Category: English language

Emily Jane Brontë (1818-48) was part of a tragic but creative family in Yorkshire which produced what are now regarded as classic English literary works. Her own was called ‘Wuthering Heights‘ (1847), a story of vengeance, death, love and cruelty and it challenged Victorian ideas about class. Without the normal morality lesson, it was panned by critics at the time.

Emily herself died of tuberculosis aged only 30, just a year after the book was first published. The featured image is of Haworth House, the parsonage where she and her family lived and all but the youngest, Anne, died. Although Emily and her siblings loved the moors near their home, the district did not have good sanitation and the water supply was polluted, sadly.

Indeed, in the industrial town of Haworth at that time, life expectancy was a mere 19-25 years, but Emily’s Irish father, Patrick (1777-1861, original surname Brunty), had been given a job for life there so did not consider moving away. He outlived all his family ~ his wife, his son and his five daughters, of whom Emily was the fourth.

(Top image: DS Pugh at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The writer Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad (“V.S.”) Naipaul died in August 2018, just short of his 86th birthday. He was born in Trinidad in 1932 but studied in England at Oxford University as a young man and became a British citizen. He wrote more than thirty books, including ‘A House for Mr Biswas’ (1961) and ‘In a Free State’ (1971) for which he won that year’s Booker Prize.

He wrote both fiction and non-fiction and in various styles, from comic to bleak.

The video below is of a short speech he gave in 2001 during the Nobel Prize awards event, at which he was honoured with the Prize in Literature.

(Top image of Naipaul in 2016: Faizul Latif Chowdhury at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)