The Brontë monologues

Saturday news are diverse.

The BBC has one more review of J. Peder Zane's book The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, highlighting the following:

Thomas Keneally, who won the Booker for Schindler's Ark, listed Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte as his favourite novel.

Remember you can read the list of authors who picked a Brontë novel among their favourite books here.

A Brontëite by profession is Dr. Patricia Murphy from the Missouri Southern State University, who according to The Chart is going on a sabbatical in 2008. She is described thus:

With the completion of her second book, Sciences Shadow: Literary Construction of Late Victorian Women, Dr. Patricia Murphy, associate professor of English, has planned her sabbatical for the spring semester of 2008.
Murphy specializes in late Victorian literature, concentrating on authors like Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. [...]
Murphy will be spending her sabbatical traveling to various libraries around the country to study the perceptions and conventions of women in the late Victorian era and how those ideas are present today.
"I'm looking at how culture constructs what it calls the ideal woman, and how that can be dangerous," Murphy said.
She plans to primarily examine the gender relationships between the characters in Victorian literature and "power relationships in culture." Murphy also plans to travel to London libraries to consult books, some of which have been out of print for more than 100 years.
"It's utterly fascinating," she said. "I really get to dig in."
In addition to her work in Europe, Murphy plans to visit university libraries in Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri.
Murphy said the power relationships she sees in the works of the late 19th Century are still present today.
"There's a set idea of what it is to be a woman, anyone who deviates from that is seen as an oddity and somehow less valuable," she said. (Alexandra Nicolas)

Perhaps during her trip to England she could pop into the North-West Evening Mail offices to teach the staff how to spell Jane Eyre properly.

The diverse musical talents of South Lakes pupils were on show this week. [...]
There was a fashion show with avant garde hats, funky urban dance pieces, Jayne Eyre monologues and Arden Days, a modern version of Shakes-peare’s As You Like It.

TwinCities has a brief note on what influences fashion designers when it comes to creating their collections. We have seen right from the start how unexpectedly intertwined fashion and the Brontës were. More recently, we posted about Badgley Mischka's source of inspiration. And, well, she confirms it again:

Decide for yourself if the "inspirations" are apparent in these fall collections. [...]
Badgley Mischka: "Wuthering Heights" (Allison Kaplan)

For a book uniting fashion and literature in perfect harmony we suggest Justine Picardie's My Mother's Wedding Dress once again.

And finally some art. Flickr user Poor Sailor has posted a lovely drawing of Jane Eyre. Click on the link and take a look at it - it's worth it.

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Scholar, Wuthering Heights