No critic has ever domesticated Wuthering Heights

Manchester Evening News features the history of the now-called Blavatnik Honresfield Collection.

A unique collection of classic literature - including originals by Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters - amassed by a Rochdale businessman has been saved from going under the hammer after £15 million was raised to buy it.

The Honresfield Library was set up by mill-owner William Law in the 19th Century when he lived at Honresfield, a few miles from Haworth in Yorkshire, where the Brontë sisters famously wrote their novels.

The collection has been largely inaccessible for the last 80 years, its contents examined only by a few trusted scholars.

Now, a group set up to buy the contents has succeeded in its bid to stop the collection from being sold at auction.

The group raised £15 million to buy the collection, with the balance made up by multi-billionaire businessman Sir Leonard Blavatnik so it could be shared with UK libraries and other organisations. (Hamish Morrison)

Observer reviews Mothers, Fathers, & Others by Siri Hustvedt.

In “The Enigma of Reading,” Hustvedt reappraises Wuthering Heights. For her the book has a mysterious phenomenological spell. Her daughter both wants to keep reading and finds Heathcliff an immoral devil. “No critic has ever domesticated Wuthering Heights… It is useless to try to beat the novel into submission. It will not comply.” Hustvedt sees the novel as destroying the “boundaries of character, setting, and plot.” They all melt together, the dialectic is mush. In her essay “The Brontës,” Elizabeth Hardwick provides a biography of the three sisters, their brother, and father. Hardwick’s prose is stark, “Wuthering Heights is a virgin’s story.” Hardwick illustrates the life of the Brontës in a way that lends itself to understanding the wild, boundaryless Wuthering Heights. The prose of the Brontës explores the “nettled complication of moods and traits, resolutions and lacks, ambitions and insecurities.” Obviously, Hardwick’s essay is more biographical in nature, while Hustvedt is trying to explain the phenomenology of reading Brontë that she feels has been obscured by theorists. And yet, even with the scaffolding of history, Hardwick is better able to excavate the Brontë’s mystery: “How to live without love, without security?” (Grace Byron)  

Electric Lit interviews Lily King about her book Five Tuesdays in Winter.

AR: Is that story the completion of the book’s arc then? Because the collection begins with “Creature,” about a teenage girl reading Jane Eyre, fantasizing about her own agency when she gets assaulted in the bathroom. Then at the end, “The Man at the Door” give us a woman reaching full agency. Not so different from Jane Eyre’s path from powerless girl to grown woman with agency. Is that how you see the emotional arc of the collection? 

LK: Well maybe not as sophisticatedly as that, no. When we were putting it together, we were trying to figure out what we were going to do with these three stories that have people who become writers in them. I definitely felt like they were the three pillars of the collection. There was a part of me that wanted to put them separately, at the end, boom, boom, boom. Then, I really felt like it would be better if it were over the course of the whole collection, to start at a younger age and go to the mid-20s, to the mid-30s or late 30s, or whatever she is in “Man at the Door.” I felt like “The Man at the Door” absolutely had to be the end. I do feel like those three women are holding up the collection, definitely. I didn’t really think about it in terms of Jane Eyre and agency, but I think that is so accurate. I’d give an A to that paper. (Amy Reardon)

Reader's Digest interviews David Raeburn Finn about his novel The Leopard’s Daughter: A Pukhtun Story.

Q. Which one author or book has been the most inspirational to you across your writing journey?

A. Sorry, it has to be two! Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë for the glory of its English prose and its courageous heroïne, and British Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid for his wonderfully twisted subcontinental irony in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. (Timothy Arden)