Newsnight Review discussed a newly discovered novella by Charlotte Bronte.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK LAWSON:
Jeanette, it's being publicised as a great literary find. Is it?

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
No, it isn't. It can't be a classic because it was only published today, and classics have to stand the test of time. We need more than 12 hours. It's the minutiae. It will give academics something to do for the next 20 years. For the reader, it doesn't give us a fresh way into the work. It's certainly not Jane Eyre. I wouldn't go out and buy it.

LAWSON:
We have to say, they are making huge claims on this. They say "wittier and more ironic than anything published in her lifetime." It's spin.

WINTERSON:
They have to say that. I was spoken to by a literary editor saying the phone has been jammed all day. It's hit the market right. It's not about literature. It's about promotion.

EKOW ESHUN:
Man, I loved it. Such a nice boy!

LAWSON:
Was this your first Charlotte Bronte experience?

ESHUN:
Yes, it was! It seemed modern and cinematic. It's taken in excerpts, quite short bits. It read like a screenplay. It's seen through the eyes of a foppish dandy. He sees the world through gestures, signs, fashions. He talks about how he spends half an hour dressing in front of the mirror, and then another half an hour looking at himself in the mirror. I loved the way that all of this world is described through detail and gesture. There is a great scene, near the ends of this, when the duke, who is the monarch of this kingdom, faces a riot. All the rude mechanicals of the state waving their pitch forks in his face. The dandy is describing the scene and describes how the duke stands up and pushes his hand through his hair. That gesture alone stills the riot before him. The Duke has so much power that he doesn't have to do very much. But because it's a dandy describing that scene...

WINTERSON:
But it's not well written.

ESHUN:
You see it through gesture. I love the way all of this comes through in visual, cinematic moments.

PAUL MORLEY:
I thought it might have been Ruby Wax locked away in a room for a few days and she's delivered this. It's interesting to see an imagination coalesce into what it became with Jane Eyre. Then I dipped in again and I got carried away. There was an example of supernatural, divine imagination coalescing into something. You see surrealism, and jazz before Charlie Parker. I am getting carried away.

LAWSON:
Come on. Curiously, books were often more cinematic before cinema than they are now.

MORLEY:
It's not surprising unless you are coming in from a virginal angle.

ESHUN:
Because it seems to be outside the social construct, outside Victorian life, it becomes a thing of pure pleasure, because it's not about realism any more.

WINTERSON:
There's a fairy tale side of it. Didn't any of these sentences bother you?

MORLEY:
Yes. Then I forgave it because it was 120 years ago and she was only 23.

LAWSON:
If this had been found in a drawer and simply said, "A novel by a lady", it wouldn't be published.

MORLEY:
But you would have been puzzled by the hallucinatory nature of it, as if they were on opium.

ESHUN:
I agree. There is a weird science fiction quality to it.

MORLEY:
Jefferson Aeroplane discovered this before a whole album was made about it.

LAWSON:
Some people are going to be very surprised.

MORLEY:
It's Ruby Wax, ahead of her time!

WINTERSON:
Are we sure this isn't a Red Nose Day joke?!

LAWSON:
We don't think it is, but as Jeanette says, they have published it rather evocatively in Penguin Classics.