Category: Literary Essays
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Joseph Roth, a visionary poet and victim of European history
Frank WollheimSweden Joseph Roth was born on 2 September 1894 in Brody, then a Galician town in the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, bordering Russia. His parents married in 1892 and like two thirds of the 20,000 inhabitants were Hassidic Jews. His mother Maria came from a family of merchants. His father worked for a timber trading company…
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Madness, mind-doctors, and Mrs. Dalloway
Sabina DosaniLondon, England Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925 as the fourth novel by Virginia Woolf, is a life-in-a-day novel, almost certainly influenced by James Joyce’s Ulysses. In her 1919 essay Modern Fiction, Woolf rejects her materialist forerunners, praising Joyce and others like him: “They attempt to come closer to life… so must discard most of…
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Narrative control and the monster within: Empowering disability in Jane Eyre
Mary ValloGlastonbury, Connecticut, United States In chapter twenty-five of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Jane tells Rochester that the night before, “a form emerged from the closet” in her room and tried on her wedding veil, ripped the veil apart, and blew out a candle in her face before Jane fainted with fear.1 Although Jane is…
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Why “nurse” Grace Poole is the greatest puzzle in Jane Eyre
Sarah WiseLondon, United Kingdom “My mind had been running on Grace Poole — that living enigma, that mystery of mysteries,” Jane Eyre admits to herself, one evening at Thornfield Hall. Charlotte Bronte’s readers’ minds also run on Grace Poole throughout the Thornfield chapters of the novel — from the first “mirthless” laugh that housekeeper Mrs.…
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Poe’s consumptive paradox
Gregory RuteckiCleveland, Ohio, United States Tuberculosis may have killed more people than any pathogen in history1 leaving an array of terrible stigmata whenever it extinguished life. The essential image of tuberculosis in the eighteenth century was that of foul decay.2 Morgagni vividly described the road to a consumptive death as, “(she) threw up pus by…
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Walt Whitman: A difficult patient
Jack CoulehanStony Brook, New York, United States On June 15, 1888, the following notice appeared in the New York Times under the headline AGED POET SUFFERS RELAPSE: Prof. William Osler, of the University of Pennsylvania, was summoned by telegraph this afternoon to go to Walt Whitman’s bedside. The aged poet had a relapse, and it…
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Patrick Branwell Brontë (1817–1848): A tale of aspiration and decline
JMS PearceHull, England On the bleak, rocky, windswept Yorkshire moors is the famous Brontës’ parsonage of St Michael and All Angels’ Church, Haworth. Here the celebrated Brontë sisters wrote their varied poetry and tales of romance, repressed passions, and frustrated love. This year (2017) marks 200 years since the birth of their brother, Patrick Branwell…
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The morbid poet: Gottfried Benn, the morgue and the mysterious postcard
Annette TuffsHeidelberg, Germany “Worst of all: not to die in summer, when everything is bright and the earth is easy on the spade.” So wrote the German poet Gottfried Benn (1886–1956), three years before his death, in the poem “What’s Bad”.1 But if the wrong timing of one’s death is the very worst thing, what…
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Sir Roderick Glossop: Wodehouse’s “eminent loony doctor”
Paul DakinNorth London, UK P.G. Wodehouse is one of the greatest comic authors of the twentieth century. He wrote nearly a hundred books containing a fascinating array of characters. Many inhabited the confined geography of 1920’s London and country houses, with occasional trips to New York or the French Riviera. This was the world Wodehouse…
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Love, cancer, and the caregiver’s faith of C.S. Lewis
Joshua NiforatosCleveland, Ohio, United States Poi se torno all’ eternal fontana.Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, Canto XXXI C.S. Lewis, the medieval and Renaissance scholar of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, wrote prolifically on myriad topics and won international recognition early in life. During the Second World War, Lewis had numerous broadcast talks that made his voice second only…