The Irish Times has an article on Lydia Robinson by Finola Austin.
In my novel, Brontë’s Mistress, I give voice to Lydia Robinson for the first time, imagining what could have driven an established woman, without access to divorce or her own money, into a reckless affair with a younger and unstable man. My Lydia is stuck in a loveless, and sexless, marriage with her husband Edmund. She’s reeling from the deaths of her mother and toddler daughter. Her surviving children are rebellious teenagers, and her mother-in-law is a force of nature, breathing down her neck. There’s no love lost between Lydia and Anne Brontë, her daughters’ governess. But when Anne’s brother Branwell takes up a position as her only son’s tutor, sparks fly. Branwell is passionate, imaginative, and searching for a great love to inspire his poetry. Lydia is desperate for affection and attention. It’s a dangerous match and the affair has consequences for them both.
While my book is fiction, I spent over a year researching Lydia Robinson and the Lydia/Branwell affair. It was important to me that everything that happens in the novel could have happened, and the book is in some way my response to the arguments that have raged between Brontë scholars and fans over the scandal. Every character who appears in the novel is real and I spent a lot of time trying to understand Lydia’s servants and neighbours, building up a picture of the world she lived in and the people who inhabited it.
My book is also in some ways a response to the Brontë sisters’ novels – especially those written by Charlotte. Charlotte had a penchant for heroines who were poor, plain, young and virginal. Lydia Robinson was rich, beautiful, in her forties, and a mother of five, yet didn’t she also suffer from living in a patriarchal society? Wasn’t her story worth telling? [...]
Writing historical fiction can feel very much like detective work, and, given the Brontës’ unwavering popularity, I was surprised and delighted at the new details I was able to uncover while researching the book. Lydia Robinson is very much a woman of her time. We might not agree with all her choices, but I hope that, by the end of the novel readers can come to understand them. The Brontë sisters were immensely talented, and this wasn’t the only way in which they were exceptional. Most women were not educated and wouldn’t even have thought it possible that they might pursue their own artistic aspirations. I dedicated my book to “the women who didn’t write their novels” – that is, to the voices we haven’t heard from history; the women who’ve been forgotten, or, like Lydia, maligned and misjudged.
MD Theatre Guide reviews Marilyn Ross's books based on the Dark Shadows soap opera.
The first five books do not feature vampire Barnabas. Instead they center around the governess, Victoria Winters, hired by the family matriarch, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, to tutor her troubled nephew, David, at the mysterious Collinwood mansion. The first novel, “Dark Shadows,” has plot twists regarding madness, love, and hate reminiscent of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and Daphne Du Maurier’s “Rebecca.” (Dr. Mark Dreisonstok)
Buzzdefou (France) describes Louis Arlette's music video for L'Ange as
Un clip à l’esthétique ombreuse et amoureuse, quand Ophélie rencontre Heathcliff. (Translation)
Music Week and others mention her Wuthering Heights when reporting that Kate Bush has been made a Fellow of The Ivors Academy.
The Spaces has an article on Ponden Hall being on the market.
Books After Dark describes Jane Eyre as a 'revolutionary romance'.
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