Limericks, houses and talks on Jane Eyre

Ligneus' Blog has a couple of limericks mentioning the Brontës:

This is the first, written by Kit Wright:

Jane Austen
Kept her legs crausten
Contrast to Emily Bronte
Who displayed the Full Monte.

And this is the second, by Robert Conquest:

Charlotte Brontë said: 'Wow, sister! What a man!
He laid me face down on the ottoman:
Now don't you and Emily
Go telling the femily,
But he smacked me upon my bare bottom, Anne!'

But weirdness doesn't stop there. This is the context:

Morgan Digital Works (MDW), a computer product development consultancy that serves high-technology companies in Silicon Valley with operations in San Jose, California, announced today the successful completion of a one month test of its HouseNameRegistry.com database. MDW received several hundred website visits and recorded house names during its first market trial, proving the value of the database as a clearinghouse for imaginative house names and reviving a sense of neighborhood pride-of-place.

And this is where the Brontës turn up:

My wife and I named our house 'Peniston Crag', which reflects our home's unique landscaping scheme. Our garden mimics the wind-swept patches of heather and lavender found on the Yorkshire Moors, where the tragic story of Catherine and Heathcliff unfolds in Emily Bronte's 'Wuthering Heights'. Fortunately for my wife and I, we've been spared the tragedy bit!"

Nice - but they should have a very large garden or it would look very weird. But we like the idea of a literary-themed garden :D

And finally, we have found an interesting post on this blog. The blog's owner has been giving talks on Jane Eyre lately, and this is what he/she says about them:

Tonight I gave a talk at a local library about Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre. Given my gaffe earlier, talking about this novel tonight had a particular kind of resonance for me. Why do we choose pseudonyms? What do they give us? What kinds of anxieties can they cause? How does one manage two identities - one "real" and one invented? (Or is all identity invented, blah blah blah, but I'm not talking about that right now.)
I suppose this brought me back to thinking about how 19th century novelists like Charlotte Bronte or George Eliot (whom we still know by the pseudonym, which I think is incredibly interesting, especially since we "know" it's not a man, except for I didn't know it was a woman when I had to do a book report on The Mill on the Floss as a senior in high school and, whoa, was I surprised when I found out I wasn't reading a male author) used pseudonyms. [...]
Isn't this juxtaposition of fear and freedom exactly the same juxtaposition that we see with writers like Charlotte Bronte? We have Jane and we have Bertha - the good girl with some rebellious tendencies that must be mastered and the madwoman who must remain behind closed doors. Isn't this exactly what a pseudonym offers? The ability both to be good and to be mad (or bad)?

Categories: Poetry, Weirdo, Humour, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Talks, Websites