Category Novels

Who was Emily Jane Bronte?

English novelist, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights was the author’s first and last novel. It is widely considered by many as one of the most incredible pieces of imaginative literature in the English canon. Let’s find out what makes it a classic.

About the author

Emily Jane Bronte was born on July 30, 1818, in Thornton, Yorkshire, England. She was the fifth of six children, and the fourth daughter of Patrick Bronte and Marie Branwell. Her father was a remarkable man and a minister of the Anglican church. The author lost her mother at the tender age of three. This was the first great loss the family had to come to terms with. In 1825, Emily was sent to join her sisters Maria, Elizabeth, and Charlotte at school. Following the tuberculosis epidemic at the institution that claimed the life of her two elder sisters, Emily and Charlotte returned home. This incident is also mentioned in her sister Charlotte’s magnum opus Jane Eyre. Emily spent the next 10 years of her life at home, where she played, read extensively, and wrote together with her siblings in an inventive creative workshop. During one of such playful workshops, the four participated in fictional world-making, which resulted in Charlotte and their brother Branwell teaming together to create a fictional land called Angria, and Emily with her sister Anne inventing the fictional Pacific Island of Gondol.

Emily was a meticulous reader. Charlotte in her Preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights elucidated that her sister “always wrote from the impulse of nature”. However, Professor Karen O’Brien from the University of Oxford says that Emily Bronte’s lone novel is a testament to her extensive reading and understanding of the works of English poets and authors such as Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, and Lord Byron. The first edition of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights was written under the pseudonym Ellis Bell and published in 1847.

Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is a powerful and complex story of love, obsession, and revenge over two generations. It is narrated by housekeeper Nelly Dean and framed from the perspective of a visiting outsider Mr. Lockwood. This narrative revolves around an orphan named Heathcliff, who is taken in by Mr. Earnshaw and brought to live in Wuthering Heights. The story explores the close-knit bond he forms with his patron’s daughter Catherine.

What makes it a classic?

A treatise on women Social conventions were extremely important at the time when Bronte wrote this novel. Italian writer and journalist Italo Calvino, in his book The Uses of Literature, said. “A classic is a classic book because it had never finished what it had to say”, and Wuthering Heights stands true to this statement. One might think of it as just a love story. Well yes, but it’s also a story of ghosts, obsession, and haunting. Where Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters predecessor, wrote about the purpose of romance and how it was intangibly linked to or ended in marriage, Emily Bronte’s sole novel is a treatise on women and tries to explore what is important to her gender other than the pursuit of marriage.

Making a statement

Through Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte changed what was possible and acceptable for women to write, and how women and men can be portrayed in fiction. Her characters challenged the social expectation that one’s emotions and how they are expressed or dealt with must be dictated by an individual’s gender. It advocated that all the things.

that we as people feel are not so different just because one is a man or a woman. It broke away from the tradition that dictated that women must only write about acceptable things (such as love and marriage) and elements of the domestic sphere. It objected to the idea that men (especially heroes) are not capable of emoting grief and passion or being allowed to display any negative emotions such as vengeance. Wuthering Heights is not a moralising novel and calls the hypocrisy of the society that divides people on the basis of gender, turns a blind eye to the violence it inflicts in the name of religion, set unrealistic moral expectations, and is more concerned with respectability, than working towards creating an equal society.

Emily Bronte’s exceptional imagination in Wuthering Heights, says English author Kate Mosse, “makes it clear that a woman who is an artist and a man who is an artist have the same mission-to write what we think is true and to write what we think matters, this makes her sole novel one for the ages.”

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What does Jane Austen say in her novel Emma?

English author Jane Austen’s novels employ wit and humour to decipher the sheltered lives of the upper classes in rural England. Her novel Emma explores the baffling collision of emotions and etiquette. Let us revisit this story and see what makes it a classic.

About the author

Jane Austen was born December 16, 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, England. She was the second daughter and seventh child of Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Leigh Austen. Her father was a rector and a scholar who encouraged and inculcated a love for learning in his children. The authors mother was a woman of quick wit, popular for her impromptu stories in her circles. Austen shared a special bond with her elder sister Cassandra, who was her lifelong companion as neither of them married. She was mostly homeschooled by her father and brothers due to the poor financial condition of the family. However, as an avid reader, she grew up perusing classics by William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, David Hume, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Jane Austen began writing at a very young age. She finished early drafts of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice in the late 1790s. Her novels shed light on distinct expectations of a woman’s proper role in society and studied the frustrations of her gender, in a society that saw no use for their talents.

Long considered the English authors most perfectly executed novel, Emma is the only one of her books that is named after its heroine. Published in 1815, this titular protagonist is the first and the only one of Jane Austen’s heroines who has something close to power. Emma Woodhouse is generous, smart, rich and in the prime of her youth. She had lost her mother at a very tender her sister is married off, and her father is completely dependent on her. So, she age, runs the household and has the liberty to act according to her will. The novel, many critics argue, is Austen’s homage to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and chronicles Emma’s near-disastrous meddling in the lives of others. Austen famously said this about her heroine Emma Woodhouse “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like”.

The mould of a heroine

What is a heroine? All six of Jane Austen’s novels teasingly ask this question. The formulation of a typical heroine of the 19th Century as described by Austen was “Heroine, a faultless character herself – perfectly good, with much tenderness and sentiment, and not the least Wit”. Heroines that dominated the English novel before and in Austen’s time had to be morally impeccable. Breaking away from the trope of the pious heroine, Austen, through her rebellious, mischievous, and flawed female protagonists, broke the unrealistic societal expectations that forced women to lead their lives as pictures of perfection.

The Artistry

One thing about Jane Austen’s writing style that sets her apart from her contemporaries is her way of narrating the story through the consciousness of the characters. Modern novelists call it free-indirect speech. Although Austen didn’t invent this technique, according to Austen scholar Juliette Wells, “she’s certainly the one who took it the farthest and established its primacy, its necessariness.”

According to English critic John Mullon, the most sophisticated use of this technique can be observed in Emma, where most of the novel is seen through the eyes of a heroine who is mostly wrong about everything. So while reading it one is sharing her delusions and misjudgement.

This technique makes us as readers fall in love with Austen’s characters for their humanity and the capacity to make mistakes and learn from them.

Janet Todd, Professor Emerita from the University of Cambridge, said, “Emma is the culmination of her career and it is the cleverest, the most subtle and the one in which she thinks about her artistry as well as putting artistry into the book…. think it is her masterpiece.”

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Bond with nature

In her debut children’s novel “Searching for the Songbird”, anthropologist Ravina Aggarwal pens a story about the curiosities of children, of young friendships, and of finding harmony with nature. The book details the exploits of Johnny Raut and his friends as they set out to find Kastura, the missing ‘songbird’ and the prime suspect in a burglary in the Himalayan foothills. In this interview, the author speaks about her new book and why it’s important for children to develop an intimacy with the songs and sounds of their environment. Excerpts….

What prompted the decision to write a children’s book?

My love for books came through mysteries. As a child, the imagined world of clues and detection fascinated me. I had grown up imbibing the experiences of children in England through the works of English authors. The characters in these stories eat scones, live in cottages, and form secret societies in garden sheds. But growing up in India, in Mumbai, that wasn’t quite my experience. So I wanted to write a mystery that is reflective of our Indian context.

“Searching for the Songbird” is set in the foothills of the Himalayas in Dehradun. Why did you choose this setting for your book?

My quest has always been to convey the geography and the experiences of the Himalayan region, which I have loved and studied through various genres of writing. The Himalayas are not static mountains. They are undergoing a lot of change and turmoil. I think cities such as Dehradun capture the complexities of balancing the environment with a desire for growth.

When Johnny arrives in Dehradun, he struggles to deal with his new surroundings as he knows almost nothing about the mountains. Like Johnny, children growing up in urban areas are often unaware about their local flora and fauna. Do you think it is necessary for children to interact with nature?

It is absolutely essential for the children of this generation, who are growing up with the looming cloud of climate change, to bond with nature. Children today are living with the negative consequences of unbridled human growth, and so it is important that our parenting and education systems reflect a relationship with nature. There has to be a curricular shift, along with experiential learning, creating opportunities for children to be with nature. We also need to think of exposing children to alternative, more sustainable lifestyles.

From the crimson sunbird to the slaty headed parakeet and the Indian paradise flycatcher, why are birds central to the story?

When you are in Dehradun, you can’t help but notice different varieties of birds. The book is about listening to the songs and the sounds of the mountain; the birds are part of that soundscape. Unfortunately, we are at a time when there’s a lot of human-wildlife conflict because natural habitats are disappearing.

Kastura, the missing ‘songbird’ is portrayed as a caste musician and the book highlights caste discrimination prevalent in India. Could you elaborate how difficult it was to weave such a complicated topic into a children’s book?

For urban kids, understanding caste- in particular, the prejudices or stigmas that people in their peer group might be enduring- is important. In modern India, you need to know about caste and engage with its history. And how do children grapple with that? I think it’s through social relationships. The protagonist Johnny, although he is from Mumbai and is living in the mountains, has to start understanding these differences to form social bonds and solve the mystery.

After solving the mystery of the missing ‘songbird’, Johnny and his friends form the Himalayan Catchers Society. Can we expect more adventures from them?

Certainly! I intended this book to be part of a series and I hope to write the second part soon.

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Why is Frankenstein novel still relevant more than 200 years after it was written?

More than 200 years after its first publication, English author Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus is still discussed and lauded for its cultural and scientific impact on our world. Let us find out why.

About the author

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in London. England on August 30, 1797. Her father was an author named William Godwin and her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the most popular early feminists, who wrote the influential book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and championed the cause of women’s education and equal rights. She, sadly, passed away 11 days after giving birth to Mary.

This devastating event heavily influenced Mary Shelley’s writing. Many critics even argue that a biological reading of her magnum opus Frankenstein: or. The Modem Prometheus can help one look at it as a story of a monstrous or disastrous birth. Mary first met P.B. Shelley, her future husband and one of the greatest lyric poets of the age, when she was 14. The poet had come to consult her father after being thrown out of Oxford for writing the essay. The Necessity of Atheism.

The contest and the dream

While on vacation in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1816 with her husband, her stepsister Claire Clairemont, English poet Lord Byron and his doctor, 18-year-old Mary wrote the story of Victor Frankenstein in a friendly novel writing competition that ensued among her peers. Her novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, was first in 1818 anonymously in London.

In the introduction of the 1831 edition of the novel, the author explained that she wanted to write a story that would “speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror. But what really helped her create a narrative around this idea was a conversation she overheard between her husband and Lord Byron, on the new developments in electricity and whether it can possibly be used to bring the dead back to life. That night she had a waking dream of, “a pale student” kneeling next to the monster he had put together.

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Recognised as one of the greatest gothic novels, this book traces Italian Swiss scientist Victor Frankenstein’s futile quest to impart and sustain life using scientific means. Plagued by unbridled curiosity, he creates this monster part by part from different corpses and electrifies it into a conscious being. Upon completing the experiment, however, Frankenstein, appalled by his creation, abandons it and flees. Rejected by his creator, the nameless monster wanders into the wilderness, where he takes shelter and eventually learns to read and write. The plot of this story is the chilling chase between the creator and his creation.

What makes it a classic?

The Modern Prometheus

In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a Titan god of fire. He is best known as the ethereal figure who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind and was sentenced to eternal torment by Zeus for this act of disobedience. The authors mention of this figure in the subtitle alludes to her reimagining of what a modern and scientific Prometheus would be like. Through the character of Victor Frankenstein, she explores the jarring and tragic consequences of humans trying to play god.

Perils of being an irresponsible parent

The endurance of Frankenstein can also be attributed to its emphasis on the perils of being an irresponsible parent. A child’s behaviour is directly related to the quality of parenting he or she has received. This justifies why Frankenstein’s monster is looking for his creator to wreak his revenge for the neglect he feels that he has experienced.

“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould me Man, did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me?”

Paradise Lost by John Milton Mary Shelley’s choice to include these lines spoken by Adam in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, in her novel’s epigraph helps promote the idea of scientific responsibility. The transformation of the creature from a benevolent being to a murderous fiend because of his master’s rejection and failure to take any responsibility can be understood, as Mary Shelley’s warning against the single-minded pursuit of science without an accompanying concern about morality. The tension between Frankenstein and his creation represents the struggles among a parent and child, science, and morality. This story acts as a warning to treat all living things with respect.

Corruption of nature

Romanticism was a movement in 18th-Century literature that promoted the idea of purity in art, and inspiration in nature. It surfaced as a response to spreading industrialisation and scientific developments. Mary’s novel as a text from this period acts as a cautionary tale that narrates the dangerous consequences of the corruption of nature in the quest for glory.

More than 200 years after its publication, Frankenstein’s monster lives on in our collective consciousness as a disfigured mirror of the natural cycle of life and as a warming to not tamper with the laws of nature.

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Who was the Bram Stoker?

Bram Stoker, byname of Abraham Stoker, (born November 8, 1847, Clontarf, County Dublin, Ireland—died April 20, 1912, London, England), Irish writer. Bram Stoker who is best known for the Gothic horror novel “Dracula” was born in Dubin, Ireland, in November. His early years were rife with personal struggles for he was an invalid till the age of 7. He could not stand or walk. But even those difficult times had a profound creative effect on Stoker. “I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later  years.” Stoker would write later.

After making a full recovery. he became an athlete and football player in school. He also earned a degree in mathematics from Trinity College, Dubin.

A passion for theatre

Even as he was in civil service at Dublin Castle in 1876, he doubled as a drama critic for the Dublin Evening Mail. Though an unpaid job, it quenched his passion for theatre. Around this time that he acquainted himself with English actor Henry Irving. Stoker was Irving’s manager for about 27 years until the actor’s death.

Foray into the literary world

It was in 1879 that Stoker published his first book. Titled “The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland,” it was a handbook in legal administration.

He later turned to writing fiction and published his first novel, “The Snake’s Pass,” a romantic thriller. In 1897 came his masterstroke – “Dracula.”

An epistolary novel – a novel written as a collection of diary entries, telegrams, and letters from the characters – “Dracula” was celebrated and led to a lot of subcultures. The book went through a multitude of incarnations, being adapted for movies, television series, theatre, books and so on.

“Dracula”

The Gothic novel starts off with a young lawyer Jonathan Harker on his journey to Transylvania. His destination – Castle Dracula where he is set to meet Count Dracula, a client of his firm, to finalise a property transaction.

The story features a Transylvanian vampire who survives by feeding on the blood of innocent people. Eventually, after many exploits, Dracula is destroyed.

During the course of his literary career, Stoker wrote a number of short stories and 12 novels, including “The Mystery of the Sea” (1902), “The Jewel of Seven Stars” (1903), and ‘The Lady of the Shroud” (1909).

Personal life

Stoker married actress Florence Balcombe and the couple had their only son Noel in 1879. The final years were difficult, for Stoker had to grapple with financial struggles and deteriorating health. He suffered a number of strokes and renal impairment. Stoker passed away in April 1912.

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WHAT IS AGATHA CHRISTIE FAMOUS FOR?

Dame agatha mary clarissa christie, lady mallowan, dbe (née miller; 15 september 1890 – 12 january 1976) was an english writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives hercule poirot and miss marple.

A crime, a host of suspects, twists and turns, and an unexpected ending, all make this genre a delight for the reader. It’s a genre made popular by British author Agatha Christie

Let me explain how I got introduced to mystery novels, a popular genre.

Some of us in our neighbourhood usually visit each other’s homes whenever we are free. The other day when I went to one of my friends place, he was in his ‘home’ library, which he calls the mini library. There was a good collection of books, and I ran my eyes over them devouringly and pulled out a book at random. The cover page had an attractive design – a huge mansion surrounded by water and had the usual details such as the name of the author and the title – Agatha Christie, “And Then There Were None” – and what caught my attention was – The Queen of Mystery’.

I asked my friend, “Why is the author called The Queen of Mystery?” He thought for a while, but unable to respond, called out his sister. When she came in, I repeated the question.

She started off mentioning that anyone interested in mystery novels would have certainly read at least one of hers as Agatha Christie had written 66 of them. All her novels had the structure of a murder / crime being committed and a detective investigating and unravelling the truth at the end. Although the author was not the one who invented this genre, no one had written as much as she had and popularised it, and for that reason she was described as The Queen of Mystery’. It was a convincing answer to me.

An important fact about Agatha Christie, she added, was that she was the best-selling author as her books sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in translation; this was next only to the sale of The Bible, a rare feat, in fact.

She also told us that she liked the mystery novels very much, which, in a way, intrigued me. So, I asked her why she liked them and how they were different from other types of novels.

My friend’s sister gave an interesting response to my question. She elaborated that all mystery novels narrate a gripping story about a crime and as readers, we all get involved in the investigation, but till the end, we wouldn’t be able to identify the criminal, though we would be led to suspect many of the characters. It was these elements of mystery or the suspense that differentiated them from other kinds of novels, which mostly narrate straightforward stories. “The unexpected twists and turns in the mystery novels further add to our delight,” she added.

She went on to tell us that she had basically been a slow reader but after starting on the mystery novels she has gained speed. Even the textbooks, she could read faster and understand them better now. When she stopped, I pointed out to her that the title was rather unusual, and enquired why the novelist had given such a title.

The title was, in fact, an adaptation from the nursery rhyme “Ten Little Soldier Boys Went Out to Dine”; and it was printed at the beginning of the book. She explained, “You would realise as you read the novel that the writer had drawn heavily from the rhyme.”

She also listed other famous mystery novelists, namely, Stephen King, John Grisham, Dan Brown, and so on, who are widely read all over the world. Finally, she prodded us to read this novel as this has been one of the top-selling novels and made into a movie. She also suggested that we watch the movie along with her.

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