Haworth Churchyard photograph, John Stewart, c.1856–57. © Brontë Society. Sourced via annebronte.org. There’s a photograph - albumen print, sepia-toned, crisp with the shadows of headstones - that has set imaginations aflame for more than a century. It shows Haworth churchyard, with its lichen-bitten tombs and overhanging sky, a place where the dead vastly outnumber the … Continue reading A Ghost in the Glass: Charlotte Brontë and the Churchyard Photograph
Tag: fiction
Death on the Installment Plan: A Comedy of Filth and Futility
Life, says Céline, isn’t a banquet but a butcher’s stall, and each of us is the meat on the hook, dripping away one grey day at a time. Death on the Installment Plan isn’t a novel so much as a splatter of bile, a confession delivered in hysterics, punctuated with ellipses… ellipses… until the very … Continue reading Death on the Installment Plan: A Comedy of Filth and Futility
How Much Land Does a Man Need? – Tolstoy’s Six-Foot Sermon
Tolstoy was always the moralist disguised as a storyteller. He couldn’t so much as describe a hayfield without planting in it a parable, and How Much Land Does a Man Need? is among his most ruthless little lessons. At its heart, it’s an absurdly simple tale: a peasant named Pahom believes that with just a … Continue reading How Much Land Does a Man Need? – Tolstoy’s Six-Foot Sermon
Anno Dracula: Empire of the Undead
What if the monster had won? It’s the forbidden question behind so much of Gothic literature. We tidy our novels with the crucifix triumphant and the stake neatly driven home, as if evil may always be dispatched with a mallet and a bit of ash. Yet Kim Newman, that merry necromancer of the imagination, dared … Continue reading Anno Dracula: Empire of the Undead
The Book of Catweazle
Being a Remembrance of his Misnamings, Quirks, and Misadventures Set forth in his own crack’d tongue, with a Preface from our world ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.’ — 1 Corinthians 13:12 When I was a youngster, Catweazle was one of my favourite programmes - part comedy, part … Continue reading The Book of Catweazle
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