Tristram Shandy evicted

The New York Times interviews Margaret Atwood who has published Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth:

So what led you to take up the subject of debt?
Long ago, I was a graduate student in Victorian literature. When you think of the 19th-century novel, you think romance — you think Heathcliff, Cathy, Madame Bovary, etc. But the underpinning structure of those novels is money, and Madame Bovary could have cheerfully gone on committing adultery for a long time if she hadn’t overspent. (Deborah Solomon)

EDIT (2 October 2008) (from ohnotheydidnt):

“I became a Victorian. That was my field of study at univer-sity - and that's the age par excellence in which plots are driven by money and people are embroiled in an outbreak of capitalism. Wuthering Heights is driven by money: Heathcliff earns a fortune and then comes back to extract the house from its previous owner. Madame Bovary would have been quite all right had she kept within her budget. It's not the adultery - it's the debt that sank her.”

Today we have just another sample of that (perverse) journalist custom of defending one cause by attacking just another that happens to be on the journalist's mind for some reason. Christina Patterson vehemently defends in The Independent that Shandy Hall (Laurence Sterne's house) in Yorkshire should be preserved but thinks necessary to add:

Apart from the world of Brontë shortbread and sub-Austen samplers, there are a number of buildings in this country that operate not as sacred temples to writers elevated to the top table of heritage Britain – deified, commodified and occasionally revivified by Andrew Davies – but as living, and often leaking, tributes to some of this country's greatest minds, and their work.

The Daily Star (Bangladesh) has reread Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and thinks that

The settings and landscapes of Aymenem can easily be compared to Bronte's Wuthering Heights and give it character. It is very much visible in the book that the kind of landscape the writer grew up in is still very much living in her --- the way she loves a tree or a river or the color of the earth. It is a different kind of love. (Shusmita Amin Chowdhury)

Categories: References, Wuthering Heights