Front Row Review: The Bride! Maggie Gyllenhaal's film about the bride of Frankenstein
Mar 5, 2026
Seán Doran, artistic director behind Northern Literary Lands, outlines a bid to make an eleven-county region a UNESCO literary area. Rebecca Stott, novelist and academic, talks novels, creative writing and reading culture. Robbie Collin, Telegraph film critic, delivers sharp takes on Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride and other contemporary films.
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Bad Fiction Probes Creative Writing Power Dynamics
- Bad Fiction by Rebecca Sarah Lay explores creative-writing class dynamics, unreliable narrators, and how life bleeds into fiction through a charismatic teacher figure, Sophie Muller.
- Rebecca Stott recognises the heady atmosphere of creative writing courses but feels the book's campus relationships and predation elements didn't ring true to her experience.
Novel Teases Veiled Memoir And Appropriation
- The novel toys with readers' suspicion that a celebrated author's life might be stitched from students' work and invites meta-reading about how much fiction is veiled memoir.
- Robbie notes the book deliberately teases the 'veiled memoir' canard and the hunger to trace fiction back to authorial experience.
First Book Smuggled From A Banned Home
- Rebecca Stott recounts stealing or secretly taking her first book from a school library at age six because books were banned at home.
- The book was Enid Blyton's The Secret Island and it sparked her lifelong love of reading and writing.
