The have-been's and the will-be's

These are days when we all consider how the year has been for us. The news sites do too, and - continuing with yesterday's 'selection' - here are a few more highlighted events.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette looks into who has been the performer of the year and - though not the winner - they reserve a special mention for Caroline Nicolian in the recent Pittsburgh Point Park University version of Jane Eyre The Musical.

Also: Laurie Klatscher in "The Good Body" (City), Alessa Neeck in "42nd Street" (Pittsburgh CLO), Erika Cuenca in "Opus" (City), Erica Highberg in "Fool
for Love" (Thank You Felix), Chandler Vinton in "Pyretown" (City); Susan McGregor-Laine in "Long Day's Journey Into Night" (Summer Co.); and a pair of Point Park students, Caroline Nicolian in "Jane Eyre" and Kelsey Robinson in "Ragtime." Helena Ruoti's Jocasta in "Oedipus" (Public) may be too small a role to be a lead but it was harrowing.

Also AA Gill, a television critic at The Times Online considers that the latest Jane Eyre has been one of the highlights of the year.

It’s been a funny old year on TV. Most of the drama has happened offscreen in the boardroom, but my highlights included two adapted dramas, the wonderful The Line of Beauty and the sublimely reinvigorated Jane Eyre.

Sublimely reinvigorated sounds really good.

The Observer does the opposite and instead of looking back looks forward at the 'hot lit flicks' opening in 2007.

Tighten those bodices and get ready for some heaving bosoms - this is the year of the literary biopic. From Renee Zellweger as the animal-mad Miss Potter (opens Friday) and Anne Hathaway as Austen in Becoming Jane (9 March) to Michelle Williams as Charlotte in Brontë (filming next year), it seems none of English literature's lovely ladies are unplundered by those canny Americans. Expect plenty of overemphasis on non-existent love lives, swooping vistas of lush countryside and assorted anguish.

Incidentally we suggest that if you want more info on Becoming Jane you visit AustenBlog where they will let you know why it is - in Mags's words - a Made-Up Story.

And finally another Indian Brontëite. Poet Agha Shahid Ali is interviewed in Chowk and this is what he says about one of his poems Snowmen.

I approached the poem "Snowmen", from which these lines are taken as an immediate sensuous apprehension. It was later that I thought of its feminist implications. There are two things hidden in that poem. One is a poem by Wallace Stevens called "The Snowmen". If you read it you won't see the connection but it is there for me. The other is a scene that has haunted me for a long time from Wuthering Heights. The narrator is staying at Heathcliff's house because there has been a terrible storm and the ghost of Katherine [sic] knocks on the window. She says, "I'm cold. Let me in". He opens the window and the glass breaks somehow. He takes the hand of the ghost and rubs it against the glass and there is blood. It's an amazing scene. Talk about magical realism. People think about that novel and they want neat answers. [Bronte's] whole enterprise is that there are no neat answers. But to provide you with a neat answer: I'm thinking about my ancestry and the lost women in this ancestry who we never hear about.

Categories: Brontëites, Jane Eyre, In the News, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Poetry, Theatre, Wuthering Heights