Reviews for Glimpses of Authors

The average rating for Glimpses of Authors based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-08-03 00:00:00 Amy Carter This book is one that will resonate with a very specific type of reader. It is necessary to have read her works, including the juvenilia, to understand many of the references. You have to be deeply interested in Brontë's life to tackle it. Not a few Goodreaders have been put off by the lengthy descriptions of Yorkshire life that take up the first 50 pages. The thin information about Brontë contained in the front of many editions of her novels is quite startling when you examine the timeline. It told me almost nothing, yet shocked me. Brontë's life was full of pain and suffering of a type that we cannot even conceive of today. She was hemmed in by her gender. Her life was full of frustration, sacrifice, duty, death, neglect and illness. Through it all she retained her faith and strength, never raising her fist or voice in anger. Her death was the result of a pregnancy she should have never considered in her frail condition, which is the most frustrating thing of all. She was in her prime, experiencing the fullness of married life and ready at last to appreciate the bloom of her genius when she died. Gaskell was Brontë's friend; some criticism has been made of this biography because of that fact. Gaskell herself admits that she wishes to show her friend in her best light. It is all we can wish for after our own death, I suppose. One more thing - I hope you aren't reading the North Books edition I read. There are tons of typos. Whoever edited this book needs to grab a freaking brain. Get a better version if you can!

Review # 2 was written on 2009-08-25 00:00:00 Paul Niermann Mrs. Gaskell continues to serve overwritten Victorian treacle dedicated to the memory of Charlotte Brontë in this second volume. The introduction by Alan Shelston in the 1975 edition points out Mrs. Gaskell's omissions and deletions (some due to Charlotte's main correspondent, Ellen Nussey), and her anxiety to please both Charlotte's father Patrick, and her husband Arthur Nicholls. This volume covers the Brontë sisters' literary success and then the quickly following deaths of Branwell, Emily, and Anne within nine months' time. Charlotte recovers after a period of grief and depression, and goes on to exchange letters and visits with the literary people of the day, including Thackeray, whom she counts as the greatest living author of her time. Despite her London visits, and her widening circle of acquaintance, she persists in an almost pathological shyness and a dread of meeting new people. The introduction claims that Mrs. Gaskell shaped the Life of Charlotte Brontë to her own morbid and moral purposes, and painted Charlotte's life as bleaker than it actually was. But even without her sentimentalizing, the bare facts of Charlotte Brontë's life are bleak enough. The saddest fact is the needlessness of her own death, the result of a pregnancy which seemed ill-advised given Charlotte's weak constitution and the high maternal mortality rate of the day. Still, it's consistent with the prevailing religiously-tinged fatalism of the time, as well as Charlotte's self-abnegating character as she is portrayed in the Life.