Jonathan Keates
Big Trouble in Little Bronte
Under the Volcano: Revolution in a Sicilian Town
By Lucy Riall
Oxford University Press 278pp £35 order from our bookshop
Which British hero links Mount Etna and Wuthering Heights? The answer hasn’t any connection with Heathcliff or Catherine Earnshaw, however volcanic their emotional lives, and the violent death of the figure in question occurred 42 years before the novel’s publication. Will it help if I add that but for his demise, its author might nowadays be known to us as Emily Brunty?
The right answer – as you guessed – is the victor of Trafalgar, who signed himself ‘Nelson and Bronte’. An ambitious Irish undergraduate at Cambridge, Patrick Brunty or Prunty – the sisters’ father – saw a heaven-sent advantage in adopting the latter name as his own. The rest, as they
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'He is persuaded by the idea that coffee, the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world, changed 18th-century European minds, catalysing a new material rationalism.'
@ajlees on Michael Pollan's new book, 'This is Your Mind on Plants'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-mind-the-neurobollocks
'A publicist interviewed by Fairrie praises Collins and her heroines ... because these were "women who behaved like men". Is that supposed to be good, given how men behaved towards Collins?'
Peter Conrad reviews a new documentary about Jackie Collins.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/easy-writer
'Walk down your supermarket pet food aisle and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single brand that claims to be made with high-welfare meat. More expensive pet food should not be about spoiling our cats but about sparing the farmed beasts we feed them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/meattoo