Jane Eyre fiesta

Tonight's the screening of Jane Eyre and though not able to attend ourselves we are really excited for all who are going. We are really looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say about the first two episodes, especially after watching yesterday's clip.

And for all the Toby Stephens fans out there - though he won't be attending the Q&A - you can still read an interview with him in the Evening Standard Friday Magazine. Next Friday, that is.

This week's ES Magazine, FREE with the Evening Standard, gives you all the latest on the gorgeous actor Toby Stephens, who's playing Mr Rochester in new 4part BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre.

The poor man! And to think he said he didn't want to be part of much of this promotion...

Another Brontë man is Jasper Fforde, who talks to an Australian newspaper.

“Terrible handwriting. Left school at 18. No secondary or tertiary education. I got a D in art — I am totally unqualified to be a writer,” says the 45-year-old English-born, Wales-based satirist. “I got to the point in my life, in my late 20s, where I suddenly realised you didn’t have to have letters after your name to be an author and that it was great fun to write. I hadn’t learnt anything and I hadn’t learnt you couldn’t not do anything, so there was nothing in essence I couldn’t do because I’d not been told not to.”

Hear, hear!

This is what he says about his brand-new book (which half of BrontëBlog is currently reading)

Nothing is sacred in Fforde’s world, it’s true. His new and sixth novel, The Fourth Bear, the second in the Nursery Crime series, lives up to the unusual brand of inspired silliness that Fforde first launched on an unsuspecting public with his 2001 bestseller, The Eyre Affair.
But unlike The Eyre Affair and its genre-bending, time-travelling, gloriously ridiculous Thursday Next sequels, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten, The Fourth Bear reads like a “straight”, expertly plotted crime novel on one level and a parody of crime writing on another. Well, as straight as anything gets in Fforde’s world. Indeed, he confides, “the Nursery Crimes series are what I describe as my straight novels. This is about as normal as it gets.”
OK, so there are no dodos, woolly mammoths or time-travelling literary detectives in his nursery crime series. But Fforde’s brand of “normal” translates into a pervasively inverse, satirical logic in The Fourth Bear.
It swipes at race relations, political corruption, the drug trade and rogue nuclear (sorry, make that cuclear) scientists, as it follows the fortunes of DI Jack Spratt, head of Reading’s Nursery Crimes Division, and his assistant, Mary Mary.
After identifying the killer of celebrity ovoid, Humpty Stuyvestant Van Dumpty, in The Big Over Easy, Spratt finds his professional life takes a dive when his early successes with nursery crimes are re-labelled human rights abuses. So when reporter “Goldilocks” Hatchett — renowned for her controversial story about the right to arm bears — disappears while investigating a combusting cucumber and the psychopathic massmurdering gingerbread man escapes from the lunatic asylum, Spratt is taken off both cases.
For Fforde, who abandoned a successful career in the film industry to devote himself to “all this silliness”, it began as a quest to find some logical explanation for three bowls of porridge served at different temperatures simultaneously in that well-loved tale.
“It’s thermodynamically impossible,” he states in all seriousness.

"Thermodinamically impossible", we like that. Not to mention talking bears.

In some ways he is not too dissimilar to his fictional protagonist, DI Jack Spratt, in that he has long harboured a desire to bring justice to the crimes in nursery rhymes. “They are full of murder, mayhem, disfigurement, and dismemberment. All that kind of stuff is terrific for kids. Just keep it away from impressionable adults.

Yes, that too.

And a little well-known history of The Eyre Affair:

But what’s intriguing about The Fourth Bear — which is his sixth book to be published, but the second he actually wrote — is that it is the pivotal book on which all else hinges, says Fforde. “I’d actually run out of nursery rhymes and fairy stories and I was hunting round for something else to use, and I thought, well if I can start messing the collective memory in the way that I am, why shouldn’t I be able to do that with the classics?”
So he recast Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray as a used car salesman in The Fourth Bear and when it was rejected, he began The Eyre Affair, which is based on the notion that someone is kidnapping Jane Eyre out of Jane Eyre.
“Rather than write what people would read, I thought, let’s just go balls out for this, and do something that is purely me. The classics belong to this slightly clouded, grown-upnot-allowed-to-laugh-at-them pomposity, and I thought there’s a lot of mileage here.”
Yet behind Fforde’s selfdeprecating affability lies an unshakeable confidence. Or what he prefers to call stubbornness. Along the road to getting The Eyre Affair published in 2002, Fforde clocked up 76 rejections.
He was vindicated when the first publisher to actually read it snapped up all his manuscripts. Encompassing mischievous treaties on Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre, high-brow Shakespeare jokes and low-brow puns, they filch from sitcoms, movies and the realms of sci-fi and horror as well as from other literary classics, and have won Fforde well over a million readers in the UK alone.
He has since garnered thousands of fans in the US, Germany, Denmark, France, Holland, South Africa and Korea.
“Initially, I thought no one would get the jokes who wasn’t British, so that surprised me, but all it told me was that I clearly had some kind of prejudice, which I was delighted to be proven wrong. It is telling me that we are a lot more similar than I thought.”

Oh, and don't forget Thursday Next will be back next year!

And to end on a more serious note:

Cal Poly has named three professors, one from the college of Engineering and two
professors from the College of Liberal Arts, to receive this year’s highest teaching award. [...]
[Mary Armstrong of the English Department] has published several essays on Charles Dickens, as well as articles on feminist theory and queer theory. Her current research includes the articulation of the gendered subject through the scientific vernacular in Bronte's "Jane Eyre," and discourses of sexology in Hall's "The Well of Loneliness."

Congratulations to her!

Categories: Books, Jane_Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Scholar