![]() ![]() We hear so much today about spin-doctoring and media management. It was, in fact, the result of a biographer’s calculated attempt to turn the public’s attention away from the sisters’ novels. If James had been in the business of blame, he would have realized that this “beguiled infatuation” did not occur by accident. ever achieved, on a literary question, by our wonderful public.” Somehow, the Brontes’ lonely existence and romantic early deaths had become a far more potent “story” than “Jane Eyre” or “Wuthering Heights.” Public obsession with Charlotte and Emily had, he felt, “elbowed out” understanding of their books, causing “the most complete intellectual muddle. This was something that worried Henry James, writing in 1904 on the Bronte sisters. ![]() An obsession with writers’ lives - perhaps particularly with female writers’ lives - seems inevitably to overwhelm their literary reputations. Similarly, every filmgoer and memoir addict now knows about Iris Murdoch’s Alzheimer’s, but hardly anyone will confess to having read her novels. Although critics were engaged by the popular retelling of Sylvia Plath’s tragic story, they seemed compelled to deride her poetry as adolescent and overrated. The response to the film “Sylvia,” recently out in Britain, was marked by some extraordinary invective. ![]()
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