Bookninja
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04-13-2004 12:42 AM ET (US)
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Yeah, I'm Gonna Finish Me a Little Something in Ottava Rima Too...Playing winger for Charlotte Brontė. " Brontė introduces the major characters, including the sullen, solitary Matilda (who later finds she is named Emma); the intelligent, sympathetic widow who narrates the book, Isabel Chalfont; the single gentleman who helps to unravel the mystery of Emma's background, William Ellin; and the three slightly buffoonish sisters who run the school. Boylan thinks the sisters might be Brontė's inside-joke version of herself and her sisters Emily - of "Wuthering Heights" fame - and Anne, who tried to start a school once but couldn't get pupils." (Maybe she just needed glasses?) Home
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| Rachel Lebowitz
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03-01-2004 12:42 AM ET (US)
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This article is so obnoxious (and poorly written). What do their looks have to do with anything, and what does she mean when she says that they were “psychologically delicate”? And what’s with the “although” in :“Miller is particularly good on this last point, although she is blessedly free of the sort of dogmatic gender-study approach that takes a perverse pride in counting off the indignities inflicted by an obtuse male establishment.”
This wins as worst segue: “Actually, although ''Jane Eyre'' was originally billed as ''An Autobiography,'' it is ''Villette,'' Charlotte's most accomplished novel, that is also her most painfully self-revealing one.”
Alright, I’ll stop bitching now. Both Miller’s book and editor Juliet Barker’s The Brontes A Life in Letters are good, especially Barker’s, which compiles letters from all of the Brontes, from 1821-1855. Miller’s book is hilarious in parts. My favorite is this quote about Emily from a 19th C writer, Thomas Wemyss Reid:
“Emily Bronte does not talk so much as the rest of the party, but her wonderful eyes, brilliant and unfathomable as the pool at the foot of a waterfall, but radiant also with a wealth of tenderness and warmth, show how her soul is expanding under the influences of the scene;
she utters at times a strange, gutteral sound which those who know her best interpret as the language of joy too deep for articulate expression.”
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