Jane Eyre: rebirth and coming into one’s own

Bookish questions to author Hilary Mantel in Elle:

The book that… 

[...] …I asked for one Christmas as a kid:

Jane Eyre. My mother said, “You won’t understand it.” That acted as an incentive. (Riza Cruz)

According to Thrillist,

If Sally Rooney is the millennial Austen, [Ottessa] Moshfegh is for Brontë bitches with Gothic instincts and a high tolerance for vivid descriptions of bodily functions. (Esther Zuckerman)

Irish Echo features Mary-Grace Autumn Lee’s new music album Eyre.

In her liner notes, Lee tells us the album’s title borrows from the title of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre,” as she feels the book and her album share the themes of “rebirth and coming into one’s own.” (Daniel Neely)

I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour is one of the 'Best summer books of 2022' in the Literary non-fiction category recommended by Financial Times.

I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys

by Miranda Seymour, William Collins £25

Seymour’s biography of the contrarian author of Wide Sargasso Sea is clear-eyed yet sympathetic. It not only tells the story of an extraordinary, complicated life — but offers an appreciation of Rhys’s great literary legacy that is sure to send readers back to her novels. (Carl Wilkinson)

Dewsbury Reporter features the inventor of the clinical thermometer: Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt, who has a Brontë connection as we highlighted many, many years ago. However, the present article seems to exaggerate things a bit,

His father, Reverend Thomas Allbutt, was Vicar of Dewsbury Parish Church from 1835 to 1862, and his mother, Marianne, was the sister of Margaret Wooler, of Dewsbury, who taught Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë.

Sir Clifford met the Brontë sisters on a number of occasions when they visited the vicarage at Dewsbury, where their father, Reverend Patrick Brontë, had been curate some years earlier.

The Brontë sisters often visited the vicarage to have tea with the Allbutt family, and they also attended the church at various times, although St John‘s Church, Dewsbury Moor, was their regular place of worship.

For this was the church nearer to their school, Healds House on Healds Road, which was run by Margaret Wooler, Mrs Allbutt’s sister, and Sir Clifford’s aunt.

This was the school where Charlotte taught, and where her sister Anne was a pupil. (Jane Chippindale)