Bicentenary of the death of Maria Brontë (née Branwell)

First of all, today marks the bicentenary of a sad event that shaped the lives of the Brontë family:

#OnThisDay 200 years ago, Maria Brontë, mother to Emily, Anne, Charlotte and Branwell, sadly passed away.

You can find out more about Maria and her life in the exhibition room at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. pic.twitter.com/KnDEeeG1b1

— Brontë Parsonage (@BronteParsonage) September 15, 2021

And so an alert for today and several days more:

A repeated twenty-five minute talk with readings at Maria's grave site at @haworthchurch is planned for today at 12pm and 2.30pm, for both Saturday 18 September and Sunday 19 September at 2.30pm, and for Wednesday 22 September (the day of her funeral) at 12.00pm and 2.30pm.

— Brontë Parsonage (@BronteParsonage) September 15, 2021

GoBookMart reviews the recently-released Mrs. Rochester’s Ghost by Lindsay Marcott.

Jane has lost everything. She has lost her mother, boyfriend, and her career as a TV story writer. It is in these troubling straights that old friend Otis gets her ready to get across country, take up the work of tutor for a teenager. Doing all this in the isolated coastal estate of a rich man being investigated for killing his better half.

Mrs. Rochester’s Ghost by Lindsay Marcott had a benefit of being set along the California central coast. The author intelligently wove the winning components from the classic into this modern domestic spine chiller. It was done so that there was much for a Jane Eyre fan to recognize and appreciate while likewise having the chance to enjoy new components to plot and characters.

The cast of characters are well crafted, flawed and complex. They have been brought to life flawlessly. The stand out character for me was Beatrice and when the point of view was told from her perspective, these were the parts that I liked the most.

Mrs. Rochester’s Ghost by Lindsay Marcott was modernized and with a considerable amount of differences from the original novel. I think was ok for me since the original is practically unapproachable in my eyes. Readers will enjoy the similar names and parallel circumstances. I also enjoyed the twist of adding Beatrice’s voice in this and to see through the eyes of somebody experiencing psychosis. I found this to a lesser extent a thrilling ride however more a mystery—with the basic “who done it” driving the plot. (Anurag Anand)

A contributor to Her Campus has really enjoyed  Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic.

My teenage years were spent developing a slightly unhealthy obsession for anything by Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and practically any material Masterpiece Theater would adapt for the small screen. [...]

While I could simply say that Silvia Moreno-Garcia has taken the gothic extravagance and sophistication of Mary Shelley or Jane Austen and just made it more accessible to Hispanic and Latino readers, that would be a disservice to Moreno-Garcia’s writing. In actuality, Silvia Moreno-Garcia takes a literary structure typically reserved for white Americans and/or white Europeans and reframes it the rich, extensive Latin American culture. She does not work to mimic their style but rather harnesses it to prove the Latin American experience can be just as sophisticated and extravagant. (Mari Prieto)

Les Petits Livres (France) features the novel as well, mentioning its Brontëan echoes.

Kleine Zeitung (Austria) thinks that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is better than Jane Austen's or the Brontës' works because she left the 'the spheres of domesticity behind'. It also claims that it had gone unnoticed before the pandemic.

Als Autorin ließ Shelley die Sphären der Häuslichkeit, in denen Zeitgenossinnen wie Jane Austen oder die Brontë-Schwestern ihre Romane ansiedelten, weit hinter sich. Bemerkenswert ist eigentlich vor allem, dass es fast 200 Jahre und eine Pandemie brauchte, bis das endlich aufgefallen ist. (Ute Baumhackl) (Translation)

Not to belittle Frankenstein (which we read decades before the pandemic, go figure!) but it seems like an appropriate time to quote from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's One concerning the so-called 'spheres of domesticity'.

And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are 'important'; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes 'trivial'. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop--everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists. 

The Brontës' use of pseudonyms in Gulf News.

Finally, Luccia Gray has posted about why she wrote Resurgam: An Eyre Hall Series Novella.