2. Upon leaving Selden’s apartment, you run into the unfortunately Jewish, and hence socially dead, Simon Rosedale who asks what brings you to a street consisting entirely of male rooming houses. You…
A) Tell him the reasonably innocent truth, and butter him up by accepting his offer of a lift to the train and making friendly conversation.
B) Make up a weak story about visiting your dressmaker, and butter him up by accepting his offer of a lift to the train and making friendly conversation.
C) Make up a weak story about visiting your dressmaker, then insult him by jumping into a hansom cab and dashing off.
It is my secret hope that we can expand the theme, make it a true tour of the glories of the Sisters Bronte, and move on from Jane Eyre to Wuthering Heights, to enjoy Heathcliff’s sullen and vengeful brooding… and perhaps end the trip in a prolonged visit to Wildfell Hall to complete the cycle.
For although I love Jane Austen dearly, I often feel like the Bronte sisters get the short end of the stick. All this Darcying about and Colonel-Brandoning it up is quite well and good, but sometimes a girl just wants some dark and brooding moorland action to soothe her soul.
(Artwork by Melissa)
Not because they're women, but because they are writers whose work thrills and surprises me. And because, simply on account of their gender, they are too often overlooked by the silly popularity contests that are juries and boards and lists. This is not a question of the writers' quality but of our society's habits, and of a habitual--and primarily lazy--cultural expectation that male writers are somehow more serious, more literary, or more interesting."(Claire Messud, you are cooler than I thought. Mea Culpa!)
Women's 2009 Books Enjoyed a Banner Year:Female writers in all genres and at all levels--from blockbusters to thought stirrers--have won a generous portion of this year's critical acclaim, sweeping up a large percentage of the major prizes and, partially thanks to a spate of new film adaptations, spending considerable time perched atop the bestseller lists . read more.
(A review of A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen, which is totally on my Hannukah wishlist)
After all, every fan of Jane Austen fan thinks she is a real fan of Jane Austen – that her understanding of and empathy with Austen surpasses that of other readers, that she and she alone fully appreciates and savors Austen’s merits.
I say this because before I hated Jane Austen spinoffs, I adored them. No—I was addicted to them. But in both phases, I considered myself a Jane Austen snob.
Thus asks Sam Jordison at the Guardian, who adds that he'd put nearly every single Booker Prize-winning book on his list! Harsh.It's all very well to make lists of the decade's best books, but surely the worst books would give future generations a truer glimpse of the 'noughties. Let's name and shame.
Despite such drastically mixed reviews, The Woman in White was a mad success with the public, and made no less of a sensation out of its 35-year-old author, Wilkie Collins. In middle-class dining rooms everywhere, discussion turned to the intriguing cast of characters Mr Collins had invented – mannish, eloquent Marian Halcombe; faithful and angelic Laura Fairlie; sinister, secretive Percival Glyde; and of course Count Fosco, seductive and cunning, with his cockatoo, his canary-birds, and his white mice running over his immense body. Two months in, Dickens was calling the novel "masterly", and Prince Albert admired it so much that he later sent off copies as gifts.Who could ever forget Count Fosco?
Check any bookshelf of contemporary fiction and you'll see what I mean. Black writers get compared to black writers; Jewish writers to Jewish writers; gay writers to gay writers. According to the publisher's description, my friend Preeta Samarasan's novel Evening Is the Whole Day is "sure to earn her a place alongside Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, and Zadie Smith." I teased her: a place on the shelf of Brown Women Writers. As someone of Indian descent, Samarasan can apparently hope to become a Bharati Mukherjee or a Jhumpa Lahiri, but not -- say -- a Toni Morrison or an A. S. Byatt. Or an Amy Tan, for that matter.
Fellow-ette. ~Sarah Marian S., freelance writer and adorer of all things leftist and literary. ~About this blog~
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