'Manly men' like Heathcliff and other news

The Daily Mail claims that the 'metrosexual is dead' and hails Heathcliff-y men:

Even when I was in my 20s, I yearned for a macho Heathcliff type, as opposed to an Edgar Linton (Wuthering Heights’ resident toff) with his scrawny frame and wimpy ways.

Perhaps Isabella Linton wouldn't agree though.

To continue with Wuthering Heights, we read in the Westwood Press about a group of American teachers travelling to Europe thanks to a grant, and one of them

especially excited to see the moors that inspired Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.

She won't be disappointed!

Free Republic quotes an article appeared in the July issue of Esquire where a woman who has trouble getting her boys to like Jane Eyre, though she herself doesn't sound too keen on the book.

I cringe and try to think of something to say. It's a great book that meant nothing to me until I was thirty-three and teaching it for the third time. "I wrote a paper in college about Jane Eyre," I say out loud, but that's before I can locate in my memory what that paper was about. Then it comes to me. "About a chestnut tree," I say. "I remember that much."

No wonder she can't bring the boys to get enthusiastic about it.

And finally Dogmatika links to an interview with Irving Welsh where he talks about his newly confessed 'Brontëism' - though he does so in very un-Brontëish words:

I read somewhere that you're a big Jane Austen and George Eliot fan. Some people might be quite surprised to hear that.

I've kind of outed myself recently with that. What I hate is that when we think of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, people think about Emma Thompson and costume dramas and people talking in these stupid fucking voices. But it was fuck all like that. They're England's equivalent of Braveheart: Scots dressing in fucking tartan. It's edited exploitation for the American market. People wouldn't have talked like that, they wouldn't have looked like that, dressed like that, they wouldn't have acted like that, flounced around like that. It's fucking offensive fucking marketing, to sell to gullible Americans.

Hmmmkay. To each their own, I guess.

Categories: In_the_News, Brontëites, Jane_Eyre