Ladies and Gentlemen

Patricia Beer, 6 May 1982

The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17 
by Jane Marcus.
Macmillan, 340 pp., £9.95, April 1982, 0 333 25589 5
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The Harsh Voice 
by Rebecca West, introduced by Alexandra Pringle.
Virago, 250 pp., £2.95, February 1982, 0 86068 249 8
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The Meaning of Treason 
by Rebecca West.
Virago, 439 pp., £3.95, February 1982, 0 86068 256 0
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1990 
by Rebecca West.
Weidenfeld, 190 pp., £10, February 1982, 9780297779636
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... other woman writers who have set themselves a similar task, even if, as in the case of Charlotte Brontë, they do not quite realise that this is the task they have set themselves. Here is Mr Rochester, making a guest-appearance in ‘The Salt of the Earth’: He murmured something under his breath, and bent his lips towards her. But she twisted out of his ...

Reading Cure

John Sutherland, 10 November 1988

The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals. Vol. IV: 1824-1900 
edited by Walter Houghton, Esther Rhoads Houghton and Jean Harris Slingerland.
Toronto/Routledge, 826 pp., £95, January 1988, 0 7102 1442 1
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Circulation: Defoe, Dickens and the Economies of the Novel 
by David Trotter.
Macmillan, 148 pp., £27.50, October 1988, 0 333 40542 0
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From Copyright to Copperfield 
by Alexander Welsh.
Harvard, 200 pp., £19.95, December 1987, 0 674 32342 4
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... in Nancy Armstrong’s Foucauldian Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987): On my way to the annual Brontë conference at the University of Leeds in 1981, I decided to test a hypothesis. The conference that year was concerned with the Brontës’ relationship to their historical context. In writing my own paper for the event, I had already grown dissatisfied ...

Learning to speak

Gay Clifford, 21 February 1980

Gya/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism 
by Mary Daly.
Women’s Press, 485 pp., £8.95, November 1980, 0 7043 2829 1
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The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th Century 
by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.
Yale, 719 pp., £15.75, October 1980, 0 300 02286 7
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Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes 
by Margaret Dickie Uroff.
Illinois, 235 pp., £6.95, November 1980, 0 252 00734 4
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Women Writing and Writing about Women 
edited by Mary Jacobus.
Croom Helm, 201 pp., £9.50, October 1980, 0 85664 745 4
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... Gubar study recurrent forms of female rebellion in the works of Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Dickinson herself, centring on the symbol of Bertha Mason rampaging in the attic. Socially she is there because of the power of fathers and husbands. Imaginatively, her shouts and incendiarism are the result of female writers wanting to ...

Christina and the Sid

Penelope Fitzgerald, 18 March 1982

Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life 
by Georgina Battiscombe.
Constable, 233 pp., £9.50, May 1981, 0 09 461950 6
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The Golden Veil 
by Paddy Kitchen.
Hamish Hamilton, 286 pp., £7.95, May 1981, 0 241 10584 6
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The Little Holland House Album 
by Edward Burne-Jones and John Christian.
Dalrymple Press, 39 pp., £38, April 1981, 0 9507301 0 6
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... Christina Rossetti wrote ‘If I had words’ and ‘I took my heart in my hand’ and ‘If he would come today, today’ and ‘What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through’ and: I bent by my own burden, must Enter my heart of dust. Her poetry she described as ‘a genuine “lyric cry”, and such I will back against all skilled labour ...

How to Be Good

Elaine Showalter: Carol Shields, 11 July 2002

Unless 
by Carol Shields.
Fourth Estate, 213 pp., £16.99, May 2002, 0 00 713770 2
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... aware and experimental novels of men? – has been going on since Jane Austen’s day. Charlotte Brontë was one who rejected Austen’s plot, which she called ‘a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden’. Recently Gillian Beer even announced the death of the traditional women’s novel: instead of the masochistic themes of unrequited love, she said at ...

Post-Cullodenism

Robert Crawford, 3 October 1996

The Poems of Ossian and Related Works 
by James Macpherson, edited by Howard Gaskill.
Edinburgh, 573 pp., £16.95, January 1996, 0 7486 0707 2
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... rolls the river thro’ the narrow plain.’ This voice is evident in Wordsworth, Byron, Emily Brontë and the Ann Radcliffe of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne. It can be heard, too, in Walter Scott, who was also impressed by Macpherson’s ability to capture attention outside Britain. Ossian’s tone is that of the Scotland which was central to the ...

Ten Poets

Denis Donoghue, 7 November 1985

Selected Poems 
by Donald Davie.
Carcanet, 124 pp., £2.95, April 1985, 9780856355950
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Collected Poems: 1947-1980 
by Allen Ginsberg.
Viking, 837 pp., £16.95, April 1985, 0 670 80683 8
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Instant Chronicles: A Life 
by D.J. Enright.
Oxford, 58 pp., £4.50, April 1985, 9780019211970
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Selected Poems 
by Edwin Morgan.
Carcanet, 139 pp., £2.95, April 1985, 0 85635 596 8
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Selected Poems 
by Jeffrey Wainwright.
Carcanet, 79 pp., £2.95, April 1985, 0 85635 598 4
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Selected Poems 
by Gillian Clarke.
Carcanet, 112 pp., £2.95, April 1985, 0 85635 594 1
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The Price of Stone 
by Richard Murphy.
Faber, 92 pp., £4, May 1985, 0 571 13568 4
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Selected Poems 
by Iain Crichton Smith.
Carcanet, 121 pp., £2.95, April 1985, 0 85635 597 6
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Selected Poems 
by Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Carcanet, 95 pp., £2.95, April 1985, 0 85635 585 2
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From the Irish 
by James Simmons.
Blackstaff, 78 pp., £3.95, May 1985, 0 85640 331 8
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... professional, drawing his comparisons with rehearsed casualness: In the matter of Pushkin, Emily Brontë Is the best analogy in some ways Among our poets. But Pushkin is more various than Brontë, apparently, more resourceful in relation to the wider circuit of experience available to him. Poetry for Pushkin was a means ...

Bourgeois Masterpieces

Julian Symons, 13 June 1991

Literature and Liberation: Selected Essays 
by Arnold Kettle, edited by Graham Martin and W.R. Owens.
Manchester, 231 pp., £9.95, February 1991, 9780719027734
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... and Ibsen are great dramatists in part because of their ‘centrality to their times’, Emily Brontë, Dickens and Hardy earn praise because they ‘burst the buckles of bourgeois consciousness’. There is quite a bit of pro-Soviet claptrap to be found here, as in a piece dated 1959 which says that ‘Soviet culture today is an infinitely ...

In praise of Brigid Brophy

John Bayley, 5 March 1987

Baroque ’n’ Roll 
by Brigid Brophy.
Hamish Hamilton, 172 pp., £10.95, February 1987, 0 241 12037 3
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... Brophy shrewdly says, were the result ‘not of sexual but of literary frustration’. Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre were to come out from under her cloak in time, as Dostoevsky says that Russian literature came from under Gogol’s overcoat. The section on baroque is a little – indeed not so little – masterpiece, packed with insights and concluding ...

Escaping the curssed orange

Norma Clarke: Jane Barker, 5 April 2001

Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675-1725 
by Kathryn King.
Oxford, 263 pp., £40, September 2000, 0 19 818702 5
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... Jane Eyre, and makes one wonder how much or how little 19th-century women like Charlotte Brontë were acquainted with their sister writers (as Barker might have put it) of this earlier period. Barker’s heroine, Galesia, is supporting herself by practising medicine in London while at the same time writing poetry, a passion she finds it impossible to ...

The beige was better

Jessica Olin: ‘If you hate this place so much, why don’t you leave?’, 9 October 2003

Bending Heaven 
by Jessica Francis Kane.
Chatto, 208 pp., £10, June 2003, 0 7011 7517 6
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... is cold-calling talk show hosts to promote Wistful Moors, a novel based on the life of Charlotte Brontë. Seeking authenticity, she moves into a grungy walk-up on the Upper West Side, learns to avoid the drug dealers, and begins to love New York, or at least parts of it: ‘the undulating expanse of Central Park, like actors offstage waving a giant green ...

Diary

Michael Wood: In the City of Good Air, 20 November 2003

... is enough to unsettle the city for me. This is not like visiting the real home of the real Emily Brontë or the real home of the imaginary Leopold Bloom, it’s like stumbling into a fiction you feel you may not be able to get out of. ‘Argentinians don’t believe in circumstances,’ Borges once wrote. The context is a rather flimsy essay called ‘Our ...

Tennyson’s Text

Danny Karlin, 12 November 1987

The Poems of Tennyson 
edited by Christopher Ricks.
Longman, 662 pp., £40, May 1987, 0 582 49239 4
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Tennyson’s ‘Maud’: A Definitive Edition 
edited by Susan Shatto.
Athlone, 296 pp., £28, August 1986, 0 485 11294 9
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The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Vol.2: 1851-1870 
edited by Cecil Lang and Edgar Shannon.
Oxford, 585 pp., £40, May 1987, 0 19 812691 3
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The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse 
edited by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 654 pp., £15.95, June 1987, 0 19 214154 6
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... of their earliest included poem). The first half of the book has (in order) Tennyson, Emily Brontë, William Barnes, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Clare, Carroll, Clough, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, and Arnold, who, fittingly, is the pivotal figure. After this, though big names are not lacking, their contribution weighs less, in ...

Snug

John Bayley, 9 September 1993

The Life of Ian Fleming 
by Donald McCormick.
Peter Owen, 231 pp., £18.50, July 1993, 0 7206 0888 0
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... consciences of Henry James or Hugh Walpole, or even with the heroines of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë – all of whom can make a pleasure in being themselves so endearing. Buchan’s Hannay is the only hero in the same line with whom Bond has anything in common. Fleming’s villains are totally derivative and standardised but they too have one genuinely ...

Gnawed by rats, burnt at Oxford

Claire Tomalin, 10 October 1991

G.H. Lewes: A Life 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Oxford, 369 pp., £25, September 1991, 0 19 812827 4
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... of women, and Lewes even delivered himself of some frightful nonsense when reviewing Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley: ‘The grand function of woman, it must always be recollected, is, and ever must be, Maternity ... What should we do with a leader of the opposition in the seventh month of her pregnancy? ... or a chief justice with twins?’ There may have ...