Is it a novel? Is it a biography? Who cares, it's delicious!
Like a few other "novels" of historical figures that I have read recently, this story takes factual events and presents them with fictional dialogue to create a seamless story. It's just interesting that some authors choose to call these books novels (such as James does here), while others call them history (such as in The Zookeeper's Wife). Jeanette Walls called Half Broke Horses, the story of her grandmother's life, a "true-life novel," though it read more like a memoir. The first encounter I had with this type of book was Girl in a Blue Dress: A Novel Inspired by the Life and Marriage of Charles Dickens, a title which confused the heck out of me for a lot of the book. Was it real or wasn't it?
Regardless of what they are called and how the lines sometimes blur, this relatively new genre seems to be here to stay, and I'm glad. Because these stories meet my two most important criteria for books: learning and loving it. Seriously, I enjoy books more if I've learned something. But I have to like the story, and true history often fails to captivate me.
From The Secret Diaries, I learned a great deal about one of my favorite authors AND about the writing process. It's always amazing to me to see how autobiographical most books, especially first books, are. As I read, I recognized the bits of Bronte's life that would go into Jane Eyre, even before she planned to put them in herself. It helps that I've read Jane Eyre multiple times, and seen two or three movie versions of it. But even as she wrote her less familiar books, it became apparent how she modeled them on her own experiences. Also, the story obviously contains Bronte's interactions with her sisters, Emily and Ann, who also wrote famous novels, and how the three sisters spurred each other on to writing. How cool would that be, to have a built-in writing community? I guess not as cool considering they all three lived with their father as adults.
You know I also need a happy ending to be completely satisfied. This was a case where, I admit, I skimmed the last few pages early, to make sure it WOULD be a happy ending. Because I had done some fact checking part way through, reading some online biographies of Bronte to see just how much of this was historically accurate. Most of it is, it would seem, but there is disagreement about her death (that's not a plot spoiler, we all know she's dead). One resource online speculated that Bronte had perhaps hastened her own death, feeling unhappy in her circumstances. Hello, NOT happy ending. So I read ahead, to be sure that this version of her life doesn't follow that train. Thankfully it does not.
So now I have to choose: do I reread Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, or keep going to the stack on my night stand? I decidedly did not get Wuthering Heights the first time I read it--it's so dark and creepy, how can Catherine and Heathcliff really be one of the most romantic literary couples of all time? And why is his name Heathcliff? Do I want to delve into these questions again, or move on? We'll see. I'll take tonight off and think on it.
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