Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

weekly periodical, whose literary editor Charlotte met at dinner at the Smiths, and which gave mixed notices to the Bells’ publications. One of the few journals to review Poems , it picked out Emily as the poet of the family, and talked of her “fine quaint spirit” and “an evident power of wing” (4 July 1846). H. F. Chorley, later a bête noire of Charlotte’s, wrote of the “reality” in Jane Eyre , but pre-echoed many later critics in finding that, after Jane’s flight from Thornfield, “we think the heroine too outrageously tried, and too romantically assisted in her difficulties” (23 Oct 1847). Wuthering Heights was found “[i]n spite of much power and cleverness” to be “a disagreeable story” (25 Dec 1847), but The Tenant was described as “the most interesting novel which we have read for a month past” (8 July 1848) – perhaps not the most whole-hearted of recommendations. Their unfavorable review of Shirley was made up for by a balanced review of Villette , which found the opening chapters an out-of-key beginning, but was full of praise for the body of the book, which it described as “a book which will please much those whom it pleases at all.” Its much-quoted sentence “Her talk is of duty, – her predilections lie with passion” was not intended as praise, but is acute. As late as 1857, though, faced with both Gaskell’s Life and The Professor , it commented that the “over-tragic ... log in or subscribe to read full text