Posts

Showing posts with the label Samantha Ellis

Blogging Anniversary - 10 years

Image
A while ago I checked when I did my first blog post, in order to celebrate with an anniversary post. Well, that day came and went without any reaction from me. Better late than never, so here a reminder of my very first blog post from 24 October 2012.  The book was New Finnish Grammar  by Diego Marani. Marani is an Italian novelist, translator and newspaper columnist. While working as a translator for the European Union he invented a language ‘Europanto’ which is a mixture of languages and based on the common practice of word-borrowing usage of many EU languages. It was a suitable book to start with, being a book about letters, languages and memories. With a beautiful prose, the novel went directly to my heart.  "One night at Trieste in September 1943 a seriously wounded soldier is found on the quay. The doctor, of a newly arrived German hospital ship, Pietri Friari gives the unconscious soldier medical assistance. His new patient has no documents or anything that can ide...

How to be a Heroine by Samantha Ellis

Image
  Samantha Ellis has recently written a book about Anne Brontë called: Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life.   I was rattending a zoom meeting with The Brussels Brontë Group a couple of weeks ago, where Samantha held a talk about the book, her research and her relationship with the Brontës. A must read. In the meantime, I found one of her earlier books in the library, How to be a Heroine - Or What I Have Learned From Reading Too Much. "While debating literature’s greatest heroines with her best friend, thirtysomething playwright Samantha Ellis has a revelation—her whole life, she's been trying to be Cathy Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights when she should have been trying to be Jane Eyre. With this discovery, she embarks on a retrospective look at the literary ladies—the characters and the writers—whom she has loved since childhood. From early obsessions with the March sisters to her later idolization of Sylvia Plath, Ellis evaluates how her heroines stack up today. A...