The Brontes: The Critical Heritage

by Miriam Farris Allott (Editor)

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.

Genres: Nonfiction

496 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Allott, Miriam 1920-2010
Allott, Miriam Farris
Farris, Miriam 1920-2010

Reviews

[Sherwood Smith]

The authoress has bestowed wonderful pains upon its composition [Shirley], and she has been rewarded accordingly. It has been slowly written, carefully digested, touched and retouched, reviewed and revised, corrected in manuscript and in proof, and in this respect it is a pattern to our modern novelists, who gives their scribblings to the press with all their imperfections, as they flow from their gold pen, scarcely troubling themselves to amend defects in grammar or remedy tautologies.

We forget how very new the novel is, but a book like this, full of real Victorian-age voices reviewing the Brontes' works, is an enlightening reminder.

I thought it was of particular interest, how readers in the mid-nineteenth century tried to deal with Wuthering Heights, a century and a half before the invention of the term "id vortex."

Guesses as to the gender of the writers (and how many reviewers, surprisingly, thought that line of inquiry irrelevant), the debates about morals, purpose, language--the purpose of the novel-made involving reading.