When we began to work on this month’s challenge to create a ‘family tree’ showing the literary ancestral lines that we’ve traced on the site, we soon realised that we couldn’t possibly accommodate all the intertwined connections between the forty-five authors we’ve profiled so far.
Instead, we decided to focus on the literary forebears and successors of just four of our favourite novelists: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. You’ll need to click on the image and zoom in to read it.
Our literary family tree includes the following connections:
- George Eliot re-read Austen novels prior to writing her own.
- Eliot’s partner, George Henry Lewes, was a vocal fan of Austen.
- Charlotte Brontë couldn’t understand what Lewes saw in Austen’s work.
- Virginia Woolf called Austen ‘the most perfect artist among women’.
- Katherine Mansfield described Woolf’s Night and Day as ‘Miss Austen up to date’.
- Mansfield and her husband read Jane Austen together. Mansfield admired Austen’s abilities to plot novels.
- Elizabeth Bowen wrote a BBC programme about Austen’s life.
- Iris Murdoch counted Mr Knightly as her favourite fictional character.
- Austen fantasised that her friend, Anne Sharp – a governess and amateur playwright – might marry her employer.
- In Jane Eyre, Brontë fictionalised the kind of scenario Austen had dreamed of for Sharp.
- Brontë’s lifelong feminist author friend, Mary Taylor, helped Elizabeth Gaskell with the first biography of their mutual friend.
- Harriet Beecher Stowe claimed that Brontë appeared to her from beyond the grave.
- Woolf claimed that Brontë ‘will write in a rage when she should write calmly’.
- Woolf felt that Austen had ‘less genius’ than Brontë but ‘got infinitely more said’.
- Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel to Jane Eyre.
- Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca owes a debt of gratitude to Jane Eyre.
- Du Maurier wrote a biography of Brontë’s brother, Branwell.
- The young Maya Angelou found the experience of reading the Brontë sisters inspiring and empowering.
- Gaskell found Eliot’s unmarried status an impediment to friendship.
- Woolf described Middlemarch as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown up people’.
- Woolf also felt that Eliot ‘committed atrocities’ by aping masculine prose.
- Rhys’ friend, Eliot Bliss, chose her pen-name as a mark of respect for both George Eliot and T.S. Eliot.
Virginia Woolf
- Winifred Holtby wrote the first biography of Woolf.
- Woolf stayed up all night reading Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth.
- Woolf stayed in Bowen’s court.
- Toni Morrison wrote her Master’s thesis on Woolf.
- Du Maurier’s night nursery directly faced Mansfield’s bedroom.
- Du Maurier corresponded with the younger author, Oriel Malet, and the pair shared their love of Mansfield’s work in their letters.
Activity
One of our readers, Sarah Emsley, offered us the perfect excuse to re-read Jane Austen’s Emma as she is hosting Emma in the Snow – an online celebration of the bi-centenary of its publication. Our piece will go live on her site on January 1st, and we’ll also post a conversation between the two of us about the novel here on Something Rhymed. We’ve had such fun reacquainting ourselves with this novel – an old favourite.
If you are looking for a holiday read, we’d love you to choose Emma so that you can share your thoughts with us in the new year.
In the meantime, we both hope that you have a peaceful holiday and that 2016 is full of creativity and friendship.
Something Rhymed 