Reading lists

Historical / Present looks at the Top Ten lists included in The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favourite Books and tallies the data into two lists: Top Ten Books by Women Authors and Top Ten Works in Translation. It's the former that concerns us where Jane Eyre makes it to number 10. If you want to see the lists of all the authors that included a Brontë-related work on their lists, check out this post.

As you know, yesterday was World Book Day. The Times has an article on the many lists that were compiled for the occasion.

I believe that British women can’t live without Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mockingbird and so on. Women have a tendency to treat literature as anaesthesia, dipping into books rather as their 19th-century sisters used to sip tincture of laudanum. (Jane Shilling)

However, she doesn't believe men when they say they can't live without Pride & Prejudice or To Kill a Mockingbird ;)

The Times, too, in another article makes a worrisome statement, also in connection with World Book Day.

Where is the contemporary history so essential to the creation and reinforcement of collective identity? We can learn more by studying Professor Peter Hennessy’s incomparably lucid volumes on postwar Britain than from anything by Austen, Charlotte Brontë or Charles Dickens. (Tim Luckhurst)

That is up to debate. And he's mixing up two different types of learning (not to mention genres!): cultural and personal. Both appear in those works but the levels are wildly differing. Austen, Brontë and Dickens can indeed teach people A LOT about life, even if they were writing many decades ago. Their work is not up to revisionism or scholar trends. The stories they told are timeless, and that's why they are still so widely read.

To prove this we now bring you several things we have come across in the blogosphere.

JCBrandon, who keeps a blog in French - looks briefly at Wuthering Heights. Fans of the novel and the French language will be delighted to read: Nelly, je suis Heathcliff! (Nelly, I am Heathcliff) and other key quotations translated into French.

Heather Waters, from The Idea Boutique talks to Sophie Jordan - author of Too Wicked to Tame - and asks he what inspired her to write this book.

Other influences on TOO WICKED TO TAME include the works of the Bronte sisters. Gotta love those sweeping love stories full of such dark, raging emotions! Ah, the sweet agony! Call me a Bronte girl, because I’m definitely the kind of writer that prefers making readers cry rather than laugh.The Bronte sisters wrote novels set in Yorkshire. The wild Yorkshire moors of JANE EYRE and WUTHERING HEIGHTS whisper to my romantic soul to this day. Can there be any better backdrop for a tumultuous love story? I had a great deal of fun researching Yorkshire and hope I managed to convey some of that exotic setting in TOO WICKED TO TAME.
JANE EYRE is my favorite work of the Bronte sisters. And I think readers might see some of it echoed in TOO WICKED TO TAME. Yes, there’s a curse of madness and a dark, brooding hero … and my heroine, like Jane Eyre, is no traditional beauty. She definitely invades both the hero’s desolate Yorkshire estate as well as his peace of mind with her arrival.

Rangsima T. explores the narrative of Wuthering Heights in depth on her online space. A very interesting essay for Brontëites and scholars alike.

And finally Petrona has a post reminding one and all that the BBC shop is offering DVDs of classics novels very economically.

Persuasion is £9.99, Wuthering Heights £7.99, North and South £9.99 and many others are listed. I can recommend the North and South (starring, as Cathy tells me, "Guy of Gisborne"), but have not seen this version of WH. I have seen a good ITV production which covers the whole story and not just the first half, but I trust the BBC to do the same and not go the Hollywood route of missing out all of part 2. The ITV version, incidentally, features the current Mr Darcy, Matthew MacFaddyn, in an earlyish role as Hareton Earnshaw.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, In the News, Jane Eyre, Scholar, Wuthering Heights