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Many of the podcasts in the Great Writers Inspire project seek to indicate ways in which readers can engage critically with texts,

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themes and authors in order to find great writing inspiring.

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Just as those who read literature find writers and their works fascinating, so writers in their turn, find other writing fascinating.

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Writers generally are prolific readers for it is in the pages of other books that many authors learn to glory in the new type of literary writing,

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just as they hope their own readers will do so,

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revealing to scholars or authors reading habits that many authors bequeath not only their letters,

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manuscripts and diaries to university libraries, but often their whole personal library.

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The Irish modernist James Joyce is one such example.

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And Michael Gillespie's catalogue of James Joyce's Tree Library from 1986 gives an insight into the reading habits of the biblical flick author,

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who collected six hundred and twenty three volumes over twenty years in Trace.

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Virginia Woolf's personal library is also interesting because it includes four volumes that she resigned herself to volumes of Jack Emil Blanches,

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Cahiers du artist Autoline Morales, a farewell message and Alfred's weakness.

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Didn't put the time and effort Wolf would have taken to recover.

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These books indicates that they may have been well loved and well used.

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Many of the other podcasts in this series situate writers on their works within political and social contexts

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or relate to the author's own life experiences may have impacted on their writing and how it was received.

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These aspects are undoubtedly important, but it is also worth considering how certain texts respond not just social,

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personal and political contexts, but also to literary contexts.

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How the literary texts respond to other literary texts.

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Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel, Jane Eyre, could be an interesting starting point on our journey.

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This well-known novel charts the life of the title heroine,

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first revealing her childhood with abusive aunts and cousins and later up the oppressive Lowood school.

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She then becomes a governess up filled hall where she falls in love with her employer, Edward Rochester.

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He proposes marriage, but when it is revealed he is already married to Bertha,

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who is not incarcerated as a married woman in the attic tea and leaves Anfield and is taken in by some relations, the religious rivers family.

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The man of that house, also proposes marriage, which would make Jane and missionaries wife.

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But she can't accept this offer and returns to a chain store and filled.

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Rochester's first wife has set the house on fire and killed herself.

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And so Jane accepts a proposal of marriage from the injured Rochester.

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The final chapter opens reader. I married him on that.

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As far as the romance narrative goes, should be that.

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Except it isn't the end of the novels until the story of Jane Eyre was so poignant that it influenced the creation of other works.

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Daphne Demaryius 1938 novel Rebecca is one example of a tale heavily inspired by Bronte's novel The Second Wife of Mr. de Winter.

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The new Mrs. Winter finds she can't live up to her predecessor,

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undermined by a villainous housekeeper called Mrs. Danvers until the knotty and disturbing truth of the matter ice.

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In 1966, Jean Reese also published a novel inspired by the events of Jane Eyre,

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Wide Sargasso Sea is a postcolonial prequel which takes the tale of the Imade first wife,

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Antoinette, who would become known as Bertha as its sympathetic protagonist, covering her early life in Jamaica.

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The early years of her marriage to Edward Rochester in Dominica and her time in the attic of Thorne Field Hall.

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Wide Sargasso Sea is a very different novel to Jane Eyre, reflecting the growing concern with feminism and post-colonial AP in novels.

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But the tale couldn't exist, at the very least wouldn't have the same meaning without that first text as its source of inspiration.

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There are many, many other novels which have been influenced or inspired by Jane Eyre.

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And one of the reasons to read great writing is to recognise its influence when it appears

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the owner has moved with the times and has even been retooled in the horror mash up genre,

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which is popular today with the heroine recast as a vampire slayer in the 2010 novel Gene Flare.

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Yet the tale of the literary afterlife of Bronte, this novel is but one facet of the tale.

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Bronte herself was influenced by romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Lord Byron,

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and she and her sisters read novels from their father's library, including the works of Sir Walter Scott, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

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The family also subscribed to Blackwood's Magazine, and they shared their own work amongst themselves to proofread or offer advice.

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Inspiration is described in dictionaries such as the Oxford English as a kind of prompting awakening or even on absorption or inhalation.

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For writers, however, the kind of inspiration which comes from great writers can be seen to be more antagonistic.

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The presence of great writing is problematic for an aspiring creator because if greatness already exists,

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the challenge in creating more is increased since it will be judged by a gold standard.

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The reading which writers do is a dangerous endeavour because they run the risk of

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being influenced too much and being accused thereby of imitation or derivation,

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rather than the much grander state of literary originality and innovation.

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Yet, by studying a work in close detail, writers can hope not merely to imitate it,

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but to inhabit the greatness which created it, and in doing so, attempt to do the achievement of the first work.

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Wilfred Owen, one of the great poets of the First World War,

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spent much of his youth imitating the poetry of the romantic John Keats in a manner akin to hero worship.

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His early poems, such as on seeing a lot of cases hair, are clearly derivative of Keats, his own poetry.

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In this case, the old lines on seeing a lot of Milton's hair.

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In 1915, the year he enlisted, Owen wrote that the only thing that would hold him together would be the sense

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that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats on the rest of them wrote.

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Yet it was the influence of the Great War on the slightly older poet Siegfried Sassoon,

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which brought Odin's walk away from this imitative mood and into the much stronger and individual voice of his later war poetry.

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The critic, Harold Bloom, wrote in 1973 about the anxiety of influence.

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He claimed that poets are essentially hindered in writing by the presence of precursor poets.

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The poet in a poet is inspired to write by reading other poets,

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and that work will be weak and anxiety ridden until the younger writer can forge an original vision by wrestling with their influences.

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This process, Blum contends, is what separates the minority of strong or great writers from the rest of the literary field.

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It is inspiration and influence until writers address them.

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That effectively creates great writers and the literary tradition. T.S. Eliot, the poet, editor and critic,

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inspiration and influence are not necessarily a damaging force in his 1919 essay Tradition on the Individual Talent.

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Elliott claims that a poet must embody the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer, as well as responding to the contemporary context.

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In this theory, poets don't have to be original because of their difference from other writers, but rather in truly great poetry.

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All the writers of history lived through the new writing, asserting their immortality most vigorously.

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Whether or not you feel that inspiration and influence is a haunting or a battle to overcome,

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what seems clear is that while influence and inspiration can be a troubling and antagonistic relationship for great writers as readers,

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so tuning works within the context of other related works can be stimulating 18 races wide

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Sargasso Sea without Charlotte Bronte and there would be a lesser text and at the same time,

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for modern readers, sea and air is a lesser text with 18 races back story.

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Great writers inspire great writing. Which means perhaps future generations have much to look forward to.

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Thank you for listening.