Yep… NK Jemison’s agent told her to do the same.
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really?
in what sense?
sometimes, it isn’t sexism…
The Booker prizewinning novelist and critic AS Byatt was originally Antonia Susan Drabble. She acquired the Byatt by marriage, and her nom de plume also conceals that she is the sister of the equally well known novelist Margaret Drabble – famously the sisters do not get on.
(oh in case you are wondering…
A lot of what I write is about the need, the fear, the desire for solitude. I find the Brontës’ joint imagination absolutely appalling.
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It could be both, you know.
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Hmm.
If George Eliot was a woman, might TS Eliot have been hiding something as well?
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I was cleaning out my junkmail folder and came across this article from the new york review of books. Perhaps it is good that the Brontë society is looking towards the future and anticipating the death of the novel.
…The medium of film has a major obstacle to overcome if it is to provide a faithful rendering of a first-person novel, such as the The Great Gatsby: in general, film cameras show everything in the third person, not from the vantage point of a particular character but from a stance separated from any consciousness. If our reading experience of a first-person novel is substantially conditioned by the particular perspective of the character telling the story—when is it not?—then recreating that reading experience through the third person of film is impossible.
There are often other impediments. Time and causation are dealt with differently, flexibly, in novels. Take Fitzgerald’s novel. There’s some doubt about how Jay Gatsby made his money; in the end, Carraway can really only report half-heard hearsay and rumors of historical shady dealings. How could such antecedents be brought into a film narrative while retaining the quality of doubt as to what precisely happened? That doubt or vagueness is, after all, essential in giving us permission to regard Gatsby sympathetically.
What I’m getting at with all this detail is that there’s a basic difference between fiction grounded in the interiority of characters, on the one hand, and film and TV, on the other. Novels do interiority and the drama of the mind infinitely better than TV and film do.
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Huh, why so?
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i wouldn’t rank the deed of writing about women as any particular sign. it could mean one thing or it could mean another.
for literal (literary?) centuries men have been writing about the works of women ( that they haven’t managed to bury ) - in a sense - to take credit for those women’s work.
that role puts them as the arbiter of women’s work. much as man splainers attempt to do. much as men who first ignore and then repeat women’s remarks during office meetings attempt to do. or just as many of the coaches and owners of women’s sports teams just happen to be men.
it’s not that men can’t be honest advocates for women’s work. it’s just that the system already sets men up to be gatekeepers. and here’s a man seeming to act like one. so the burden of proof is on him.
it may seem unfair. but, as a tax on inherent privilege, it’s really not so bad.
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Did you read what jerwin posted? Apparently not. Nice post of yours but only tangentially relevant to this particular case.
And yet, that’s not what the person in question did, not initially; he made it seem personal, needlessly.
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I don’t think you can legitimately criticise people for criticising the way someone chose to express in public their reasons for quitting a group.
He chose to publish his reasons for leaving on his blog.
He could have simply have left.
He could have written to the secretary of the Brontë Society if he wanted to express his reasons in private.
He chose to publish on the internet.
He accordingly chose to present his words to the public. He (or you) can hardly complain if he is judged by them.
As it happens, I agree with you and @jerwin that his actual substantive criticisms are worth considering.
His blog post would be a perfectly legitimate expression of concern about a decision he disagrees with for potentially good reasons - if he had, say, written this:
I am unfortunate enough to have encountered Lily before as a few years ago I had a front row seat of a new play about Helen of Troy at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. Lily had the title role, and the play was so bad that it is the only one I have ever walked out of at the interval.
deleting this:
If the acting was bad, and believe me it was, the dialogue was even worse – one line in particular was of such clunking ineptitude that it has remained with me forever: ‘women smell my power, men smell like sex’. It was when Lily delivered this line with all the passion of the announcer at Piccadilly station that I began longing for the train home.
leaving in:
This was, quite simply, the worst play I have ever seen, and the writer of it? Simon Armitage, the incumbent creative partner at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. So here we see one of the many problems with Lily’s appointment – nepotism. Nepotism is a disease particularly rampant in literature, so that the best way to get a book deal is to be a journalist, a celebrity, or a friend or relative of one. This is particularly evident at this time of year, when newspaper’s lists of the ‘books of the year’ feature writers bigging up those who share the same agent or publisher – an act known as ‘log rolling’. We now have a Brontë log roll, as Simon Armitage passes on the baton to his friend Lily Cole.
and ideally change this bit:
If you don’t know Lily Cole, and you’d be in the majority, she is described as ‘a model and social entrepreneur’ (whatever that is).
by deleting “and you’d be in the majority” because it is pure elitist snobbery since Lily Cole is (as has been pointed out here) a fairly well-known person.
and also remove the reference to her in his view terrible acting from this section:
I have nothing against Lily herself, other than her terrible acting, but against the people who selected her.
If he wanted to point out that there seems to be no good reason to appoint someone with no previous known expressed interest or expertise in the Brontës other than that she is a celebrity who starred in a, in his view terrible, play written by the creative partner of the Society, he could have done so without the irrelevant and entirely unnecessary criticisms of Ms Cole.
Unfortunately, he didn’t do that. He specifically wrote those bits and thought them witty or insightful enough to leave in and publish as part of his complaint about her appointment.
People are perfectly entitled to question whether his criticism of the appointment and the Society generally are fatally undermined by those attacks.
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hmmm. and yet i could swear i was responding to what you said.
this appears to be a conversational derailing technique im unfamiliar with.
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And yet he declined to quit the society over that male creative partner’s appointment on account of writing the horrible play for which he so excoriates Cole merely for appearing in. There’s no getting over that fact. If it was really such a problem for him, then it was still the involvement of a woman that finally spurred him to quit in a huff. Whatever the merits or lack thereof of his complaint about the society’s priorities, they do nothing to expunge that naked act of sexism.
Exactly. I get that people want to ignore his sexism and his whingeing rant because they have some possibly rational sympathy for what they think is his core argument. But he’ll be judged by his own words, not those people would like for him to have written instead. And those people can still voice their own dissatisfaction, if any, in a more prudent and non-sexist manner without trying to rehabilitate Holland’s screed, the unavailing attempt to do so only serves to detract from their own arguments.
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You made general statements regarding male critics. Reminds me of the Stephen Miller method of discussion.
We know what he wrote about Anne Bronte so it isn’t “one thing or the other”.
And I referred to jerwins quotes - which you ignored or didn’t bother to read.
Reading the notices for that particular play, I am reminded that there is real joy to be had in a savage, vindictive review, translating introspective thoughts about art into passionate denunciations of all that formerly thought to be good and holy. The Last Days of Troy is not the kind of bad play that inspires such screeds. In fact it may be a rather good play, if the small sampling of reviews I’ve chanced upon. are to believed.
Nevertheless:
https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2015/the-last-days-of-troy-7/
…with the original stage cast of Simon Armitage’s vigorous adaptation of Homer’s Iliad at Manchester’s Royal Exchange.
“None is more aware of presentiments, of the fleets she’ll be launching, than Cole’s Helen, who speaks in declamatory phrases which lend a contrived air to her every utterance. It doesn’t help that she is paired in her first scene with Clare Calbraith as Hector’s wife Andromache whose fluent naturalism puts Cole at a disadvantage. Later, however, Cole is less overwhelmed by her character’s mythic qualities when she finds rage and passion.”
Presumably, Holland left before the “Later.”
Even handed, level headed criticism is boring. You might as well read a product review. Passionate, unfair, biting criticism is fun to read even if you aren’t familiar what’s being criticized. And that’s the case here. I haven’t read the Brontës in a long long time. There were,perhaps some adaptations, but adaptations can miss the point of the original. So I’m left looking at form. And I’m seeing a form that’s within the domain of the legitimate.
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Oh, I’ve no criticism of his theatre criticism 
as such.
It’s just that this wasn’t a review of the play. It was his apologia for leaving the Society.
As you said, he has good reasons (whether one agrees with him or not). He just undermines them by muddling them up with his admittedly entertaining theatre critique.
His criticism of the Society could be as passionate, unfair and biting as he likes - but why review the play and Lily Cole’s acting?
It’s evidently not her acting ability that annoys him about her selection unless he really means that someone he views as a great actress but otherwise has no apparent qualifications for special expertise in the Brontës would be fine.
So why bring it up, except to be wittily cruel? And thereby risk distracting and detracting from his legitimate complaints.
It would have cost him nothing to be gracious about Ms Cole and he even attempts to claim that he has nothing against her “other than her terrible acting”. If so, why bring her “terrible acting” into it?
What does it gain him? She becomes no more or less legitimate a candidate for the post whether she is a great actress or not.
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It’s entirely possible that his real feud is with Simon Armitage, and Cole is a proxy.
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Even better for his cause, he could have written something like this instead:
Lily Cole is a talented artist, and I admire her interest in contributing to this project. However, out of respect for the Brontë sisters the Society should have filled this particular position with a literary expert on the Brontës. If they felt for reasons of fundraising that it was important to have an actress or similar celebrity in the position, at least they could have found an actress who has portrayed a Brontë character.
By personalizing and misdirecting his attack Holland has made the conversation about him and his views rather than about the reasonable point which he really wants to be making.
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my point was perhaps tangential to the overall discussion.
it was to call out only this: we have anti-abortion crusaders secretly encouraging their mistresses to get them, we have powerful closeted men who have staked their careers on railing against homosexuality, and we have folks like louis ck or bill cosby. these latter have advocated for women as a whole yet have committed serious offences against individual women.
my point is being an advocate for something doesnt mean your actual actions align.
some men use it for cover. some men use it as a new mechanism for power or gatekeeping.
the point stands irrespective of this particular man people are talking about. i don’t have an informed opinion about him.
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