The Polish, Walter Scott and the minotaur

This is the story of a Polish couple, Nawojka and Jarek, that want to emigrate to Scotland. They think that Scottish and Polish people are similar

Nawojka chimes in: “The Scottish are people from mountains, just as our people are from mountains. They are tough.” Her preconceptions derive largely from two fictional sources. One, somewhat bafflingly, is Wuthering Heights.
The other is the film Braveheart. “I can see Jarek in a skirt,” she says with a teasing glance at her husband. “I’m not so sure,” he says, knitting his brows in mock concern.

Would Emily have liked Braveheart? Good question. Probably if she had to recommend a Scottish model to our Polish couple, she would quote Walter Scott. The Scottsman talks about Walter Scott's house future:

NEWS that 84 Plymouth Grove, the Manchester villa in which Elizabeth Gaskell lived for the last 15 years of her life, is to be saved for the nation at a cost of £2.5 million prompts one to ask what's being done to secure the long-term future of Sir Walter Scott's stately pile at Abbotsford.
The answer is unclear. The National Lottery's Heritage fund has already given its biggest-ever grant, £17.5 million, to secure the John Murray Archive for Scotland, which makes it an unlikely source of immediate funds.

Nawojka and Jarek will probably need something to read during their flight from Warsaw to Glasgow, The Orlando Sentinel recommends The Minotaur from Barbara Vine.

The Minotaur conjures up a genteel English milieu that breeds violence. The book opens with a chance encounter between two women, one of whom once worked as a nurse in the other's house, Lydstep Old Hall (...) Now married to an Englishman, Kerstin explains all this in the long flashback that takes up most of the book. A chance encounter has summoned up the past, specifically the late 1960s, when she showed up at Lydstep Old Hall like a callow but educated young lady in a Bronte novel.

It's not the first time that this book and the Brontës have crossed their paths.

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