Taking it to the next level

Let's start with something quite unusual today: a review of The Professor by Charlotte Brontë on The Witlings.

The Professor is a highly intriguing and unusual book, more than worthy of close analysis for its own sake, and not just because it might shed light on Charlotte's later, more popular works. Heather Glen argues this point very eloquently in her introduction to my edition of the novel. (Amy)

The Professor might not be Charlotte Brontë's best novel, but it shouldn't be forgotten than it was good enough as to make Smith, Elder want to see more by this author. What in Brontë standards is average can nearly be considered outstanding in regular standards. Charlotte herself liked the novel well enough to use part of it for Villette and even to ry and get her publishers time and time again to publish it. It was finally published posthumously.

Also surprisingly enough we have come across a blog post on Panegurikos entitled 'Why my students like Jane Eyre'. We say surprisingly because what we tend to read in the Jane Eyre-students area tends to be get quite negative.

What’s remarkable to me is how much my students loved what they read of the Bronte novel. The majority of them are women, and I think the novel strikes a romantic chord. (Masterpiece Theater recently produced a wonderful adaptation of the novel, by the way.) In a telling moment, I asked them what they would do if they found out at the altar that their fiancé were already married, and, what’s more, he’d been keeping his crazy wife in the attic of the house they’d been sharing all this time. Dead silence. I think they were really thinking about what they would do. (Jeannie)

We have also come across a Chinese girl's take on Jane Eyre on Anna's Home.

In the modern time, people are crazy for money and status. They choose wealthy from fortune and poverty; they choose to be loveless; they choose to cheat others but not telling the truth. Only few are willing to abandon everything because of dignity without hesitation, like Jane Eyre. (Anna)

And there are people who take their love for Jane Eyre to the next level (or one of the next levels), which is writing fan fiction. Rosa Cotton recommends a couple of Jane Eyre fanfics taken from FanFiction.net.

Jane Eyre
Just an Inch by Blonde Charger Summary: She breathed out, slightly shakily, and tried to reply, tried to lighten the mood, because the intense burning in his eyes began to seep into his words.
Rochester's Thoughts by AvinWaters Summary: Jane tells her story in her own, unique, and impassioned way. But how would Edward, brooding and equally passionate, have told the story?

Or even further than that. Cynsations interviews Ysabeau S. Wilce, author of Flora Segunda. When asked about what her fans can expect next she says,

And I have plans to collaborate with another author on a YA book about a young girl mad scientist who decides to make a guardian so she isn't sent to an orphanage. Consider it the young Jane Eyre meets Frankenstein...! So there's plenty coming! (Interview by Cynthia Leitich Smith)

Someone who was also influenced - both by Wuthering Heights and by his previous work on it - was artist Balthus. This is clearly seen on Little Hokum Rag.

Illustrating the book, "Wuthering Heights" (1932-1935), shaped the painting career of Balthus. Many of his paintings were derived from these drawings. [...]
[A] quote from Balthus via Philosophical Conversations:
‘I am a very emotional man, perhaps too much so… My youth was an absolute whirlwind of Feelings, exactly like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which I illustrated. I was completely at home in this novel. It described my youth perfectly. I was in love with Antionette – de Watteville – and I was determined to win her. But Antionette, on top of being a difficult girl, was already engaged to someone else. I reread her letters every evening. I think that, like Heathcliffe, I didn’t want to leave adolescence.’
And, from artic.edu Caty Telfair :
"The drawings that Balthus produced for Wuthering Heights proved to be seminal for him as an artist; no fewer than ten of his later best-known canvases draw compositional elements directly from these illustrations." (Amy Crehore)

To end on a serious note. Via Pacific Views, we have come across an article from Wampum on hyperemesis gravidarum, which is possibly - though never certainly - what Charlotte Brontë died of.

Most high-school graduates have at least a passing knowledge of the nineteenth-century authoress, Charlotte Brontë. Married in her late 30s, Brontë is suspected to have died from Hyperemesis Gravidarum during her first pregnancy, a severe form of morning sickness defined by excessive vomiting of four or more times per day. (MB Williams)

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, The Professor, Wuthering Heights