The mad woman on the marble countertop

Elle asks bookish questions to actor Brian Cox.

The book that: [...]

…that I recommend over and over again:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. It is a great introduction to classic literature. An active story that reveals the many facets of love through Heathcliff and Catherine. (Riza Cruz)

Honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Literature Sarah Hosking makes an interesting point when asked about her most influential reads by Stratford-upon-Avon Herald.

These are ten of my favourite books but it is assuming that the great building blocks of our nation’s literature – Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, David Copperfield, Vanity Fair, etc are permanently in my mind as remembered chunks, and so have not been included. (Gill Sutherland)

More bookish questions as Rossland News interviews the mayor of Rossland Kathy Moore.

Jan Bailey: What book do you read over and over?

K.M.: I rarely re-read a book, but I have read some of the Brontë sisters’ classics more than once: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. They evoke a very different lifestyle that I find it quite interesting and a bygone, and perhaps non-existent sense of romance.

Also, those books portray just such a wretched life for women and that makes me so glad to have been born when and where I was!

The Spectator discusses Siri Hustvedt's Mothers, Fathers, and Others by way of the recent essay by Honor Jones entitled “How I demolished my life”.

According to her detractors, Jones’s piece was bad because it was so limited, so individual, both in its focus and in its justifications for the divorce. While I find it hard to believe that anyone would really divorce someone over the state of their Plain English kitchen — this is surely a metaphor for stultifying domesticity? The mad woman on the marble countertop? No? — it was hard to deny that the essay lacked breadth and interest for a reader who wasn’t also the author.

But elsewhere in the world of personal essays, we find the ghostly figures of Emily Brontë, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Sigmund Freud, Louise Bourgeois, Cecile Løveid — the list goes on. (Francesca Peacock)

In Sweden, a columnist from Expressen also shows her disapproval of trigger warnings for classics such as Jane Eyre.