Mitzi and I agreed to go to the next Cabell County Public library book group meeting in Nov. They are reading Emily's Ghost by Denise Giardina. Audible does not have this book available, so I am reading it on my phone via iBooks. It is a quick read and quite interesting. I own two other books by Giardina: Storming Heaven and .....need to fill in.....but I added this post quickly last night as I want to look up information about Chartists and Wilberforce.
Giardina (Saints and Villains) offers Brontë fans a solid biographical novel portraying sisters Anne, Charlotte and Emily as different in temperament but in love with the same man, fighting the same illnesses and withdrawing from the same grim realities to write poetry and fiction that express their individual passions. Youngest sister Emily distinguishes herself at age six when, while attending boarding school, she admits to encounters with ghosts. (The punishment doled out by the headmaster does not deter Emily, but it does inspire a well-known scene in Jane Eyre.) Brontë men include brother Branwell, who struggles with addiction; father Patrick, straining to support his family on limited finances; and William Weightman, Patrick's young, flirtatious, social-reforming curate who becomes the key figure as he wins the hearts of the three Brontë girls. Giardina's mid-19th-century England is factually sturdy, while the relationship between Emily and Weightman is nicely nuanced, and the insights and inferences about Emily and Charlotte's relationship are convincingly rendered. You don't have to be a Brontë scholar to appreciate Giardina's novel, but having a little context will greatly increase the payoff. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers Weekly
I finished the book in Nov and liked it a lot....but never got around to looking up the Chartists and Wilberforce. However, the description of the cholera epidemic in Emily's town is excellent. I am thinking that that is the disease that took the lives of my Hare ancestors. I will look that up and add it to one of my blogs.
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