Monday, June 11, 2007

It's all been a terrible mistake

A ground-breaking, nay, earth-shattering new discovery has revealed that the Brontë Sisters were not shy, retiring, tiny, slender, mouse-coloured Irish/Cornish hybrids from Britain's remote and mysterious Deep and Wuthering North at all. No! With the slip of a keystroke, Melbourne's Sunday Age has re-identified them as the Bronti Sisters.

This bombshell has been brought to my attention by the distinguished scholar and blogger Professor Stephanie Trigg of Humanities Researcher, in the course of whose work the discovery was accidentally made.

And in a heartbeat the mind's eye transforms the Sistahs into proud and fiery Italian heroines, statuesque of stance and flashing of glance, raven of lock, pneumatic of bosom, and altogether quite unrecognisable in every way. Reader, I give you the Bronti Sisters: Carlotta, Emilia and Anna.

Literary history will have to be rewritten.

16 comments:

  1. shy, retiring, tiny, slender, mouse-coloured Irish/Cornish hybrids from Britain's remote and mysterious Deep and Wuthering North

    you, er, don't know many Celts, then? Or Northerners?

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  2. BK, I'm a quarter Cornish, a quarter Scots and an eighth Irish meself. The descriptions of the Sistahs as shy, tiny and mouse-coloured (though all three could be stern, ferocious and impassioned in private) come from people who knew them, as quoted in the several standard biographies, plus the handful of paintings and photographs, and the descriptions in Mrs Gaskell's classic biography of Charlotte.

    &D -- heh.

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  3. That makes you just over half mental bugger then.

    Figures.

    Sorry, just teasing. It made Oi larf, the incongruity of your juxtapositioning.

    (Quarter Scots, eighth Irish, a little bit Cornish, all mongrel and totally barking)

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  4. Right.

    SAW

    WB: azbopwh. Something to do with non-judicial restraining orders.

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  5. Glad you liked my discovery. What can I say? all in a day's work...

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  6. Did you know Jane Eyre is cited as an emo prototype?
    Tho' I suspect Emily was more of a Goth.
    Lucy Sussex

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  7. Dear Brontes,
    Is it still easier to get published if you write under a male moniker or is the playing field level now?

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  8. Following a discussion elsewhere on the intawebs, I have — for once — a serious question.

    Did the sisters write what they wanted, how the mood took them perhaps, or did they tailor their writing for a (specific) audience or market?

    In other words, were they writing to please themselves?

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  9. Do the sisters have an opinion about the use of parentheses in prose? (I usually call them brackets, but let's be precise.)
    For example, I recently encountered an excellent post with a four-paragraph aside in parenthesis, which itself contained embedded parentheses. I spent some time searching for the closing "bracket".
    Might there be a better way to identify an extensive aside?

    Peter

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  10. Would any of the Bronty Birds be able to set me straight?

    I was re-reading Peter Temple last week or so. White Dog, a Jack Irish Thriller, and Broken Shore the latest one wot won the prize.

    White Dog, and all the Jack Irish ones, are written first person. Broken Shore third person.

    I was wondering if first person throws the gears towards the light hearted a bit and third person pulls it toward a darker feel.

    Maloney and Whelan are first person and comedic. Dave Robincheaux dark and not first person. Wallander not first person.

    I have done any sort of scientific book count but I was wondering.

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  11. Sorry. I'll read that again. Obviously it should read "I have NOT done any scientific study...."

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  12. A further question for the sisters: Reviewee's etiquette. If your book is reviewed in a blog, should you comment? Only if it's a good review? Is it OK to say 'I'm so glad you spotted my subtle use of metaphor in chapter 5'? If you meet a (kind) reviewer at a festival, is it OK to say, 'Thanks for your intelligent and insightful analysis of my book. Can I buy you a drink?' If said review is unfavourable, should you still introduce yourself, buy the drink and thank the reviewer for spelling your name correctly? Do the same rules apply for newspaper reviewers, who often seem to be novelists themselves? Or, like Basil Fawlty and The War, should reviews never be mentioned?

    ReplyDelete