#literary

Reading Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë after Jane Eyre is a curious experience. The subject of the biography is recognisably the same person who wrote the novel, but the effect of the two books is utterly different. The biography is indeed depressing and painful reading. It captures better, I believe, than any any subsequent biography the introverted and puritan pessimist side of Charlotte Brontë, and conveys the real dreariness of the world of privation, critical discouragement and limited opportunity that so often made her complain in her letters that she felt marked out for suffering. Jane Eyre, on the other hand, is exhilarating reading, partly because the reader, far from simply pitying the heroine, is struck by her resilience, and partly because the novel achieves such an imaginative transmutation of the drab. Unlike that of Jane Austen's Fanny Price or Dickens's Arthur Clennam or John Harmon, Jane Eyre's response to suffering is never less than energetic. The reader is torn between exasperation at the way she mistakes her resentments and prejudices for fair moral judgements, and admiration at the way she fights back. Matthew Arnold, seeking 'sweetness and light' was repelled by the 'hunger, rebellion and rage' that he identified as the keynotes of the novel. One can see why, and yet feel that these have a more positive effect than his phrase allows. The heroine is trying to hold on to her sense of self in a world that gives it little encouragement, and the novel does put up a persuasive case for her arrogance and pugnacity as the healthier alternatives to patience and resignation. That the book has created a world in which the golden mean seems such a feeble solution is both its eccentricity and its strength. ↗

— Ian Gregor

#experience

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#writing-craft #business

It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity. ↗

— Ferdinand Christian Baur

#activity #circumstances #general #his #ideas

The greater the conceptual significance of a literary product, the more it should be assumed that it is based on an idea that determines the whole, and that the deeper consciousness of the time to which it belongs is reflected in it. ↗

— Ferdinand Christian Baur

#based #belongs #conceptual #consciousness #deeper

My literary success meant nothing to me. ↗

— Taylor Caldwell

#me #meant #nothing #success

That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world. ↗

— J. M. Coetzee

#always #aspects #clamour #competence #fame

Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection. ↗

— Joseph Brodsky

#art

The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work. ↗

— Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

#botany #chemistry #course #decisive #determining

It's too bad for us 'literary' enthusiasts, but it's the truth nevertheless - pictures tell any story more effectively than words. ↗

— William Moulton Marston

#bad #effectively #enthusiasts #literary #more

Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten. ↗

— Chinua Achebe

#african #african-authors #african-literature #literary-fiction #literary-quotes