"… nearly all Emily Brontë’s biographers and scholars over the past century have been women. If you do spot a man in the mix, chances are that he has been shuffled off to the side, rather like , though hopefully without the urge to get drunk and set fire to himself. The only other author who has become the object of such an intense female pash in the last 200 years is Sylvia Plath, who happens to be buried less than 10 miles away from at . The parallels are uncanny. Separated by a century, both Brontë and Plath were poets who remain most famous for writing a single intensely autobiographical novel. There’s even a pleasing bit of intertextuality in the way that in 1956 Sylvia Plath actually managed to marry in the form of her own glowering man-of-the-moors, . Together the newlyweds tramped up to and wrote poems about it, an event that Hughes was still mulling over 40 years later in his valedictory '. Both Plath and Brontë died at the age of 30 and then only gradually started to attract the cult-like devotion of female fans, who responded rapturously to their heroines’ status as exiles from the twin kingdoms of heteronormative happiness and literary fame."
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Historians from EnglandAcademics from the United KingdomNon-fiction authors from EnglandBiographers from EnglandFellows of the Royal Society of Literature
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Kathryn Hughes
(born 1959) is an English biographer, historian, journalist, and professor emerita in the School of Literature, Drama and Writing at the . Her book George Eliot: The Last Victorian was awarded the 1999 for biography. Hughes, an expert on the , has contributed articles to ', ', ', and '.
8 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Kathryn Hughes →
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