A must-read for Brontë aficionados and anyone interested in the lives and concerns of Victorian women.
Novelized biography of Charlotte Brontë, with emphasis on her love life, or lack thereof.
The Brontë sisters’ childhood ended abruptly after their mother’s early death. Unable to cope, their father, an impoverished Yorkshire vicar, consigned his four oldest daughters, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily, to a charity boarding school were they were starved and abused. He rescued them, but only after the two eldest were sent home with consumption, which killed them. Charlotte and Emily enjoy a brief idyll studying French in Brussels, where Charlotte develops a desperate crush on her married professor, from which she will derive Jane Eyre’s infatuation with Mr. Rochester. Back at the parsonage, Charlotte, Emily and youngest sister Anne spend their days sewing, placating Patrick and nursing brother Branwell, who’s straining the family finances with his opium addiction, drinking binges and general dissipation. To raise funds, the sisters begin writing under masculine pseudonyms—Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Soon Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey are published, followed by Jane Eyre, a runaway bestseller. Sudden success affords only brief respite from the ongoing tragedy stalking the Brontës: Branwell, Anne and Emily will all succumb to consumption within a year. Left alone with the ailing but seemingly indestructible Patrick, Charlotte fails to notice that her father’s curate, Arthur, whose staunch exterior belies his tender heart, is gazing at her longingly. At 38, she’s made uncomfortable peace with spinsterhood, a topic she explores in her next novel, Shirley. Now unmasked, Charlotte is feted by London literati and once more disappointed in love, for her publisher George Smith. Will she realize the romantic possibilities within her grasp? Will she escape Patrick’s possessiveness? Although the narrative hews very closely to the known facts, it is to newcomer Gael’s credit that she not only builds suspense around these questions but also draws a tear when we learn Charlotte’s eventual fate.
A must-read for Brontë aficionados and anyone interested in the lives and concerns of Victorian women.Pub Date: April 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-52004-3
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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