Showing posts with label Joanna Briscoe. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 30, 2024

In brief / The Seduction; Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls; James and Nora – review XLISTO 2020

‘Love is a paradox’: James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in 1931.

In brief: The Seduction; Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls; James and Nora – review

A brave memoir on love and addiction, a rocky tale of therapy and transference, and a portrait of the artist as a husband

Hannah Beckerman
Sun 21 Jun 2020 11.00 BST

Look, don't touch / What great literature can teach us about love with no contact

‘She just wants to pick up his hand’ … Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal in the TV adaptation of Normal People.

Look, don't touch: what great literature can teach us about love with no contact

With our increased physical distance from each other, novels about forbidden touch and longing are more seductive than ever

Joanna Briscoe
Fri 22 May 2020 11.00 BST

n our time of social distancing, the desire for physical contact has never been so intense. And yet we are untouchable. This experience has had its more conspicuous consequences, such as the government scientist Neil Ferguson breaking his own rules to meet his lover during lockdown. This notion of forbidden touch, unique and even shocking as it may be to us, has a multitude of echoes in literature. Cultural constraints and taboos on touch are reflected, overturned or used for dramatic purposes by writers throughout history, and our own bookshelves are newly rich with the comfort of identification. Who would have ever guessed that the plague-ridden, the apocalyptic or the edicts of Victorian England would have quite such resonance?

Jane Eyre by Joanna Briscoe

On the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth

Jane Eyre

by Joanna Briscoe

Joanna Briscoe

Saturday 16 April 2016 08.00 BST

As a child given to reading on window seats, I was supremely lucky to come across Jane Eyre at the age of the protagonist: 10 when the novel begins. The heroine and inspiration for all of us who were also “obscure, plain and little”, Jane was my bookish soulmate with infinitely worse outsider status, providing fuel to every orphan fantasy that would explain my lot. Jane Eyre taught the young reader so much about suffering, about true friendship and love, and about courage. It demanded to be reread many times. To this day, I see Jane as one of the great heroines: she is utterly determined, while not given to flouncy foot stamping in the Scarlett O’Hara, Holly Golightly or Becky Sharp vein, yet more spirited in her integrity than Dorothea Brooke or Esther Summerson.

As a young adult, I deliberately used the novel to initiate weeping sessions in order to siphon off other griefs, and somehow, I now realise, absorbed the desire to marry complex protagonists with dark and twisted storytelling, the novel influencing me as both a writer and reader. Now that it is all less personal and I don’t find myself dreaming about my baronial hall catching fire, I regard it as a masterpiece of both entertainment and literature. As with Du Maurier’s Rebecca, it is clear why some critics regard it as overblown, but I interpret its more gothic elements as intensity rather than excess.

THE GUARDIAN