Mesmerized by sequels

Just a few Brontë mentions to be found on the net today:

The Boston Globe reviews Rachel Cusk's Arlington Park. We already posted about the Brontë connections of this book. This review insists on them:

Not much to recommend the blissful notion of the nuclear family here, but then, as one adolescent girl puts it, "Marriage is just another word for hate." (That she has just finished discussing "Wuthering Heights" only underscores her point.) Because "Arlington Park" is hideously funny, I suppose you could call it a domestic comedy, in the way that a bad day at Wal-Mart or Kafka's "Metamorphosis" might be comic with the right ironic voiceover. (Gail Caldwell)

The Scotsman talks about sequels and spin-offs and Wide Sargasso Sea and Emma Tennant's novels get a mention:

Yet there is the potential for superb literary spin-offs. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea cleverly gave us the back-story of the first Mrs Rochester; and Emma Tennant has frequently set her works in the margins of other stories. (Stuart Kelly)

The Historical/Present blog posts an interesting article about mesmerism (animal magnetism in the Brontës' days), using John Sutherland's Is Heathcliff a Murderer?: Puzzles in 19th-Century Fiction:

(...) Looking back now, we see the connection between mesmerism and science as unacceptably thin, but apparently Brontë believed she was reporting realistic possibility rather than magical invention. This is a difficult distinction to grasp, since throughout Jane Eyre we have been hearing about fairies and goblins and fantastical tales, as Brontë consciously contrasts the real and the fanciful. Whereas we would place mesmerism on the imaginary side of the spectrum, Brontë wants the reader to accept it as a real phenomenon. (Fay Sheco)

We can see the John Eshton of the new BBC take on Jane Eyre clapping in enthusiasm.

A curiosity. The promotion of this catalogue of self-help/inspirational books uses a Charlotte Brontë's quote:

'A depressing and difficult passage has prefaced every new page I have turned in life.' - Charlotte Brontë

Categories: Charlotte Brontë, Books, In the News, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wide Sargasso Sea