Gaskell understood the value of domesticity to the female writer: for all that it was suffocating, it was also a shieldĮnter Mrs Gaskell, who knew how the game was played. Even Dickens’s reputation was hurt when he separated from his wife imagine what a similar tenor of gossip did to the career and immediate legacy of a woman without Dickens’s connections, resources or privileges. But if people don’t read your books because they think you’re a whore, that is not exciting at all. The idea that Brontë was, in the words of one article, “ a filthy minx” seems to us irrelevant now (if luridly exciting). There were rumours of an embarrassing incident with a married man in Brussels, and when she fell in love, she was awkward and obvious in her affections. A single woman with an unnerving whiff of sex about her, she wrote big and lustful books. Brontë was a challenging figure to her contemporaries.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |