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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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