My Review: The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life by Graham Watson

 

Charlotte Brontë had a life as seemingly dramatic as her heroine Jane Eyre. Turning her back on her tragic past, Charlotte reinvented herself as an acclaimed author, a mysterious celebrity, and a passionate lover. Doing so meant burning many bridges, but her sudden death left her friends and admirers with more questions than answers.

Tasked with telling the truth about Brontë’s life, her friend, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, uncovered secrets of illicit love, family discord, and professional rivalries more incredible than any fiction. The result, a tell-all biography, was so scandalous it was banned and rewritten twice in six months—but not before it had given birth to the legend of the Brontës.

The Invention of Charlotte Brontë presents a different, darker take on one of the most famous women writers of the nineteenth century, showing Charlotte to be a strong but flawed individual. Through evaluating key events as well as introducing new archival material into the story, this lively biography challenges the established narrative to reveal the Brontë family as they’ve never been seen before.

• Publisher: Pegasus Books (August 5, 2025)
• Length: 288 pages
• ISBN13: 9781639369355

Marriage certainly makes a difference in some things and amongst others the disposition and consumption of time. I really seem to have had scarcely a spare moment... Not that I have been hurried or oppressed but the fact is my time is not my own now, somebody else wants a good portion of it and says we must do so and so. We do 'so and so' accordingly, and it generally seems the right thing-only I sometimes wish that I could have written the letter as well as taken the walk.

My life is changed indeed:  to be wanted continually, to be constantly called for and occupied seems so strange:  yet it is a marvellously good thing. As yet I don't quite understand how some wives grow so selfish. As far as my experience of matrimony goes, I think it tends to draw you out of and away from yourself. (Mrs. Nicholls aka Charlotte Bronte) 

Graham Watson focuses on the last five years (1850-1855) of the life of Charlotte Bronte who becomes Charlotte Nicholls. In this debut biography, the reader meets the friend circle of Charlotte Bronte:  Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriett Martineau, Kay Shuttleworth and Ellen Nussey. You will get to know who is a trusted friend of Charlotte Bronte and who is not. The relationship between Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell is key because of the first biography Gaskell will write and publish in 1857 two years after the death of her friend.  The reader is left to form their own opinion regarding Charlotte's individual friendship with each of them which is an aspect of the biography that I truly enjoy.  Currer Bell is brought into the frame while Charlotte Bronte is the last of her sisters to have her novels published. Aspects of Jane Eyre and Villette are discussed in various chapters. The Jane Eyre connection with a certain Mr. Thackeray shows the fangirl side of Charlotte Bronte. In 1853, Charlotte read a review of Villette posing the question, "What kind of circumstances produced women in revolt like Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe?" Charlotte wrote a letter replying in explanation to answer his question. I absolutely loved the letter excerpts that author, Graham Watson uses throughout, The Invention of Charlotte Bronte: A New Life. There is nothing better than reading the words of Charlotte Bronte herself in various situations and aspects of the last years of her single and brief married life. 

It was heartbreaking yet fascinating reading about the aspects of Charlotte Bronte and Rev. Patrick Bronte's life together, just the two of them in the parsonage.  Patrick Bronte is ailing and aging while Charlotte Bronte takes care of him all the while becoming a published author and wife of the man that her father is hell bent against her marrying. I am so glad Charlotte didn't listen to her father and for a very brief few moments was truly loved as a woman and wife. 

Graham Watson has shown us Charlotte Bronte as: Friend, Author, Daughter, and Mrs. Arthur Bell Nicholls as Wife.  The Invention of Charlotte Bronte: A New Life debut biography by Graham Watson is a treasure to behold. 

To purchase the book directly from the publisher, Simon & Schuster 

To purchase from, Amazon 

Book Review: The Fisherman’s Gift by Julia Kelly

The sea stole him from her. Could it bring him back?

Winter, 1900. A little boy washes up on the beach of a small fishing village in Scotland, barely alive. He bears an uncanny resemblance to teacher Dorothy's son, lost to the sea many years before.

When the village is snowed in, Dorothy agrees to look after the child until he can be returned home. But, as the past rises to meet the present, long-buried secrets in this tight-knit community start to come to light. And Dorothy finds herself thrown together again with the reclusive fisherman Joseph, after years of keeping their distance.

Debut novel based in the United Kingdom

Publisher UK: Vintage, Harvill Secker

Publisher US:  Simon & Schuster 

Publishing Date UK:  6 March 2025

Publishing Date US:  March 18 2025

The Stolen Child by WB Yeats

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles 
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

Julia Kelly interweaves aspects of Yeats poem heartbreakingly beautifully to describe Dorothy’s son Moses drowning in the sea. This disturbing loss sends Dorothy into trauma she cannot heal from. Especially, years later when a small boy washes up onshore bearing a strong resemblance to her son. 

Written in a dual era storyline, The Fisherman’s Gift  tells the backstory of the hardships Dorothy experiences with her female neighbors in this remote Scottish fishing village. 

I found The Fisherman’s Gift deeply moving and I couldn’t put it down. My heart broke for Dorothy but I could appreciate her steadfastness she had for the people in her life. 

My Review of Dangerous A Lord Byron Mystery By Essie Fox

When fiction is fatal…  

Living in exile in Venice, the disgraced Lord Byron revels in the freedoms of the city But when he is associated with the deaths of local women, found with wounds to their throats, and then a novel called The Vampyre is published under his name, rumours begin to spread that Byron may be the murderer…  

As events escalate and tensions rise – and his own life is endangered, as well as those he holds most dear – Byron is forced to play detective, to discover who is really behind these heinous crimes. Meanwhile, the scandals of his own infamous past come back to haunt him…  

Publishing Company: Orenda Books (U.K.)

Publication Date: Hardback 24 April 2025, eBook 25 April 2025.

Lord Byron the enigmatic cad enjoying his time in Venice, Italy. He can’t help it if women continuously throw themselves at him. What’s a romantic poet to do? Throw in a doppelgänger, a sidekick named John Polidori and a story called, The Vampyre; you have a recipe for a gothic mystery. Oh yes but the key question here is is Lord Byron a murderer running around the canals of Venice Italy killing women? You’ll have to read Dangerous by Essie Fox to find out! 
Dangerous is a fun and exciting read. A clever, not so serious depiction of an aspect of Lord Byron’s life where his reputation precedes him and continues to get him into trouble. 
Dangerous is a perfect gothic mystery in every way. You will laugh along with Lord Byron and you will start to doubt those around him as the mystery unfolds and secrets come out.  However, Venice is the star of this show whispering her secrets in the wee hours of the night while the moonlight reflects off the water along the grand canal. 
Thank you to Karen Sullivan of Orenda Books and Netgalley for my review copy of Dangerous by Essie Fox.

Julia Margaret Cameron Upcoming Exhibition: Arresting Beauty May 30th - September 14th, 2025 The Morgan Library & Museum, NYC

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
Call I Follow, I Follow, Let Me Die
1867
Carbon print
35.1cm x 26.7cm
© The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A, acquired with the generous assistance of the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Art Fund

Julia Margaret Cameron photograph by Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, 1870 V&A

“I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.” — Julia Margaret Cameron

The following text is from The Morgan Library & Museum website:

Arresting Beauty:  Julia Margaret Cameron explores the path-breaking career of photography's first widely recognized artist. Cameron (1815-1879) was born in Calcutta modern day Kolkata to a French mother and English father, in 1848; with her husband and children, she moved to England where her sisters introduced her to the elite cultural circles in which they traveled. Residing on the Isle of Wight, where she was close neighbors with the poet Alfred Tennyson, Cameron acquired her first camera at age 48. In only eleven years she would create thousands of exposures and leave an enduring image of the Victorian era as an age of intellectual and spiritual ambition.

Cameron's prodigious drive helped her become a probing portraitist of leading writers, artists, and scientists, such as Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, G.F. Watts, and Charles Darwin, while her absorption with fine art, notably Renaissance painting, led her to create staged tableaux in a model that has been perpetually rediscovered by photographers down to the present. Most distinct of all was Cameron's wholly personal handling of her medium. Heedless of contemporary conventions of technique, alert to the happy effects of accident and indifferent to critical scorn, she embraced a style of spontaneous intimacy, that distanced her from the photographic establishment of her time and class. Motion blur, highly selective faces, and even fingerprints on the glass negatives (which required developing before their emulsions dried) are among the idiosyncrasies of her singular oeuvre.

Cameron was quick to exploit publishing and promotional opportunities: at London's South Kensington Museum (today the Victoria & Albert Museum) she secured not only an exhibition in 1865 but, a few years later, studio space, and she was the first photographic artist to be collected by the institution. Arresting Beauty features prints from its initial purchase, and from subsequent additions to its holdings, which have grown to number nearly one thousand. The exhibition includes Cameron's large camera lens (all that survives of her apparatus), pages from her unfinished memoir in manuscript, Annals of My Glass House, and portraits she made in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) after Cameron and her husband moved there in 1875.

Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron was created by the V&A - Touring the World

 Arresting Beauty Exhibition   Morgan Library and Museum exhibition link

2025 Books I Love, Read, To Be Read & Currently Reading!

2025 has started out with some beautifully written novels that tell stories capturing themes of hope, love, loss, grief and trauma. I love discovering new authors such as, Julia Kelly and Ronnie Turner. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have.

The sea stole him from her. Could it bring him back?

Winter, 1900. A little boy washes up on the beach of a small fishing village in Scotland, barely alive. He bears an uncanny resemblance to teacher Dorothy's son, lost to the sea many years before.

When the village is snowed in, Dorothy agrees to look after the child until he can be returned home. But, as the past rises to meet the present, long-buried secrets in this tight-knit community start to come to light. And Dorothy finds herself thrown together again with the reclusive fisherman Joseph, after years of keeping their distance.

Debut novel based in the United Kingdom

Publisher: Vintage, Harvill Secker

Publishing Date: 6 March 2025

When fiction is fatal…  

Living in exile in Venice, the disgraced Lord Byron revels in the freedoms of the city But when he is associated with the deaths of local women, found with wounds to their throats, and then a novel called The Vampyre is published under his name, rumours begin to spread that Byron may be the murderer…  

As events escalate and tensions rise – and his own life is endangered, as well as those he holds most dear – Byron is forced to play detective, to discover who is really behind these heinous crimes. Meanwhile, the scandals of his own infamous past come back to haunt him…  

Publishing Company: Orenda Books (U.K.)

Publication Date: Hardback 24 April 2025, eBook 25 April 2025

TO BE READ

Suspected of murdering their parents, sisters Lily and Della flee to a strange, unnamed island in Scotland, and their arrival puts in motion a horrifying series of events… Literary suspense meets folk horror in 2025’s most original, mesmerising modern gothic masterpiece…

Publication Date: 27 February 2025

Format: paperback

Pages:  300

Publisher:  Orenda Books

Subject:  Thriller/Suspense

CURRENTLY READING

A moving, redemptive novel about the unexpected friendship between Marilyn Monroe and a young maid whose life will be changed forever...

Pauline, a young chambermaid who works at the legendary Mapes Hotel in Reno, Nevada, is asked to step in for a colleague and clean Suite 614. Although she was told the rooms were empty, a dazed, sleepy woman appears before her. This is Mrs. Miller, aka Marilyn Monroe, whose stay in Reno coincides with the breakdown of her marriage to Arthur Miller and the filming of what was to be her last film, The Misfits.

 

Set in the American West in 1960 where the mustang horses run wild, an unexpected friendship unfolds between the most famous movie star in the world and a young cleaning woman whose life will be changed forever through the course of a few weeks. A testament to the enduring power of female friendship and a reimagining of a side of Marilyn Monroe that has never been seen before.

U.S.Publishing Company: Grand Central Publishing a division of Hachette Books

Pages:  320

Publishing Date:  June 3, 2025