Rumpus Exclusive: “Neither Wicked Witch nor Fairy Godmother”
[W]hat was going wrong? Why were our stories not being written or published?
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...more“Ultimately, this is who I am. I can only write honestly, and from where I live.”
...more“[I]t was thrilling to try to push up against genre and density of language and see what strange hybrids emerged.”
...moreTerry H. Watkins shares a list of books to celebrate her novel, DARLING GIRL.
...moreBe stunned by Kleinzahler’s poetry in the far ports of your body.
...moreWe here at The Rumpus matriarchy are celebrating all of our feminist “mothers” this Mother’s Day!
...morePerhaps it’s more productive then to think about Rebecca’s craziness as a source of sanity in a crazy world in which women are routinely disregarded.
...moreIn between book launch events, Miranda Pennington found time to discuss her bibliomemoir and more.
...moreSociety is falling apart, the daily news seems to say. Living in interesting times, it is all too easy to fear that our work is meaningless.
...moreMembers of the Brontë Society, which maintains the historical Bronte homestead in Haworth, England, “seem to have split into two factions, the ‘modernisers’ and the ‘conservatives,’ who are now battling for the society’s soul.” A recent meeting involved much shouting, booing, and an (unsuccessful) attempt to exclude a journalist. All of this may be getting the society […]
...moreFor Electric Literature, Selin Gökcesu shares her experience rereading Jane Eyre. Though she had loved the novel in childhood, Gökcesu’s MFA experience and her “selective” adult perspective “eroded” her interest in the novel: At thirty-eight, what I perceived as Brontë’s moral standpoint rubbed me the wrong way. Nowadays, to enjoy a book, not only do […]
...moreIn the wake of Jane Eyre’s 200th birthday and Claire Vaye Watkins’s essay “On Pandering,” Bridget Read looks at the proto-feminism in Jane Eyre as eventually improved upon in the postcolonial update Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (now celebrating its 50th birthday).
...moreLaura June writes for Pictorial at Jezebel on the epistolary life of Charlotte Bronte. June covers Bronte’s later years, showing that the significant portion of what we know about Charlotte Bronte comes from her correspondence with her best friend, Ellen Nussey, and her former employer/love of her life, Constantin Héger.
...moreThe refusal of such a woman, who lived in such a time, to be silent created a new mold for the self… Karen Swallow Prior, writing for the Atlantic, shares her essay on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and its roots in the Protestant Reformation that contributed to the Western idea of the self—and so, inevitably, […]
...moreLong since buried and canonized, Charlotte Brontë is now subject to every writer’s worst nightmare. A poem and prose piece penned by a teenaged Brontë have recently been discovered between the pages of a book that belonged to the Victorian author’s mother. The Brontë Society will acquire the previously unpublished works within the next few […]
...moreIt’s no surprise from how the Bronte sisters wrote about school in their novels that their school reports would be less than exemplary. Still, to read Charlotte Bronte’s school report that describes her as an indifferent writer who knows little of grammar is pretty hilarious.
...moreBefore the Brontë sisters wrote their masterpieces, they and their brother created tiny little books. The creative children invented fantasy worlds, wrote stories, and then set about putting together the petite, one inch by two inch books. Twenty of the pint sized books survived and now nine are digitally available from Harvard’s Weissman Preservation Center. […]
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