Immortal Shirley

 A couple of Brontë-related talks today, August 25:

Shirley: A Window into Charlotte's World

Thu 25 Aug, 14.00 (in person); 19.30h (online)

Brontë Parsonage Museum

Having been criticised in some quarters for ‘melodramatic’ elements in 'Jane Eyre', Charlotte Brontë advised her readers on the very first page that her second published novel would be ‘realistic’. Shirley was duly drawn vividly from the lives of the people of West Yorkshire during industrialization. The result was the closest Charlotte came to writing a social novel, produced under the most trying of personal circumstances: the loss of her three siblings.

Contemporary complaints that it contained too many characters and lacked coherence have endured, too often obscuring the passages of brilliant writing which it contained, particularly on the experiences of women and on the shortcomings of contemporary Anglican clergymen.

This talk will avoid spoilers on the story and focus instead on Charlotte’s remarkable insights and the immortalization in print of many of the people she knew, including how much of the elusive Emily Brontë it is possible to glean from the Shirley Keeldar character.

And a talk at the Charis Books & More website:

Reluctant Immortals And Unwieldy Creatures—feminist Horror Remixes In Conversation

This event takes place on crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform.

August 25, 19.30h

Charis welcomes Gwendolyn Kiste in conversation with Addie Tsai for a celebration of their respective novels, Reluctant Immortals and Unwieldy Creatures, each of which takes cues from classic works of horror literature and remixes them to make new feminist meanings. Reluctant Immortals (Kiste) is a novel inspired by the untold stories of forgotten women in classic literature—from Lucy Westnera, a victim of Stoker’s Dracula, and Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester’s attic-bound wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—as they band together to combat the toxic men bent on destroying their lives, set against the backdrop of the Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury, 1967. Unwieldy Creatures (Tsai) is a biracial, queer, gender-swapped retelling of Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein.

Reluctant Immortals is a historical horror novel that looks at two men of classic literature, Dracula and Mr. Rochester, and the two women who survived them, Bertha and Lucy, who are now undead immortals residing in Los Angeles in 1967 when Dracula and Rochester make a shocking return in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Combining elements of historical and gothic fiction with a modern perspective, in a tale of love and betrayal and coercion, Reluctant Immortals is the lyrical and harrowing journey of two women from classic literature as they bravely claim their own destiny in a man’s world.