Browning
Posted by Cassia on October 29, 1997 at 14:04:49:
In response to Time and effort well spent, written by Jane Elizabeth on October 29, 1997 at 13:48:32
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] ] I actually wish she had just used one of those guys as her model. Her "composite" poet is taking up toooo much of my time. ]
] Well, I appreciate it! Your findings have been fascinating and have really added depth to this third reading for me.
I always wondered why Ellen Ash was called Ellen when her sisters are Patience and Faith.
In her interview with the Times (London) after her Booker win Byatt says that Browning was the poet she most modeled Ash on, especialldy the low regard in which he is held by 20 c audiences. Browning was out of fashion from the mid-fifties until the present, although some scholars are now willing to conceed that he had a positive influence on the poetry of his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Still I do think that wince she knows her subject so well, it would be easy for her to transplant bit of the lives of Tennyson, Keats, and other writers quite easily and not necessarily realise that was what she was doing. It may drive us batty but it makes us think.
This debate has reminded me of an episode of The Charlie Rose Show when he had on the actors from a Lincoln centre production of the bio of an English painter (Stanley Something, I can never remeber the name but Northerner left his wife for a woman {a lesbian} who took him for his home ect.) The actor playing Stanley said that he actually had to work so much harder for the American audiences since not everyone knew the story than for British audiences where one could assume things. Someone was telling me something similar about Les Mis as well. So all of the cutting and pasting Byatt did was to make sure we weren't allowed to fall back on our assumptions about Victorian men of letters.
My God, that was long winded.
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