught it yet” are tools for Natasha to explore the treatment of women under the studio system, and to show how they used what meagre power they had to take control of their own fates. A teenage Aria is welcomed into their shared bedroom where she finds sisterly love and advice amid cosy pyjama-parties and mint juleps ordered from Schwab’s.

The Chateau itself is almost a character. It observes and sighs and welcomes Aria, who was orphaned at the age of 13 after her parents are killed in a gas station inferno. The reason she has come to the chateau is that it is where her aunt, the washed-up actress Miss Devine Rey, lives.

The narrative shifts back and forth between young, newly arrived Aria, and a more mature Aria who has taken on the role of being a sort-of governess to Adele, the daughter of the new owner of the Chateau, gruff rock star, Theo Winchester.

Like Edward Rochester, Theo has a history of excess, and a mysterious, checkered past. Though he’s more conventionally attractive than the original. [...]

Aria’s goal in taking a job as Adele’s carer is to save enough money to one day break free of the Chateau. Just as Jane Eyre yearns to see the world beyond the English hillside, Aria dreams of the ocean. She is haunted by apparitions of fire, which foreshadows the inevitable fate of the building.

The Chateau on Sunset is not a re-telling, however, it is a re-imagining, and Natasha has allowed herself to create new fates for the characters. There is a distinct shift in tone after the famous woman-in-the-attic-scene, with plenty of surprises as the story barrels towards its ending. (Genevieve Gannon)

Donegal Daily features Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre for Charlotte's birthday tomorrow. AnneBrontë.org celebrates Ellen Nussey's birthday, which is today.