A new Brontëite and a Disappointment

The writer Jamaica Kincaid is interviewed in The Brown Daily Herald. We discover another Brontëite:

When you were sent away [from Antigua, in the Caribbean], you didn't know you were going to be a writer. When did you decide to pursue writing?
I was in college in New Hampshire, Franconia College, and I wanted to write. It wasn't a decision - I don't remember it as a decision. I just wanted to write. I left and moved to New York and said I was a writer and shortly after I began to be published. … It's possible that I always wanted to write since I was a child, but there was no possibility, it was like wishing you were a princess or something.
I always read, and I always imagined myself as a writer, but as a writer who was dead, like Charlotte Bronte. I liked Charlotte Bronte very much. I used to pretend I was her and that I was living in Belgium, alone.

What else did you read that influenced you?
I read "Jane Eyre" for pleasure, but the big influence on me were the things I had to read in school - the Bible, the King James Version, a dictionary my mother gave me when I was seven years old - and I read it. It was a birthday present. That was a big influence in a strange way.
(Interview by Isabel Gottlieb)

Bad news for the recent BBC production of Jane Eyre. The Pioneer Audience Award for Best Television Programme of 2006 shortlist has been announced and Jane Eyre is not among the six chosen shows.

The judging panel took discussion from this blog along with feedback from many other online forums when finalising the shortlist. They based the results upon innovation, popularity, and overall impact on TV from the past year. Noteable “blog-favourite” exceptions included Strictly Come Dancing, Jane Eyre, and Spooks. (David)

Finally, we mention this lenghty and overally positive review of 1978 BBC take on Wuthering Heights, that appeared on DVD last year. As we informed some weeks ago, the series now appears in The Netherlands and is reviewed, in Dutch, here.

Categories: Brontëites, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights