BLOG POSTS

Emily, a film loosely based on Emily Brontë’s life, has hit the screens. Sally Minogue finds herself at odds with the rave reviews. As soon as I had seen the film Emily, I knew what the first sentence of this blog was going to be: ‘Emily is pure codswallop’. But me no buts. But …… Read More

Agnes Grey was Anne’s Brontë’s first novel, written at the time when her sister Emily was working on Wuthering Heights and sister Charlotte on The Professor. David Stuart Davies takes up the story. ‘The statistics touching lunatic asylums give a frightful proportion of governesses in the list of the insane.’ – Fraser’s literary magazine, 1844… Read More

How might a different marriage have impacted on D.H. Lawrence’s writing career? David Ellis considers a literary counterfactual. There are some historians who are inclined to ask `what if’ questions: what if the Spanish Armada had managed to land on these shores, or our air force had lost the Battle of Britain?  These speculations are… Read More

The story of Robinson Crusoe is familiar to us in many forms; here Sally Minogue re-evaluates Daniel Defoe’s novel some 300 years after it was first published. I touched briefly on Robinson Crusoe (1719) in my final ‘Empire’ blog as an example of a novel whose depiction of power relations received a countering fictional response in… Read More