Brontes, Women's Literature Surveys, cave paintings, marketing, Press Effect

I read three studies of women and literature: Showalter's A Literature of One's Own, Spack's Female Imagination, and Madwoman in the Attic by Gilbert and Gubar. I enjoyed, indeed devoured each of them. I found myself sharing the self-consciousness and the impostor syndrome of all these authors, and I hadn't given much thought to what all these novels said about women. I also found I had read much of what they had referred to: Eliot and the Brontes and Austen and Dickinson and Sand. It was an unadulterated pleasure. I just finished a biography of Charlotte Bronte. All I can do is repeat what I said to my boyfriend as he left this morning to go to the farmer's market: the Brontes keep dying. This biography was by Rebecca Fraser. The next one I'm just starting is by Juliet Barker. I'm also 200 pages into The Nature of Paleolithic Art, by Dale Guthrie. I had read of this book elsewhere, and there was a suggestion that the author was full of himself. It is frequent to find this in an academic, but it rarely comes across in what amounts to a textbook. It does here, despite the care and the completeness and the thoroughness.

I also devoured Hall and Waldman's Press Effect: this confirmed much of what I thought of the bias of the press towards established narrative, except that the roots went much further than I thought, and that the journalists in the US I most admire are also falling prey to this. I also read The Long Tail, about the move beyond limited consumer options. I found it much better written that The Black Swan. I also read La Grande Mademoiselle's memoirs, which were as self-centered as their reputation made them out to be.