Stranger than legend

A poll commissioned for the DVD release of comedy Stranger Than Fiction reveals that Heathcliff and Jane Eyre are on the top ten of the fictional characters people would most like to meet:

Heathcliff, Emily Bronte's creation from Wuthering Heights which is set on Haworth Moor near the Bronte sisters' home, finished tied for ninth place with Yossarian from Joseph Heller's Catch 22 with four per cent of the votes.

Charlotte Bronte's creation Jane Eyre finished tenth with two per cent of the votes. (Ben Barnett in The Telegraph & Argus)

The complete results can be found here.

More Brontëites. Trashionista interviews author Rhonda Stapleton:

Your favourite female heroine (if different from above!), and why?

This one is hard. I'd have to go with a classic--Jane Eyre. She's tough, but still vulnerable, and she has no problem standing up to the dashing, aggressive Mr. Rochester!

Another possible Brontëite is the actress Rose Byrne, that says in The Courier Mail:

"I'm not a science person at all – I failed it my whole life," she says. "I was always the arty weirdo who was reading Jane Eyre or whatever.

We have a new appearance of the do-not-let-reality-spoil-a-good-story phenomena. A Happy Sabrina talks about the death of Branwell Brontë as told by Douglas Adams:

Once in the terminal stages of the disease, and after having collapsed outside the Bronte residence, Branwell died standing upright and leaning against the mantle of the fire place JUST TO PROVE THAT IT COULD BE DONE!!.

What Douglas Adams says in The Salmon of Doubt is:

My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Bronte, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done.
This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees. However, this is not relevant to what is currently on my mind because it concerns sloths, whereas the Branwell Bronte piece of information concerns writers and feeling like death and doing things to prove they can be done, all of which are pertinent to my current situation to a degree that is, frankly, spooky.

Finally, we mention this review (in Italian) of Franco Zeffirelli's version of Jane Eyre by The Cottage.

Categories: Branwell Brontë, Brontëites, In the News, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV