Spelling, nurses and blind characters

In our almost daily dose of weird Brontë connections we have today two Jane Eyre references more or less forced:

The Guardian reports the shooting of the last James Ivory's film The White Countess (that has been already premiered in the US but that opens in the UK this week) with Ralph Fiennes and Natasha Richardson. As Ralph Fiennes plays a blind character that falls in love with Natasha Richardson this seems reason enough to trigger a Rochester-Jane comparison:

When Fiennes joins me during a brief break, I ask him: is Natasha your Jane Eyre and you her Rochester, a man blinded in an accident and thus dependent on her in a lovely romantic way? "Yes, I think so," he says.

The International Herald Tribune publishes a review of the novel Doctors & Nurses by Lucy Ellmann that we presented some days ago. The comments are ...well, read and judge:

She does seem, however, to toy with the notion of Jen as a modern-day Jane Eyre. Complaining about Charlotte Brontë and her heroine, Ellmann asks: "Couldn't she have made her a bit UGLIER? Jane doesn't hate herself ENOUGH." She subjects Jen to a botched Brontëish wedding in which it is revealed at the altar that the groom is already married to a lunatic. But there's one difference: Jen's fiancé is engaged to one too.

In Brontë's novel, Mr. Rochester sought to stir Jane's pity by describing the miseries of his long, unwilling association with the depraved, demented Bertha. "No professed harlot ever had a fouler vocabulary than she," he told Jane. "Those are the sounds of the bottomless pit! I have a right to deliver myself from it if I can." If Bertha wrote, she probably used a lot of capital letters.

Now, a good association. We read at the New York Daily News how

A Korean-born sixth-grade girl who learned English by reading the classics is headed to Washington to represent New York at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. (...) Yu Jin grew up in South Korea and learned English by reading books like Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" after moving here with her family four years ago.

We wonder if the judges asked her to spell penetralium?

And finally... one piece of shocking news. Remember this Jane Eyre production? Well, it seems that its Jane Eyre is involved in some terrible news.

Categories: In_the_News