deep structure

"[...] Longbourn is delightfully audacious; after all, Jane Austen is a very tough act to follow. Pride and Prejudice has been read and reread by enchanted readers since its publication in 1813. George Henry Lewes, the Victorian critic and partner of George Eliot, declared Austen to be 'the greatest artist that has ever written,' and Virginia Woolf called her 'the most perfect artist among women, the writer whose books are immortal.'
     Today these judgments have reached something close to cultish fervour. Yet Austen’s great successor, Charlotte Brontë, was baffled by all this admiration. For her, Austen’s work lacked 'what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and sentient target of death.' It’s one of literary history’s most famous misjudgments.

   But if Charlotte Brontë had taken up the challenge of a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, she might very well have hit upon the sort of broader, more sympathetic point of view Jo Baker has derived from the servants’ quarters. Baker shares some of Brontë’s qualities — a power of description, a feeling for the natural world, a regard for emotional turbulence — and she shows a comfort with the past that allows her to imagine it in a vivid way. […]
     With large imaginative sympathy and a detailed knowledge of early-19th-century housekeeping, Baker gives us a sobering look at the underside — or the practical side — of daily life circa 1812, where in a bourgeois household, however hard up, a staff of people, knowing their place, worked an 18-hour day, every day, to achieve for their employers even the minimum of comfort. In Baker’s account, the Bennets are employers more considerate than many — Elizabeth gives the housemaid, Sarah, one of her dresses — but social distances are thoughtlessly taken for granted. Certain lines are never crossed, and certain others often are: an upper-class young man was never too grand to hang around downstairs in hopes of ruining some servant girl."
— Diane Johnson, The New York Times
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"It's shocking to consider that good reviews seldom make history. Expressions of delight and approbation are welcome to authors, publishers and people looking for birthday-gift ideas. Bad reviews, however, reverberate down the years. We read George Eliot's airy dismissal of Charlotte Brontë's dialogue ('I wish her characters would talk a little less like the heroes and heroines of police reports') with a sigh of century-defying pleasure. […]

     Hatchet jobs are a joy to read, not because we love to see a writer's new baby stabbed through the heart, but because we admire the breezy wit that ideally accompanies the best ones. Hatchet jobs should make you laugh rather than recoil in horror. They should be more than a series of negative opinions. They should be about the work of an established writer rather a newcomer. They should consider the offending book from several directions in an amused manner, slowly ingesting it like a snake devouring a deer.

     All credit then to Anna Baddeley and Fleur Macdonald, two Oxford graduates in their late 20s, who founded The Omnivore website to monitor newspaper reviews. Their weekly inspections led to their establishing, last year, the Hatchet Job of the Year Award 'for the writer of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past 12 months.' It's sponsored by the Fish Society, who offer the prize of a year's supply of potted shrimps (the connection is that shrimps are natural .omnivores'). Last year the prize was won by Adam Mars-Jones for his magisterial, but humorous, evisceration of Michael Cunningham's precious novel By Nightfall."
— John Walsh, The Independent
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Life Lessons

"No novel ever shared a point of view more effectively than Jane Eyre. From the minute the child Jane is unfairly locked in the Red Room by her vicious aunt, Charlotte Brontë gets us on her side. We see what she sees; we fall in love with ugly, rude Mr Rochester as she does. The voice of “Jane Eyre” has no distance. It is raw, persuasive, exhilarating, just as it was in 1847.
     Brontë had a short, hard life, dying at 38 of sickness in pregnancy, having already lost all five of her siblings, including the writers Anne and Emily. Her life was ruled by her father Patrick, vicar of Haworth. Her biographer, Mrs Gaskell, said he had a 'strong, passionate, Irish nature...compressed down with resolute stoicism.' The same could be said of his daughter’s writing. The substance of Jane Eyre is a gothic fairy tale: an orphan, a powerful man, his mad wife, all laced with reversals of fortune. Yet the tone is flattened with Yorkshire terseness. 'I have no wish,' Jane tells Rochester, 'to talk nonsense.'"
— Bee Wilson, Intellgent Life
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Scribo Ergo Sum

"Franz Kafka was a legal secretary at the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague (later: In the Czech Lands), where he wrote reports like 'Accident Prevention in Quarries,' and rose to a top office position, Obersekretär. Though his bureaucratic labors bore literary fruit—providing context and imagery for his fiction writing—Kafka came to feel bogged down by the daily grind. 'Writing and office cannot be reconciled, since writing has its center of gravity in depth, whereas the office is on the surface of life,' he wrote to his fiancée in 1913. 'So it goes up and down, and one is bound to be torn asunder in the process.'
     T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, was inclined to keep his day job even after it was financially necessary. When the Bloomsbury group offered to set up a fund that would allow him sufficient funding to become a full-time writer, the poet turned them down. 'This idea that Eliot should be freed from the drudgery of work misses the point that he was actually very interested in the minutiae of everyday life—he was a commentator on the quotidian,' British Library curator Rachel Foss told The Guardian. [...]
     Says Von Arbin Ahlander, 'We're kidding ourselves if we think we can make a living on writing.' As for the romantic ideal of the leisurely writer life, slowly crafting one's masterpiece in the calm solitude of a big, empty house: 'I mean, that's over,' she added, 'Unless you're a trust fund baby.'
     Though it's rare to make a living on writing, it's becoming increasingly easy to call yourself one. Without any money at all, anyone can publish digitally with the click of a button or, for a price, self-publish a print manuscript. The ecology of authorship has changed dramatically since, say March 1845, when Charlotte Brontë was working as a governess, miserable, and wrote in a letter, 'I shall soon be 30 and I have done nothing yet.' "— Betsy Morais, The Atlantic
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The Birth of Bertha

Painting of the Brontë sisters by their brother
Branwell Brontë (circa 1834)
from: Wikimedia Commons

"A newly-discovered manuscript reveals the author [Chalotte Brontë] imagined the creepy character [Bertha] 17 years earlier, when she was just a teenager. The hand-written story, penned by the author at the age of 14, has laid hidden in a private collection and has never been seen before by scholars. [...] Experts have drawn attention to passages with echo the chapter in Jane Eyre where Mr Rochester’s insane wife, Bertha, sets fire to his house. [...] In another passage, she gives a vivid description of the attic similar to the one which becomes the home of the mentally-ill Mrs Rochester. [...]
     With hand-cut pages, she replicated the format of printed periodicals of the day, complete with table of contents, articles, poetry and classified advertisements, one of which reads: ‘Six young men wish to let themselves all a hire for the purpose of cleaning out pockets they are in reduced CIRCUMSTANCES [sic].’
     Inspired by Blackwood’s Magazine, to which her father subscribed, she called hers The Young Men’s Magazine, Number 2, and dated it August 1830. It is the missing second volume of a series of six.
     Most of her manuscripts are now in public institutions in Britain and America, and the anonymous owners of this one had no idea of its significance when they approached Sotheby’s in London about selling it. [...] It is expected to sell for £300,000 when it goes on sale at Sotheby’s in London next month." — Dalya Alberge, Daily Mail
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"This autumn sees two new film adaptations of novels by the Brontë sisters: one, directed by Andrea Arnold, of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and the other of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, directed by Cary Fukunaga. Making a film adaptation of a classic novel is an ambitious and risky business—both of these books have been read, studied, loved and debated for over 150 years. The destructive passion of Catherine and Heathcliff and the stoic, enduring love of Jane and Rochester have seeped into the common consciousness.
     There are already several film adaptations of both novels, such as Robert Stevenson’s gothic 1943 interpretation of Jane Eyre and Robert Fuest’s unconventional 1970 take on Wuthering Heights. So why make any more? The preoccupations of Victorian ladies, such as status, marriage and inheritance, aren’t as potent as they once were. Yet the darker forces of these books, including their undertones of feminism and concerns with inequities and feelings of alienation, are as relevant as ever."— More Intelligent Life
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