Jane Eyre is April's Reading group book

Edit The Guardian 05 Apr 2016
Charlotte Brontë’s much-loved, much-hated masterpiece should generate some fascinating debate. Following last week’s vote, I have to admit some relief in announcing that Jane Eyre has trounced Don Quixote ... It’s a book that has always been divisive ... Her ambivalent verdict ... Jean Rhys spent decades battling her memory, for instance, composing The Wide Sargasso Sea as an answer to the injustice she saw in Jane Eyre ... Be nice to her, too ... ....

Hamlet, The Divine Comedy, and 3 other pieces of classic literature that are also fan fiction

Edit Vox 05 Apr 2016
Under US copyright law, it is illegal to profit from someone else’s intellectual property. This means you cannot write a story using someone else’s characters or setting or plot and sell it, unless you are writing an officially licensed tie-in novel or you’ve renamed the characters and changed them just enough to claim plausible deniability ... "My characters are my children," says George R.R ... I mean. ... 5) Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys ... ....

Roderick Graham obituary

Edit The Guardian 28 Mar 2016
My husband, Roderick Graham, who has died aged 81, was an award-winning television drama producer and director ... Roderick was born in Edinburgh to Alec, a photographer, and May (nee McCormack) ... He also wrote several radio plays, including Melford’s Axe (1988), about the man who beheaded Charles I, Trumpets and Foie Gras (1993), about the famous cleric Sydney Smith, and Good Morning Midnight (1995), an adaptation of the Jean Rhys book ... ....

Why those subversive Brontë sisters still hypnotise us

Edit The Guardian 27 Mar 2016
The bicentenary of Charlotte’s birth next month has produced a slew of events that highlight the sisters’ appeal to all ages ... Related ... Twitter ... Daphne du Maurier was so obsessed that she paid homage twice – to Jane Eyre with the sharp-edged and haunting Rebecca and to Wuthering Heights with the wild menace of Jamaica Inn – and writers from Jean Rhys and Muriel Spark to Emma Tennant and Fay Weldon have reimagined their lives and work ... ....

Why you're on the write path if you need to battle the bottle

Edit Belfast Telegraph 04 Jan 2016
Hands up anyone who's quitting alcohol for the month of January? Oh, yes, I can see there are quite a few. It's a fashionable practice among the young crowd - post-Christmas is the new Advent, you might say. Give the liver a month's rest. And it's proof you aren't an alcoholic ... So you can't win ... (Other women writers with a liquor problem, according to Graham, included Jean Rhys, Patricia Highsmith, Marguerite Duras and Elizabeth Bishop) ... ....

Books in 2016: a literary calendar

Edit The Guardian 01 Jan 2016
West of Eden by Jean Stein (Jonathan Cape) An august literary journalist and author of a well-known book about Andy Warhol’s muse Edie Sedgwick, Stein has compiled an oral history of Hollywood, from her interviews with Lauren Bacall, Joan Didion, Dennis Hopper, Arthur Miller, Stephen Sondheim and others ... The 50th anniversary of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a postcolonial classic that transports Jane Eyre to a Caribbean island....

The Siege Of Krishnapur by JG Farrell – imperial folly comes fatally undone

Edit The Guardian 16 Dec 2015
Intolerable heat, appalling insects and fraying colonial illusions come together in a surprisingly hilarious novel I want everyone to read. A few days ago, I was sitting in a cafe reading a book when a man came up to me, looking vaguely embarrassed, but nonetheless determined. “I’ve never done this before,” he said. “But I have to tell you ... Related ... I wouldn’t want to start a scrap with Hemingway, Joyce, Jean Rhys and everyone else ... ....

Diana Athill: Writing is like a sort of therapy for me

Edit Belfast Telegraph 12 Dec 2015
As she lay recovering from a miscarriage that nearly killed her, a sudden warmth spread through Diana Athill's body ... A highly successful editor at André Deutsch, whose authors included Jean Rhys and V.S ... Over 50 years she has performed an emotional striptease, revealing private passions with stark honesty and humour - Jean Rhys once told her there was no point in writing unless she was absolutely honest about her experiences....

The best British novel, according to 82 foreign book critics

Edit The Independent 08 Dec 2015
It’s interesting to know what Brits consider the Great British Novel, but perhaps more fascinating to learn what those outside of Britain deem our finest literary work. In pursuit of this, the BBC polled 82 book critics from around the world - anywhere except the UK. Their favourite? Middlemarch by George Eliot ... 100 ... 99 ... 98 ... 97 ... 96 ... 95 ... 94 ... 93 ... 92 ... 91 ... 90 ... 89 ... The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark, 1961) ... Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966) ... 9....

The best British novel of all time: have international critics found it?

Edit The Guardian 08 Dec 2015
Middlemarch is No 1, according to a sometimes surprising top 100 ranking by books writers from around the world – excluding the UK. Could this be the definitive verdict? ... The list was put together for BBC Culture by Jane Ciabattari, who polled 81 book critics from all around the world, excluding the UK ... Two more Dickens titles feature in the top 10 ... The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark, 1961) ... Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966) ... 9....

Reimagined story reaches great heights

Edit Otago Daily Times 06 Dec 2015
I approached Nelly Dean, United States author Alison Case's reimagining of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights - one of my all-time favourite books - with trepidation ... (Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, her response to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, is one of the notable exceptions.). Case has succeeded where many have failed ... Unlike the original, however, Heathcliff and Cathy are relegated to the background, and Nelly takes centre stage ... ....

Diana Athill: How writing has been her therapy through miscarriage and not marrying

Edit The Independent 29 Nov 2015
A highly successful editor at André Deutsch whose authors included Jean Rhys and V S Naipaul, she never married, but instead conducted a series of affairs with men, some married, many of them black, including an eight-year love affair ......

Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Matter by Diana Athill review – lessons from old age

Edit The Guardian 26 Nov 2015
Avoid romanticism and possessiveness. a clear-eyed view from the ‘high plateau’ ... “In or out?” he would ask ... She was Jean Rhys’s publisher, of course; it’s interesting that she responded so acutely to Rhys’s quite opposite personality – fatalistic and fearful, drowning in doubt. If Athill suppresses the angsts, Rhys dissembled her force under performances of weakness ... Athill statuesque and commanding, Rhys petite and flinching ... ....
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