Wuthering Heights v Jane Eyre 2: Rock Star or Librarian

Posted on 23/05/2012 by

So, now to the Rock Star of the Bronte novels, according to Guardian journalist Imogen Russell Williams: Wuthering Heights. I’ll talk more about Russell Williams’ contentious claim that Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre ‘divide humanity‘, as well as Virginia Woolf’s characteristically poetic response to the two novels, but first, to Wuthering Heights!

In 1820 Patrick Bronte, an Irish clergyman, moved with his wife, five daughters and son to Haworth, a remote township high in the Yorkshire Pennines – and it was from this wild landscape that his daughter Emily would distil Wuthering Heights, one of the most extraordinary novels in all of English literature. The Bronte parsonage was on the edge of town, flanked by a moorland wilderness. Its desolation was heightened by the tolling of funeral bells and the mason’s chisel cutting gravestones in the churchyard that surrounded the parsonage on three sides. Death was ever-present in Haworth – the average age of death was 25 years, due largely to the town’s dismal sanitary conditions – and within five years of their arrival, the Bronte children had suffered the deaths of their mother and two eldest sisters (aged 11 and 10).

Emily Bronte

The remaining four children, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, were cared for by their mother’s sister, Aunt Branwell. They grew up in relative isolation, creating their own entertainment. From an early age, they invented stories set in an imaginary land, Angria, which they recorded in miniature books in tiny writing so their aunt and father couldn’t read them.

Emily and Anne broke away from the Angrian stories when Emily was about 13, and invented their own fantastic world – Gondal – which was dominated by powerful, capricious women. Emily’s few surviving diary entries show her as much preoccupied with the imaginary world of Gondal as she was by the world around her. In 1845 she wrote:

‘the Gondals still flourish bright as ever I am at present writing a work on the First Wars – Anne has been writing some articles on this and a book by Henry Sophona – We intend sticking firm by the rascals as long as they delight us which I am glad to say they do at present.’

The three Bronte girls rarely walked in the village. As Charlotte’s friend and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell noted, they ‘never faced their kind voluntarily, and always preferred the solitude and freedom of the moors’. Emily was particularly attached to her moorland home, and would sink into melancholy and homesickness when parted from it. Her few absences from Haworth, to study or teach, were brief, mostly cut short. When Emily was six she spent several months at Clergy Daughters’ School; aged 17 she went away to school for three months; in 1838 she became a teacher for six months. Her longest absence from home began in February 1842, when she went to Brussels with Charlotte to study at the Pension Heger. There she studied French, German and advanced piano, and her musical talent was particularly praised by their teacher, Monsieur Heger. When Aunt Branwell died the following October, Emily returned home to Haworth – and there she remained until her death six years later in December 1848, aged 30.

Following the publication at the sisters’ expense of Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell in 1846, Emily sent out the manuscript of her novel Wuthering Heights to publishers. It was accepted and published in December 1847, two months after the publication of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre.

Unlike Charlotte, Emily did not base her novel on the events of her own life, and her vision was intense, focused laser-like on two houses, two families, and the moors, from which small range she spun a whole world. The principal narrator of Wuthering Heights, Mr Lockwood, remarks:

‘I perceive that people in these regions acquire over people in towns the value that a spider in a dungeon does over a spider in a cottage, to their various occupants; and yet the deepened attraction is not entirely owing to the situation of the lookers-on. The do live more in earnest, more in themselves, and less in surface change, and frivolous external things.’

He could be describing Emily’s own way of living – for what she might have lacked in breadth of experience, she made up for in depth.

In the opening pages of Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte raises spectres, Lear’s mad ravings on the moor, salivating dogs, dripping blood and an impassable snow storm, evoking the atmospheric tumult – or ‘wuthering’ – that will haunt the pages of her only novel. One of the most striking features of Bronte’s book is its tortured landscape, which manifests not only as rocks and stunted trees and grey overarching skies, but is alive in its human inhabitants, most notably Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. ‘Tell her what Heathcliff is,’ urges Catherine, ‘- an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone.’

The desolation of the Yorkshire moors is exactly what the world-weary Mr Lockwood is seeking when he rents Thrushcross Grange from Mr Heathcliff as the novel opens. Lockwood notes with pleasure that ‘In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s heaven’; and his heart warms to the withdrawn and suspicious countenance of Heathcliff, his new landlord.

But, despite his desire for isolation, Lockwood persuades Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, to keep him company while he shivers long evenings by the fire. Nelly then relates an extraordinary tale of wild love and hate, a tale of torment that begins with the arrival at Wuthering Heights of a ragged gypsy child named Heathcliff, ‘dark almost as if it came from the devil’.

So powerful is Bronte’s story that the names Catherine and Heathcliff now stand for passionate, demented love – and their fierce obsession remains one of the most disturbing and exhilarating of all literature.

‘Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,’ declares Catherine. They love with a religious fervour, pitched at the extremes of life and death, on the edge of madness. ‘Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!’ cries Heathcliff. ‘Oh God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!’

But it is the corrupt child of this love – Heathcliff’s poisonous hatred nursed over years – that drives Bronte’s novel, his bitter resentment that fills its pages. The relentlessness of Heathcliff’s vengeance born of his love – wrought on Hareton Earnshaw, Catherine Linton, Linton Heathcliff – is chilling, its dark violence almost palpable.

The power of Emily’s creation was felt by her sister Charlotte, who wrote: ‘Whether it is right or advisable to create things like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is.’

While Wuthering Heights, published under the pseudonym ‘Ellis Bell’, did not receive the immediate acclaim of Jane Eyre, contemporary critics found much in it to praise. A reviewer in Atlas from 1848 said of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights respectively: ‘The work of Currer Bell is a great performance; that of Ellis Bell is only a promise, but it is a colossal one.’

Charles Dickens’ friend Wilkie Collins, whose bestselling novels The Woman in White and Moonstone appeared in the 1860s, was a great admirer of Wuthering Heights. Like others after him, including Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), Collins was influenced by the innovative and structurally complex double narrative of Wuthering Heights. Its story, told by two curious bystanders, is an early example of the use of multiple narrators. With the publication of A. Mary F. Robinson’s biography of Emily Bronte in 1883, Emily’s ‘colossal’ talent began to be more widely acclaimed.

There have been at least 14 film versions of Wuthering Heights, including the extraordinary looking 2011 version directed by Andrea Arnold (starring James Howson as Heathcliff and Kaya Scodelario as Catherine), a 1939 film directed by William Wyler (starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon), French and Japanese versions, and an MTV musical. The Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel, who believed that ‘desire is the one true motor of the world’, was haunted all his life by the mad untrammelled love unleashed in Bronte’s novel and captured it in his 1954 adaptation Abismos de Pasion, filmed in Mexico.

The English singer Kate Bush, who shares a birthday with Emily Bronte (30 July), based her hit 1978 song ‘Wuthering Heights‘ on Bronte’s novel, which she wrote under a full moon.

I first read Wuthering Heights at 15 and it immediately became my favourite novel. I’ve read it many times since and I always see something new in it, read it as if for the first time. But I also love Jane Eyre, which is so different – especially in its first person narrative and the way this connects us so intimately with Jane – and yet it too tells an irresistible story of passionate, abiding love.

As for Imogen Russell Williams’ claim that you can’t be BOTH a Jane Eyre AND a Wuthering Heights person – you’re either a Librarian OR a Rock Star – I think she’s wrong. I know lots of people who love both Bronte novels, even if they love one more. I guess I know lots of rocking Librarians and bookish Rock Stars.

So what about Virginia Woolf? Librarian or Rock Star? Stay tuned for my next Jane Eyre v Wuthering Heights post.

Posted in Classics | 5 Comments

‘She doesn’t know, she can’t know, what his fingers are doing with her hair’: Hisham Matar opens the Sydney Writers’ Fest 2012

Posted on 16/05/2012 by

Last night novelist Hisham Matar opened the Sydney Writers’ Festival with a talk on ‘The Distance’. He was mesmerising. When Matar left the stage SWF director Chip Rolley attempted to thank him for his extraordinary words but he (Rolley) was so moved he could barely speak. I think we were all speechless. And undone.

Matar was asked to speak on ‘The Private Moment’. His talk was so hushed, so intimate, it almost seems wrong to write about it, to make it public. But I will attempt to capture some fragments of what he said.

Chip Rolley introduced the festival’s theme: the line between public and private. But what is personal, he asked, in an age when everything’s personal and everything is on facebook?

He told a story about Jaballa Matar, a political dissident and Libyan exile in Egypt who was kidnapped in Cairo in 1990. He has been missing ever since.

‘His son speaks tonight. Hisham Matar is not a political scientist, not a journalist. He’s a novelist. Matar will demonstrate it’s the writer of fiction who can best give the private moment expression.’

Matar said, ‘Libyan writers have been pushed during the last year to engage with language and reality in ways more literal than literary.’

And then he did an extraordinary thing. He spoke as a novelist, a creator of stories. He conjured a small fictional space, a man and a woman lying entwined on the grass. The man is contemplating desire, the conflict between what desire wants (to possess the beloved) and what desire needs (the unattainability of the beloved).

‘She doesn’t know, she can’t know, what his fingers are doing with her hair.’

And from this small fictional space he spoke of worlds.

Between 1928 and 1932 in one way or another the Italian army killed half the population of Libya. The human race seems condemned to recounting the past, condemned to remember. But he remembers his uncle, who spoke of forgetting. ‘Without it we’d go mad.’ He thinks of the first time he became conscious of memory, seated at a piano, and its keys became indistinguishable, infinite.

He thinks of Marcus Aurelius and memory, which records our lives like wax. Or Shostakovich, who kissed his wife and children goodnight then went to sleep on a rug on the floor, by the front door, waiting for Stalin’s men to arrive, waiting to be taken by them without resistance. Shostakovich lying there, ‘like a dog’. His piano nearby.

She said, ‘I have such a beautiful perspective.’ How appropriate that she should say that in Rome. He thinks of the Marcus Aurelius arch in Tripoli, built in 163 AD. How far is Tripoli from Rome?

And of Caravaggio’s David with the head of Goliath in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. David’s face hints at remorse. ‘Perhaps the magnitude of his action had suddenly become clear to him.’ The blade of his sword is close to his groin. The blade and the penis. Maybe nothing ever justifies murder.

What all art does and what only art can do is make us see something in a particular way.

It is questionable to him if he would ever write if he were to lose her. All art is an act of love … no matter how great the darkness writing is always an act of hope. The whole history of art can be read as a gesture of desire – and of hope.

We read to know ourselves, but we also read to remember ourselves. Art makes the world tolerable and tolerant of variety. Perhaps we also need nations, their culture, language, politics, art, to organise our world.

What is the distance between Mussolini and Gaddafi? Between Gaddafi and the present?

The man is Turgenev. The husband of the woman lying beside him is in the house nearby, probably reading the paper.

In 1953 a young Arab novelist Tayeb Salih arrives in London. He’s Sudanese, 24 years old. His time away from home stretched until Feburary 2009, when he died. His body was taken back to Sudan and he was buried in Karmakol near the house he was born in.

Camus in his fiction tells us that the curse of the world is the idealist. Both Mussolini and Gaddafi were idealists. Both were obsessed with the private moment, with invading it.

In Ovid’s letters of exile we see his ‘dark sympathy’ for Augustus, his secret understanding of the man who banished him.

The leader wished to know your thoughts, those you thought before you slept and those you thought while you slept too. Is that desire? What is the distance between love and oppression?

The story of the dream. A man dreamt he assassinated Gaddafi and woke up startled. He told his wife immediately. In other versions of the story he only remembered his dream much later, leisurely, and the dream amused him. He told his wife and two children over dinner. It’s not clear if it was his wife or one of his children who carried the dream out of the house.

The revolutionary men came immediately, it happened so fast, to interrogate the dreamer about his dream. They asked him the names of the other plotters he dreamt of. The dreamer and his three friends were arrested and thrown into prison without trial. Four years later, they were released.

Gaddafi’s war on dreams and writing was effective.

But literature is not a plant you can uproot. It is a vapour, rebellious, wild, searching, never satisfied. It finds opportunity everywhere.

The imagination is a private place like the marital bed, where a writer renews his vows to literature.

Perhaps every book is a letter home. Shostakovich, Turgenev, Christa Wolf, Samuel Beckett, Ovid – all sent their books (or music) home.

To be rooted is perhaps the most essential need of the human soul, in the words of French philosopher Simone Weil.

‘Go, book, greet the dear places with my words: / I’ll walk among them on what ‘feet’ I can. / If, in the crowd, there’s one who’s not forgot me, / if there’s one, perhaps, who asks how I am, / say I’m alive, but deny that I am well: / that I’m even alive is a gift from a god. / Otherwise, be silent – let him who wants more read – / beware of saying by chance what isn’t needed! / The reader, prompted, will soon recall my guilt, / the crowd’s voice make me a common criminal. / Beware of defending me, despite the biting words: a poor case will prove too much for advocacy. / Find someone who sighs about my exile, / and reads your verses with wet eyes, / and silently wishes, unheard by enemies, my punishment lightened by a gentler Caesar. / For myself, I wish whomever it is no ill, / who asks the gods to be kind to suffering: / what he wishes, let that be: the Leader’s anger done, / grant me the right to die in my native country.’

Posted in What's new | 2 Comments

The 6 capitals: the cutting edge of accounting

Posted on 12/05/2012 by

Yes, accounting does have a cutting edge. Yesterday I was part of a round table discussion on the future of accounting organised by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia. It was called ‘Sustainability & accounting’ and the proceedings will be published in the July issue of the Institute’s magazine Charter.

The participants were: Peter Lewis, the Chief Financial Officer of Seven West Media; Michael Bray, the Chairman, Energy & Natural Resources KPMG; Lee White, CEO of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia; and me. Needless to say, I was there mostly to listen and ask questions in the context of my work on the history of accounting for Double Entry.

It was fascinating to be in the company of such expertise. Especially because what seemed to be simmering when I finished the research for my book (in late 2010) is now cooking at lightning speed: the rethinking of corporate accounting in response to the ‘third wave’ of wealth creation.

Michael Bray mentioned a paper which was published in 1992 by senior accountant RK Elliott, of KPMG New York, called ‘The third wave breaks on the shores of accounting‘. Here Elliott argued that with each new wave of wealth creation a new form of accounting is required. Drawing on Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave, he characterised the three ages of wealth creation as the agricultural, the industrial, and the information era. Our accounting systems were designed for the industrial era – first codified by Luca Pacioli in Venice in 1494 and then adapted to factory production in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Elliott argued that these industrial accounting systems cannot account for the new, late 20th and 21st century forms of wealth creation of the information age (characterised by Yann Moulier Boutang as ‘cognitive capitalism‘).

So what new forms of accounting are being proposed? Not surprisingly, ‘sustainability is the new black’ (their words). In accounting terms it’s called ‘integrated reporting’ – which is already being tested in 65 pilot initiatives around the world, including by Microsoft and CocaCola. Integrated reporting broadens the concept of capital to include: 1. financial capital, 2. manufacturing capital, 3. social capital, 4. intellectual capital, 5. environmental capital, and 6. natural capital.

There’s also the new ‘Global Reporting Initiative‘ (GRI), which advocates accounting reform and the use of integrated reporting, led by Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England. King says the integrated reporting initiative is driven by financial, social and environmental imperatives, ie the need for sustainable business.

While it’s good to hear that accountants are expanding their horizons beyond financial and economic imperatives – and actually beginning to implement new forms of accounting – it seems the actual financial statements remain intact in the new system. The integrated reports appear as text and graphs up the front of the annual report. So I wonder how this new information will feed into the behaviour of corporations and investors if, for example, the cost of polluting a river is not factored into the production process and thus into prices.

Even with integrated reporting, destructive corporate practices – tellingly called ‘externalities’ in economics – will remain external to the real game changer in our capitalist system: numbers denominated in money. Economist Raj Patel vividly captures the conundrum of externalities with his $200 hamburger – $200 being the REAL cost of producing a hamburger, taking account of its externalities: its carbon footprint, its impact on the environment in terms of water use and soil degradation, and the enormous health costs of diet-related illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease. Traditional accounting models do not take these costs into account. And nor, it seems, does integrated reporting. But they still have to be paid. By us.

Next week is the Sydney Writers’ Festival and on Tuesday evening I’m going to the opening address by writer Hisham Matar, who’ll be speaking about ‘The Private Moment‘. Matar will talk about the need to give the private moment its worth and argue that fiction articulates these moments best. He says: ‘Even private life is infiltrated by a totalitarian regime. To describe how people love differently under this situation is an act of resistance.’

I’ll be blogging about Matar’s ‘The Private Moment’ next week – with the second of my librarian v rock star Bronte blogs, on Wuthering Heights, to come. (My PhD annual review papers are due on 21 May so Wuthering Heights will be up after that.)

Posted in Luca Pacioli and Double Entry | Leave a comment

Jane Eyre v Wuthering Heights: Librarian or Rock Star?

Posted on 06/05/2012 by

I’m not so much into comparing the work of siblings, but ever since they were first published in the 1840s, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre has been compared to her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Critics did it at the time. Viriginia Woolf did it in her essay ‘Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights’ published in The Common Reader in 1916. And two years ago Guardian journalist Imogen Russell Williams did it in her article ‘How the Brontes divide humanity‘ when she asked ‘Are you a Jane Eyre or a Wuthering Heights person?’ And claimed that ‘In my experience, you can’t be both.’

Russell Williams was responding to a blog about memorable school reading by Alison Flood, who said that Jane Eyre ‘bored me’, but Wuthering Heights ‘really stands out in my memory’. This reminded Russell Williams ‘of my long-held pet theory about the Battle of the Brontes: everyone who’s read both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights is passionately devoted to one book but nose-holdingly repelled by the other.’ She calls Jane Eyre lovers Librarians and Wuthering Heights lovers Rock Stars. Russell Williams is a Librarian. Flood is a Rock Star. I am definitely a Rock Star. But I also love Jane Eyre.

Charlotte Bronte was just 20 years old when she wrote to the British poet laureate Robert Southey to ask his advice on her poetry. Remarkably, Southey replied to this young, unknown, provincial writer. But only to advise her  that ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life.’ Bronte assured Southey that she had ‘endeavoured not only attentively to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfil, but to feel deeply interested in them. I don’t always succeed, for sometimes when I’m teaching or sewing I would rather be reading or writing; but I try to deny myself.’

The complex mix of audacity, determination, longing, submissive restraint and forbearance revealed by Bronte in this episode is painfully evident in the pages of Jane Eyre:

‘I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to … allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions arose before it … a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.’

Jane Eyre burns with the restless fire of contained desire. It opens with Jane, aged 10, seated by scarlet curtains, gazing out onto a wild and sombre winter’s afternoon. There is something about Jane that unsettles her aunt and three cousins with whom she lives. ‘I was a discord in Gateshead Hall: I was like nobody there,’ she confides to the Reader. On this fateful afternoon, her life is forever altered when, tormented by her cousin John, she fails in her habitual obedience. Soon after, she is sent from rural Gateshead Hall into the world, to boarding school, from where she eventually secures a post as governess at Thornfield Hall. The story of Jane’s passionate love for the master of Thornfield Hall, Edward Rochester, is one of the great love stories of fiction.

Jane narrates her own story. She directly addresses ‘the Reader’, recalling her innermost thoughts and feelings as she struggles through her teenage years to honour both her sense of duty and her own wild nature – for Jane shares not a little of Catherine Earnshaw’s moorland spirit. Bronte’s novel is remarkable for its innovative approach to narrative – told retrospectively by an adult Jane from her point of view as a child – and the intimacy, energy and intelligence this brings to Jane’s confessions.

Bronte’s writing is rich, compressed and dense, at times intimate and hushed, at others muscular and Gothic: ‘that blood-bleached robe with which Christianity covers human deformity’. Her observations are astute, such as Jane’s sense of the potential ruthlessness of religious zeal: ‘I felt how – if I were his wife, this good man, pure as the deep sunless source, could soon kill me, without drawing from my veins a single drop of blood, or receiving on his own crystal conscience the faintest stain of crime.’

Although Bronte had taken Southey’s advice by attempting to curb her writing ambition and turning her energies to teaching, circumstances conspired to reveal her talent to the world. Having been educated briefly at two boarding schools, Charlotte worked as a teacher and governess. She then decided, with sisters Emily and Anne, to open a school in Haworth, Yorkshire. With this in mind, Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels in 1842, where they studied French, German and school management.

Their teacher Constantin Heger recognised the sisters’ literary talent – and in turn it seems that Charlotte fell in love with the brilliant Heger, for when she returned to Yorkshire in 1844 she wrote him a series of passionate letters. Heger responded by tearing each letter to pieces. (Miraculously the letters survive to this day, their fragments stitched together by Heger’s suspicious wife.)

In 1844 the Bronte sisters advertised their school, but could attract no pupils to the distant Yorkshire village of Haworth. Then by chance the following year Charlotte discovered some poems written by Emily, which amazed her. Soon after she and Anne revealed their own secret writings and in 1846 the three Brontes published their collected poems. They presented their work to the public as Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, keeping their initials but choosing male pseudonyms for secrecy and to avoid the special treatment they believed was given to women writers. Only two copies of Poems sold, but the experience opened up a new world to the sisters and they began to send their novels to publishers.

Charlotte’s first novel, The Professor, was rejected. She then sent her second manuscript, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, to Smith, Elder & Co. The first reader praised it so effusively that the publisher decided to find a more levelheaded judge. So he gave it to a sober Scotsman to read. But the sober Scotsman was so gripped by Bronte’s manuscript that he stayed up half the night to finish it. Less than 8 weeks later, in October 1847, Jane Eyre was published.

The first edition of Jane Eyre sold out in two months. When the second edition appeared in January 1484, dedicated to Charlotte’s hero William Makepeace Thackeray, controversy exploded on the streets of London. Little did Charlotte realise that, like Rochester’s first wife in Jane Eyre, Thackeray’s wife had gone mad and was kept in the attic. It was soon rumoured that ‘Currer Bell’ was once Thackeray’s governess and lover, although Charlotte did not in fact meet Thackeray until after the third edition of Jane Eyre was published.

More rumours circulated when Emily and Anne’s publisher claimed that Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell were one single author. To prove they were not, Charlotte and Anne travelled to London in July 1848, where they revealed to their astonished publishers their identity not as one man but three women.

Charlotte became a minor celebrity, but her fame and fortune were soon overshadowed by the death of her brother, Branwell, in September 1848, and her beloved sisters Emily and Anne within the next 8 months. In 1854, Charlotte married her father’s Irish curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, having turned down his proposal and three other offers of marriage. She was pregnant when she died the following year, aged 38.

Jane Eyre was written at a time of massive change – revolution in Europe and profound unrest in England – and women were beginning to challenge their social bounds. Jane’s internal rebellion against the restrictions placed on her as a woman of no independent means, her sexual longing and her passionate claim to be equal to Rochester before God were highly contentious in Bronte’s day.

As Elizabeth Rigby chastised in her review of Jane Eyre in Quarterly, December 1848, ‘the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre’.

There have been at least 16 film versions of Jane Eyre, the most recent one in 2011 starring Mia Wasikowska as Jane and Michael Fassbinder as Rochester. The 1944 film starring Joan Fontaine as Jane and Orson Welles as Rochester was billed as ‘A Love Story Every Woman Would Die a Thousand Deaths to Live’.

An opera of Jane Eyre by English composer Michael Berkeley, with a libretto by Australian writer David Malouf, premiered in 2000.

Stay tuned for Wuthering Heights, up next.

Posted in Classics | 4 Comments

‘If I were an unpublished writer …’: The forest for the trees, Sydney Writers’ Fest 2012

Posted on 01/05/2012 by

As I was saying to one of my creative writing students from the University of New South Wales, if I were an unpublished writer – or even a published writer wanting to learn more about my industry – I’d be going to ‘The Forest for the trees‘ at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this year. I’ve mentioned this session already on this blog, but since then I’ve learnt the full scope of this day-long workshop and I want to say more about it.

Why? Because it brings together some of the most interesting and exciting people working in writing and publishing today. They come from Australia and the world. And between them their expertise covers pretty much everything you need to know about this industry-in-flux in 2012, from printed books, bookshops and journals to the new electronic world.

The workshop is at the State Library of New South Wales from 10am to 4.30pm on Thursday 17 May 2012. First up is writer Sophie Cunningham talking about her writing life, what she’ll be doing in 2012. Before she published her first book, the bestselling novel Geography, Cunningham was a publisher and an editor. Most recently she was the editor of literary magazine Meanjin.

Cunningham will then talk to two writers – debut US novelist Chad Harbach and established writer Elliot Perlman – about their paths to being published.

Next up some seriously important publishers will talk about the challenges and opportunities publishing houses face in 2012. They are Margaret Seale from Random House, Sue Hines from Allen & Unwin, Alison Green from Pantera Press and Paul Baggaley from Picador UK.

From big publishing to small, next four journal editors will speak about the vital role journals play in the careers of emerging writers, including what they can offer writers when so many self-publishing opportunities now exist. The panelists are Julianne Schultz from the highly regarded Griffith Review, David Brooks from distinguished literary journal Southerly, Alice Grundy from funky new glossy lit mag Seizure, and I’ll be appearing as fiction editor of politically engaged Overland.

From there the day moves to the new world of digital publishing and ‘other ways forward’. In this session panelists are Joel Naoum from Pan Macmillan’s exciting new e-imprint Momentum, Anna Maguire from digital publishing consultancy digireado, publisher Elizabeth Weiss from Allen & Unwin (whose expertise in e-publishing is vast) and David Henley from Xou Creative, a design and production studio which produces Seizure, among many other things.

The day will conclude with a wrap-up and Q&A featuring writer Bem Le Hunte, dynamo HarperCollins publisher Shona Martyn – and the equally dynamic literary agent Sophie Hamley and bookseller Barbara Horgan from Shearer’s Bookshop, who will talk to Sophie Cunningham about the challenges and opportunities for writers in 2012.

Bookings are essential for this event – it can only take 130 participants – and it costs $35/$25, but I think it will be fascinating and informative, worth every cent. If nothing else, in this increasingly digital world, it’s always incredibly useful to see the people who work in your field IN THE FLESH. And ideally to have the opportunity to meet one or two or more of them.

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‘eleven seasons’ by Paul D. Carter wins the Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award 2012

Posted on 27/04/2012 by

Last night in Crows Nest, Sydney, John Birmingham presented the 31st Australian/Vogel Literary Award to Melbourne writer Paul D. Carter for his novel Eleven Seasons. It was a big night with many speeches – by Allen & Unwin chairman Patrick Gallagher, publisher Annette Barlow, John Birmingham, Paul D. Carter, Vogel judge Sophie Cunningham, the Australian‘s literary editor Stephen Romei and Alan Stevns, whose father Niels Stevns started the award 31 years ago.

Before I go into the speeches, here’s the opening of the night’s main attraction: the award-winning novel.

’1. promise

All ten of the 1985 Hawthorn VFL swap cards are arranged in two rows on Jason Dalton’s bedspread. Most of them are creased and rain damaged. Brand new they cost fifty cents a pack from Arthur’s milk bar around the corner, but Jason had to win them playing flicks at school. Two players flick their cards against the wall, and the first player to land his card on top of another wins the other’s cards. It took him only two days to collect the Hawthorn set. Afterwards, the other kids in Year Seven wouldn’t play him. ‘No way, mate – you’re a freak,’ they said.

Michael Tuck, the Hawthorn ruck-rover, is card ninety. He has a long-sleeve guernsey, a taut, wiry body and a teacher’s brown beard. Jason wonders if his dad had a beard like that. Probably not. He might have looked like back-pocket Gary Ayres, though: tall and broad with black hair swimming around his collar. Card ninety-eight – last card in the Hawthorn set.’

So, it’s a coming of age novel about football, specifically, football Victorian-style. AFL. As the back cover says: ‘Some guys are good at school and telling jokes or they have the latest stuff. Others are cricketers and basketball players: they can do things with the ball that make their classmates talk about them when they’re not around. His thing is football. He becomes the centre of whichever team he plays for: he becomes the advantage.’

I don’t know a thing about AFL – but I can’t wait to read Eleven Seasons. Carter says it was inspired by the prologue to Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which is about a live-or-die baseball game between the Giants and the Dodgers in New York on 3 October 1951. I don’t know a thing about baseball either, but Underworld and especially its prologue are among my favourite pieces of writing in the world. (‘He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.’)

Patrick Gallagher

Patrick Gallagher introduced the evening and spoke about the revamped award. For the first time last year the winning novel was announced not after the judges had selected it in September but six months later when the novel had been published. This is an excellent innovation because it means there’s an actual book to go with the excitement of the announcement, something we can read and review. As Gallagher said, this also means a secret has to be kept for six months by the judges, publishers, editors, the winning author, but so far so good. The secret has been kept.

Allen & Unwin publisher Annette Barlow spoke about the success of last year’s Vogel winner, Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party, which has been praised by critics and shortlisted for literary awards.

Alan Stevns, John Birmingham, Stephen Romei, Annette Barlow

Next up came John Birmingham who saluted Vogel’s bread – ‘Love your bread’ – and recounted his dangerous passage from Queensland, where it’s now illegal to give literary prizes, to New South Wales. He’d been smuggled out on the freedom train, eluding the border guards who’ve been given strict orders by the new premier to allow no writers of any sort to cross the border.

The Queensland premier’s decision this month to can the QLD premier’s literary awards led Birmingham to ponder the idea of literary prize giving in general. With tongue in cheek he questioned the efficacy of rewarding one writer over another, especially in the case of Queensland, where ‘the money could be better spent returning 0.0001% of fuck all to the state’s debt’. Or not.

Birmingham said we mostly can’t distinguish between the relative merits of writers because ultimately there’s an element of subjectivity in these literary awards decisions. There’s no mechanism to make these judgements.

‘What’s that, Mr Premier? We already have such a mechanism, the infallible, invisible hand of the market?’ Birmingham joked about the trash the invisible hand throws up and argued that the great thing about literary prizes is they involve judgements made by peers who know the value of a writer’s work beyond price points and money.

Birmingham then turned to the prize winning author. ‘As reality TV tells us, there can only be one winner. I’d like to invite Paul Carter the receive the award.’

Paul D. Carter and his partner Kate

After thanking Niels and Alan Stevns, the Australian and his publisher, editors, publicist, Carter talked about his double life for the past six months. By day he worked as an English and creative writing teacher at a Melbourne high school, telling his students how fun creative writing is. By night he revised Eleven Seasons for publication, agonising over two 15-page editorial reports and sometimes wishing his novel never existed.

The ‘novel writing process’ began 12 years ago when Carter was 20. During those years he had half a dozen day jobs, finished postgraduate study (he wrote his novel as part of a PhD at Deakin University) and changed careers. Carter wanted to write about football and how Australia had changed in his lifetime. He expected it to take one or two years – ‘but stories don’t work to timelines’. He had to build his writing skills as he wrote and he had to grow up. Eleven Seasons took him 9 years to complete.

Carter thanked his family who never laughed at him when he said he wanted to be a writer, his partner Kate for her talents as a reader and storyteller, and concluded: ‘With your assistance, I’m honoured to call myself a writer tonight.’

Sophie Cunningham

This year’s judges were writers Margo Lanagan and Sophie Cunningham and writer and literary critic Geordie Williamson. Cunningham spoke about the judging. She said of the 150 entrants there was a clear longlist of 12 manuscripts and the winner was a standout – and a unanimous choice. The judges were looking for a novel that grabbed them from the opening page to the end.

Cunningham said that many of the entrants dealt with passivity, with characters keenly experiencing the world around them but not knowing how to act on it. She wondered whether this flatness of tone ‘might say something about this historical moment’. This flatness is hard to do well – and that’s one reason Clare Carlin’s shortlisted novel Excursions stood out.

This year – not surprisingly – saw a shift towards fantasy and science fiction, with a proliferation of apocalypses, vampires and zombies. Cunningham said this interest in death emerged not just in the supernatural and the afterlife, but in more realist fiction in writing about death, which is the subject of the other shortlisted novel, Michael Hugill’s Living Rooms.

Next up came Stephen Romei, who’d just flown in from Europe that morning and said John Birmingham had stolen all his jokes. After giving Paul some advice – ‘write faster next time’ – he too pondered the canned QLD literary awards. ‘The more I think about it, it’s boneheaded.’ Literary awards matter, the Vogel’s in particular. ‘You only have to look at the alumni – and not just the winners. The whole Vogel process is an incubator of young writing talent. A lot of writers who go through the process end up leaving their mark.’

Romei said that among the doom and gloom of publishing and bookselling ‘writers are doing brilliantly’. At least 12 outstanding works of literary fiction by Australian writers were published in the last year. And literary awards matter because they recognise those writers.

He summed up his position by declaring: ‘I think writers are a bit special – so why not given them praise and money?’ Why not indeed.

Alan Stevns concluded the proceedings by telling us that the Vogel Award had been going for 31 years ‘and I’ve stood here before you on 26 occasions’. His father Niels presided over the first five awards. Stevns said the prize was his father’s way of giving something back to his adopted country ‘and I know he’d be proud to see how it’s developed today’. He said the prize had ‘more than fulfilled’ his father’s initial aim, which was to give young Australian writers confidence and support.

THANK YOU Niels and Alan Stevns – what a great legacy. And congratulations to Paul D. Carter and the two shortlisted writers Clare Carlin and Michael Hugill.

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The Sydney Writers’ Festival, Patrick White’s The Hanging Garden and red herring

Posted on 16/04/2012 by

Chip Rolley

‘This year, it’s personal …’ The Sydney Writers’ Festival 2012 (14-20 May) is focused on the line between the public and the personal. As artistic director Chip Rolley says: ‘The question of the limits of what is personal is one of the hottest subjects around.’

The lineup of authors local and international is extremely exciting, including UK-based Libyan novelist Hisham Matar whose opening address will encompass the power of fiction to approximate the feelings and emotions that defy articulation, and science writer and author of Longitude Dava Sobel, who will close the festival with an address on the transit of Venus.

Jeanette Winterson

There are over 300 events and more than 400 participants this year, but I’m especially excited that Jeanette Winterson and Jeffrey Eugenides will be here. Winterson’s Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides are among my favourite novels.

I’ll be talking about Double Entry – in a session aptly called ‘Debt in Venice‘ – with Geoffrey Lehmann on Friday 18 May. I’ll also be talking about making literature out of numbers with writer Gideon Haigh in ‘The Artful Abacus‘ chaired by novelist and former Macbanker John M Green at 11.30am on Saturday 19 May.

I’ll also be part of the workshop ‘The Forest for the Trees: Writers and Publishing in 2012′ on Thursday 17 May. The workshop will discuss what’s happening in 2012 for publishers, bookshops and writers. I’ll be speaking as the fiction editor of Overland magazine about short story writing, editing and publishing.

Speaking of Overland, it’s just revamped its blog and recruited a team of regular bloggers and reviewers, including editors Jeff Sparrow and Jacinda Woodhead. I’ll be writing there once a month as ‘red herring‘ on feminist politics and green economics.

For anyone interested in Patrick White or Australian literature, I reviewed White’s unfinished novel The Hanging Garden for the Age earlier this month. The manuscript was found among White’s papers on his death and has just been published by Random House. I loved it, fragment though it is.

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