The beginning of 2024 has seen some promising author activity for me.
I was very surprised and pleased to learn that Brontë Buddies’ Bookclub Facebook group associated with the Brontë Babe Blog has chosen Without the Veil Between, Anne Brontë: A Fine and Subtle Spirit as its February reading choice.
All are welcome to join the next free online book club on Zoom on Tuesday February 27, 2024, where Without the Veil Between will be discussed along with “anything and everything Brontë and bookish!” Timing will be 7:30 – 9:00 in the UK (2:30 – 4:00 ET). I’m hoping to participate. Click here to register.
Since the fall of last year, I’ve had some lovely interactions with various administrators at The Pre-Raphaelite Society, which is the international society for the study of the lives and art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their circle. All have been very welcoming and supportive of my latest novel The Dove Upon Her Branch, A Novel Portrait of Christina Rossetti, the result being that a full-page ad for the novel is in the works for the upcoming spring 2024 issue in the PRS magazine and a review by one of the society’s team will appear in the summer 2024 issue.
The other opportunity the PRS offered me was to participate in the Pre-Raphaelite Society Podcast to talk about The Dove Upon Her Branch, my motivation, inspiration, challenges, and other things related to my writing about Christina Rossetti. Despite being out of my comfort zone, it was an offer I couldn’t allow myself to refuse. The recording of my podcast with Ester, a lovely young Spanish woman who warmly led the conversation and put me at ease (perhaps, a little too much!), took place last Wednesday, Valentine’s Day. Watch this space for when it will air!
Other news is that The Dove Upon Her Branch, A Novel Portrait of Christina Rossetti is coming soon to Audible! A superb narrator is currently in the process of recording it. Again, watch this space for its release.
This means that all four of my novels
will be available as audio books!
Here’s a recent review of The Dove Upon Her Branch by superb author of fiction, memoir, and poetry, Mary Clark. Please check out her website, Literary Eyes and publications at Goodreads and Amazon.
The fine tapestry of words in The Dove Upon Her Branch evokes a life lived more in the shadows than the light, but also reveals Christina Rosetti’s verve and certainty of talent.
Christina struggled with depression and had a penchant for the downbeat in her poems. Perhaps she meant to shock, at least to get the reader’s attention. She was a Rosetti, after all. Her poetry explored borderless areas on the edge of life, touched by death. She had an intuitive sense of human relationships and a feeling, or belief, that the divine is within our grasp.
Her brother Dante Gabriel Rosetti rocketed to fame, but this is Christina’s story, and she is always kept in the foreground of the reader’s consciousness. While she ostensibly accepted her time’s proscribed limits on women’s behavior, she also moved through the artistic world, posing for paintings, and giving critiques. Dante not only encouraged her writing but arranged for her poetry to be published, in a complex relationship between the two of competition and the desire to please, in fact, to be loved. Dante’s reckless courage in defiance of society taught her the downfall of that approach.
Within her family she was able to be safe, to be herself, and to keep a space where she could exercise her freedom. Several relationships with suitors died on the vine, no small part due to her own decisions. No judgments are made by the author, only hints that in Christina feelings of regret may have lingered along with knowledge that the decisions had their positive side. This may be one reason her work appealed to Virginia Woolf.
For the inner story of Christina Rosetti and exposure to her life’s work, I recommend Diane Denton’s The Dove Upon Her Branch.
Read review on Goodreads and Amazon
Have you read the novel? If not, hope you will add it to your reading list. If you have read it, I hope you will consider posting a review and/rating.
And my last news for this post: I have begun a new novel, another biographical, historical fiction, this time about the early 20th century Shropshire novelist, poet, and essayist Mary Webb, most famous for her novels Gone to Earth and Precious Bane and Poems and Spring of Joy. Check out The Mary Webb Society for more about Mary and her writing.
Thank you, as always,
for your support!
©Artwork and writing, unless otherwise indicated, are the property of Diane M Denton. Please request permission to reproduce or post elsewhere with a link back to bardessdmdenton. Thank you.
bardessdmdenton - author- artist 