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Jill Jones, EMILY'S SECRET,
New York, St. Martin's, 1995 novel, paper, 355 pp. Two reviews by Patrick Killough (07/04/2005) --(A) Review for www.barnesandnoble.com Here is how your review will appear on the title page: Patrick Killough (patrick@thekilloughs.com), a reader of John Henry Newman, July 5, 2004, Review's Title: 'What-if' fiction recreates history Author Jill Jones wrote of EMILY'S SECRET that her version of the life and death of 19th Century writer Emily Jane Bronte (WUTHERING HEIGHTS) might well have happened, though evidence is sadly lacking. Jones likes to explore 'this type of 'what-if' scenario.'" EMILY'S SECRET came out in 1995. Its plot is strikingly parallel to (perhaps derivative from) that of A.S. Byatt's POSSESSION: A ROMANCE which was published in 1990 and won the Booker Prize in Britain. In both tales two modern researchers of opposite sexes probe the lives of 19th Century Victorian literary figures whose DNA carries on into their own milieu. Gwyneth Paltrow appeared in the 2002 movie version of POSSESSION. Any fiction that shows scholarship as romantic, duplicitous and competitive will win a readership. EMILY'S SECRET may also more usefully inspire some readers to dig directly for themselves into the mysteries of the improbably creative Bronte siblings. Also recommended: A.S. Byatt, POSSESSION. Rudolf Besier, THE BARRETTS OF WIMPOLE STREET. Richard Matheson, SOMEWHERE IN TIME. --(B) Review for www.amazon.com Rating: *** Review's Title: Historical Imagination meets DNA Reviewer: Patrick Killough from Black Mountain, NC United States Was it possible for Emily Bronte to write passionately of a dark lover (WUTHERING HEIGHTS's Heathcliff) without herself having first had a romance with someone very like him? Author Jill Jones imagines that it was so. For no chaste unmarried English lady in the 1840s could have written the poems and novel that Emily Bronte in fact wrote without having met an injured gypsy horse trader on the moors and fallen madly in love. Having taught him to read and write, she eventually carries his child. But the fear of being expelled from her family, should her secret become known, causes Emily to commit voluntary suicide through a combination of starvation and refusal to see a doctor after taking a chill. Thus far the historical imagination of Jill Jones. Nearly 150 years later two competing scholars of the Brontes and two descendants of Mikel the gypsy lover blunder together through the evidence for Emily's secret. In the process they give rein to their own 20th century passions, including lust, jealousy, envy, greed and romance. DNA has its own way of telescoping time. This book's greatest value is its potential to motivate young readers to pick up the poems and novels of the three Bronte sisters and read them with fresh eyes -OOO- |