A difficult woman

In her piece on The Wuthering Heights in The Guardian, Kathryn Hughes rehashes and twists facts and claims from the Brontë-related literature of the past thirty years to portray the author as a “ruthlessly self-defined artist” who was “self-interested, pragmatic and stonily indifferent to her moral responsibilities.”

The reader, apparently, is presumed to be ignorant of book reviews, to say nothing of books on the Haworth siblings by literary scholars and historians. Try Googling the archive of the London Review of Books for “Brontë.” It will help to put Hughes’ article in perspective. Perhaps the public is ignorant, after all, but then it needs a remedial crash course, not a two minutes hate.

This said, there are gems in the comment section.