Post dedicated to the boys out there who like Jane Eyre

We will never get this - people are so convinced Jane Eyre is a girls-only book that they will go to great and absurd lengths to get their "point" across.

Christina Hoff Sommers, another conservative scholar who has hyped the “boy crisis” for half a decade now, chimes in as well and blames anti-boy feminists, who believe that “so-called male behaviors – roughhousing and aggressive competition – are not natural but artifacts of culture.” Her solution? Enforce discipline; stop making boys read Jane Eyre; and if they “don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about their feelings,” let them be!

Dear God - some people are simply unbelievable.

For the people who do appreciate a good book when they see one, we now know the approximate price range of the tickets on the tour that will take Polly Teale's Jane Eyre around the United States. According to the Burlington Free Press:

The Acting Company stages Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre," $27-$33;

Also in Burlington, PA, today at 2pm at the Evesham Library, 984 Tuckerton Road, an undetermined version of Wuthering Heights will be shown. More info on this telephone number: (856) 983-1444.

We are not alone encouraging people to read the adventures of Miss Thursday Next, you see.

And through The Cumberland News we have come across yet another book that supposedly resembles Wuthering Heights: The Stranger House by Reginald Hill.

It may be unconventional, but Hill's thriller, when read in the light of its peculiar Gothic persuasion, invites a comparison with that great staple of any literary diet, one consumed with gusto by undergraduates and romantics the world over, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. [...] Illthwaite transpires as a veritable hotbed of sin and iniquity where 400 years of intermarriage, infidelity and downright perversion have resulted in a tangled web of lineage that recalls the second generation of Wuthering Heights. In both The Stranger House and Wuthering Heights identity is virtually impossible to positively ascertain, as demonstrated in the former's final biting twist and the famous speech of the latter's heroine, a speech culminating in literature's most romantic impossibility of identity, "I am Heathcliff". Both Bronte and Hill exploit motifs of doubling and repetition, repeating names with slight variations across generational gulfs in order to reinforce two discrete but related themes: the inexorable passage of time and history's peculiar tendency to repeat itself. Conventional standards by which we establish and measure identity - nomenclature, inherited rights, religious faith, property, social class, physical resemblance - are exposed as reliably unreliable. The Stranger House consistently thwarts expectations: the novel's multiple and disturbing twists expose the dangers of investing confidence in these fallible indicators of identity, especially when identity itself is a permeable, incoherent entity governed by a policy of perpetual absorption, exchange and regeneration. This feature is paralleled in Wuthering Heights which, operating on the same principal of a stranger's entry to an intensely tangled rural community, consistently undermines the reliability of first impressions and our misguided notions of identity.
If the similarity between The Stranger House and Wuthering Heights is established by the criss-crossing of bloodlines, it is consolidated by the themes of rural isolation and deviant energy, sexual and otherwise. A broad spectrum of sexual deviance, ranging from the lascivious advances of an ageing lothario to the brutalities of rape, occupies a very important ideological space in The Stranger House. Although modern readers are unlikely to be offended by either The Stranger House's bawdy banter or the disturbing account of sexual assault, the subversive nature of much of the sexual energy circulating in Wuthering Heights - manifesting as quasi-incestuous unions and necrophilia - mortified Bronte's Victorian readership. Rural isolation is one of Wuthering Heights' most significant themes, and a direct association can be drawn between this and the manifest transcendence of social norms depicted in both Hill and Bronte's novels. In relative seclusion the authority of conventional morality and social norms is severely diminished, a feature paralleled in The Stranger House as the rural community acts with reference to two laws: God's and Sod's. The insular nature of the communities is therefore largely accountable for the sexual subversion at the root of many of the central complexitites of identity and morality.

We really don't know about this book, but the writer of the article surely knows his/hers Wuthering Heights.

And finally Canterbury in New Zealand is looking for its favourite book. There will be two rounds:

Round 1 runs from 15 to 29 July. Click here to vote now. When round 1 closes, we'll compile Canterbury's top 20.
Round 2 of voting runs from 5 August to 2 September. Make sure you come back to vote again, when we reduce the top 20 to Canterbury's favourite book, to be announced on Saturday 9 September on this site, in The Press and at Christchurch City Libraries.

We hear Wuthering Heights is among the top favourites at the moment. So keep on voting for it and the rest of the Brontë novels!

Categories: In_the_News, Jane_Eyre, Wuthering_Heights, Websites, Theatre