The Taste of Sorrow (A novel of the Brontës) - a must-read!

Patrick Brontë, father of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, et al, remembered his Irish father working in fields, so poor that he had to suck on a pebble to keep his mouth from going dry..."That is the taste of sorrows: the hard necessary pebble in your mouth."

The whole of The Taste of Sorrow (aka Charlotte & Emily in the U.S.) by Jude Morgan is like that.  Poetic, layered, and somber, until the sun breaks in at the end with Charlotte's marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father's curate and fellow Irishman.  Despite Charlotte dying less than a year after she was married, I was so happy that the poor woman finally tasted something other than the sorrow that weighted her down for most of her life.

The Taste of Sorrow is not just the best book I've read this year, it's one of the best books I've ever read.  I'm a fan of both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, as well as Elizabeth Gaskell's fabulous The Life of Charlotte Brontë, and know well the story of the talented by doomed Brontë family.  The mother from Cornwall who died an agonizing early death, leaving five young daughters and one young son.  The Old Testament father whose eccentricities both nourished and starved his children, both mentally and physically. The deaths of the two oldest girls at a school that Charlotte Brontë would immortalize and condemn for the ages as Lowood School in Jane Eyre.  The childhoods of the four remaining children who escaped into fantasy worlds that they documented in miniature books.  The drunken debauchery of the golden boy, Branwell.  The silent stoicism of the reclusive Emily.  The determination of shy Anne.  And the grit, gumption, and sheer chutzpah of Charlotte.

Morgan's book doesn't really reveal anything I hadn't already read in bios about the Brontës, but his writing makes the story new and fresh and heart-breaking all over again.  My copy has an endorsement by Hilary Mantel on the cover, which is appropriate because The Taste of Sorrow really reminded me a lot of Wolf Hall.  Mostly in present tense, often stream-of-consciousness, but not in a hard-to-understand way, and frequent use of free indirect discourse.  I loved how in a single paragraph, Morgan could convey the four points of view of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne, enabling the reader to feel the tension and alliances and baggage between the four.

My favorite part was when Charlotte, Emily, and Anne were working on their first three novels, and would write at night in the dining room.  Pacing around the table, reading aloud, rewriting...the three weird sisters, concocting their literary magic.  I also really enjoyed hearing about Charlotte's first meeting with Elizabeth Gaskell and their friendship.

I didn't intend to finish the novel and post about it on Charlotte's birthday, so imagine my delight when I realized that Charlotte Brontë was born 198 years ago today, April 21!

Final note - here is a great blog post entitled The Secret Life of Jude Morgan.  Like the blogger who wrote this piece, I struggle with understanding Morgan's lack of notoriety.  His historical fiction is some of the very best around.  Here's my review of Passion, his novel about the Romantic poets and their women.

The Taste of Sorrow is one of my books on my 2014 Historical Fiction Challenge and the 2014 TBR Pile Challenge.

Mailbox Monday

Mailbox Monday is on a monthly blog tour and for the month of September it is being hosted by BookNAround.

This week I got two must-reads from Paperbackswap.com

The first is Charlotte and Emily: A Novel of the Brontes (aka The Taste of Sorrow), by Jude Morgan.  I absolutely loved Morgan's Passion: A Novel of the Romantic Poets.  I have yet to read a novelized version of the Brontes that I like--I loved Elizabeth Gaskell's bio of Charlotte, which many say had lots of fiction in it, but the straight novels have never touched the right chord for me.  I'll be reporting back soon...well, soonish.  I seem to be in the middle of a lot of books right now, and CANNOT start another one yet.

The second is Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer.  I didn't even know this novel existed until I saw the movie last spring and was blown away by how good it was.  Now, I'm eager to see whether the novel is as good as the movie, which is the only 9/11-based work I've experienced.

Passion: A Novel of the Romantic Poets

Passion: A Novel of the Romantic Poets, by Jude Morgan, blew me away it was so good.  It's a bit of a ruse to say that it's a novel of the Romantic poets as it really is more of a novel of the women behind the Romantic poets, but that is by no means a criticism of the book.

The Romantic poets whose stories are told from the perspective of the women in their lives are Byron, Shelley, and Keats.

With regards to Byron, the leading ladies are the infamous Lady Caroline Lamb and Byron's half-sister, Augusta Leigh, who became as notorious as Lady Caroline when it became known that Byron was the father of at least one of her children, and his wife, Annabella Millbanke.  The latter is portrayed as the only real villain in the novel, which is a refreshingly contrary view to the usual one in which she is portrayed as victim.  Lady Caroline's voice was particularly striking--always first person, usually manic, often sad.  I got the feeling she was truly born in the wrong century.  She would have been a powerhouse in the 1990s!

Lady Caroline Lamb

With regards to Shelley, the novel begins with Mary Wollstonecraft, who died after giving birth to the woman who would become Shelley's wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (aka Mary Shelley).  Mary Shelley's step-sister, Jane/Claire Claremont is also a featured player in the Shelley domestic drama as she lived with the Shelleys almost continuously during their marriage, and she and Shelley had a closer than comfort relationship.

Mary Shelley

Finally, anyone who has seen Bright Star will thrill to know that Fanny Brawne is the sole lady around whom Keats rotates, and theirs is a truly heart-breaking story.  Although the Brawne/Keats story is but a fraction of the novel, with the bulk going to Byron (always the attention hog) and Shelley, I loved this part of the story the most.  Partly because I've loved Keats for decades and partly because their story is so poignant.

Fanny Brawne

Although I am a big fan of historical fiction, it is a rare historical fiction author who can really capture the tone, style, feeling, and sense of a timeframe and a real historical personage and make them sound true and real and not just a 21st century person in period dress.  Jude Morgan is an absolute master of the genre and I cannot praise him enough for making Byron, Shelley, Keats, Caroline, Augusta, Mary, Jane/Claire, and Fanny come to life in this novel.

What I particularly loved about this novel is that Morgan shows fully developed people, warts and all--no sugar coating here, no pandering to genius, but at the same time no denigration of the genius that clearly shone forth in the three poets and Mary Shelley.  They display the most human failings--all the seven deadly sins are there in abudance--but you can see how those failings are but a side-show to the literary work they do take seriously.

It was also very interesting to read a view of Regency England that varies so much from the Austenian world I'm used to.  For the most part, there really wasn't a place in England for Byron and Shelley considering how they wanted to live their lives. 

This book made me renew my pledge to read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein this year as well as find a good bio of Mary.  I particularly liked the relationship between Mary and Byron--she might have been the one woman who didn't try to seduce him and vice versa and they seemed to really understand each other's genius to a degree that I didn't see between any of the other characters, including Mary and Shelley.  Interestingly, we never really see or hear Shelley and Byron talking to each other without one or more of their women present, nor do we see either interacting at all with Keats.  This is the story of the women, not their famous men. 

The other Jude Morgan novel that looks particularly good is The Taste of Sorrow, about the Brontes. I have yet to read a fictionalized version of the Brontes that I like so I'm hopeful given what he was able to do with Passion.