Author Essie Fox reviews Finola Austin’s “remarkable” debut novel, Brontë’s Mistress. Brontë’s Mistress by Finola Austin is a literary novel created in the classic style of Victorian sensation. It also echoes certain themes from the Brontë sisters’ work. But at the centre of this novel is not some younger woman in the throes of her […]
Brontë’s Mistress by Finola Austin
Yorkshire, 1843. Lydia Robinson, mistress of Thorp Green Hall, has lost her precious young daughter and her mother within the same year. She returns to her bleak home, grief-stricken and unmoored. With her teenage daughters rebelling, her testy mother-in-law scrutinizing her every move, and her marriage grown cold, Lydia is restless and yearning for something […]
The Brontë Affair: researching the scandal that enveloped literature’s most famous family
Finola Austin had felt an affinity with the Brontë sisters for many years, but it was only while reading a biography of Charlotte that she became interested in their brother Branwell, who died young, like his sisters – but with his potential unfulfilled. His decline was blamed on a scandal involving Lydia, the older, married […]
Alfred Tennyson’s Bowels and Other Authorial Ailments
‘… the sufferings of which were dreadful … when I awoke with that horror upon me …’ Charles Dickens had a cold. Man flu? One might wonder when reading the dramatic description of his anguish. But, he was a novelist given to melodrama at times, and, considering the always present possibility of a cold turning […]