A visit to Haworth and other news

We are still thinking about what Laura told us about the first two episodes of Jane Eyre last night. There are no news yet regarding the screening but there are a few other things that we consider worth mentioning anyway.

Usha Mukunda, from The Hindu, writes about a visit to Haworth. Overall the article is not bad, As usual it mingles well-known facts with personal impressions. We always find the latter interesting. However, we need to comment on two things:

The miniscule children's room where the siblings gathered to make up their fantasies...

Listen carefully once again. When the children gathered in that room, it was larger than we see it now. Perhaps not enormous, but certainly larger. When Charlotte made alterations to the Parsonage before her upcoming marriage to Mr Nicholls she had both the living room and her own room made larger at the expense of the entrance hall and this room respectively.

We returned with much to think about. How did Charlotte manage to infuse her novel with so much humour and playfulness living in such surroundings and haunted by the spectre of ill health?

Perhaps because - despite being quite bleak - their lives weren't as bleak as that. There was some sunshine.

The Brontë sisters are mentioned as pioneers of the fan-fiction phenomena:

Fanfic has a long history.
In the 19th century, the Brontë sisters wrote fan fiction about the Duke of Wellington, a popular figure in their time.

More accurately we could say, juvenilia + Internet = fan-fiction?

And Jasper Fforde makes it to the news once again today. It's a Q&A from where bits of yesterday's article seem to have been extracted. It looks that Thursday Next's return is going to be short-lived :(

The Thursday Next series has four books, so the next book I'm going to be writing is five, so we're going to go back to her for a book and after that I don't know, I might experiment with a new series or two.

And finally one of the many books who bear a passing resemblance to Jane Eyre: The Scroll of Seduction: A Novel by Gioconda Belli.

At certain moments, "The Scroll of Seduction" bears a passing resemblance to "Jane Eyre," "Like Water for Chocolate" and "The Historian" — to say nothing of "The Da Vinci Code." But Belli has succeeded in putting her own stamp on the life story of Juana the Mad.

We keep on thinking, if Charlotte's copyright hadn't expired yet and all this references amounted to something, someone would be very rich. (Now of course if that was the case we are sure no one would like their books compared to Jane Eyre :P).

Categories: Haworth, Books, In_the_News