Jane Eyre in the Labyrinth

Lucy Mangam in The Guardian talks about the absence of new heroines. She envisages the following argument for a Jane Eyre sequel:

Heroines ripe for reinvention seem thinner on the ground, possibly due to a dearth of fertile literary material. The sequel to Jane Eyre would need to be the story of her attic incarceration after a breakdown under the pressure of caring for Mr Rochester and trying to master the new national curriculum. Then she could governess on the side, and pay for repairs to Thornfield Hall and the minimum wage to a maid threatening to leave for a Saturday job that got her a discount at Topshop.

Kieran Falconer reviews 'The Innway to the Peak District' by Mark Reid for The Independent.

The Innway series written by Mark Reid are long circular walks where you lunch, dine and stay in rural pubs. The latest book is a guide to the Peak District winding 74 miles and six days through Kinder Scout, Chatsworth and Bakewell for a quick tart.
Walking is a healthy way of keeping pubs and villages alive. Due to a condition called laziness, I could do only two days of the walk. Mark came along to make up for my hopeless navigation. We start in the pretty village of Hathersage, which unknown to me was on the edge of old Sherwood Forest. Besides legends of Robin Hood stealing from the wags and giving to the hags there is the grave of Little John in St Michael and All Angels churchyard. Charlotte Brontë stayed at the vicarage here and a mile out of the village we come across a fine Elizabethan manor, North Lees Hall, which was the model for Rochester's Thornfield Hall.

A new Brontëite: Katherine Center, author of The Bright Side of Disaster, is interviewed in the Houston Chronicle:

While women undoubtedly make up the largest share of Center's readers, she doesn't consider The Bright Side of Disaster "mommy lit." Mothers are responding to the book, but she's also hearing from childless readers who "love to read a story about a woman who's challenged in any way." Not by accident is Jane Eyre, with its long-suffering heroine, one of Center's favorite novels.
"I like it," she says, "when people have had to go through something that's changed them or challenged them and have triumphed on the other side." (Fritz Lanham)

And now for some erm ... imaginative Brontë mentions in the press:

The Edmonton Journal describes the Capital Ex Parade and suggests something to make it more interesting:

Parade participants and audience members could dress up as the real or imagined figure they would most like to be, if they could be anyone: the Lone Ranger, maybe, or Howie Meeker or Charlotte Bronte. (Todd Babiak)

OK... The Telegraph also publishes quite a funny article about

Welcome to Jackal Travel. We are pioneers in the business of providing package tours for the discerning assassin, as more and more hit-persons are making Britain their destination of choice for rubbing out some exile, oligarch or deposed dictator. (...) You will never forget the breathtaking experience of getting the landscape of Bronte Country in your telescopic sights. (Oliver Pritchett)

If snipers are not your cup of tea, no problem... Here comes another pairing of Harry Potter and Jane Eyre⁽¹⁾, now with an intellectual alibi:

James Krasner, a University of New Hampshire English professor, said author J.K. Rowling's great talent lies in crafting plots.
"Nobody since Dickens, and maybe not even he, could interweave hundreds of characters and dozens of plot lines in the exciting, emotionally satisfying way Rowling does," he wrote in an e-mail to the newspaper. "It's just good storytelling." (...)
He called the book a "bildungsroman," or novel of personal development, like Jane Eyre or David Copperfield. (Chloe Johnson in Foster's Online)

Although not everybody agrees that Jane Eyre could be considered a paradigmatic bildungsroman, Buzzsugar recommends it as a classic coming-of-age story.

... And now for the most weird/surprising thing today. Do you remember Jim Henson's Labyrinth (1986)? A fantasy film with David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly. Well it turns out that some of the costumes David Bowie wore in that film were Heathcliff-inspired. Or so says Brian Froud, conceptual and costume designer of the film, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

The look was not accidental. The labyrinth represented the teenage protagonist's inner world, and Jareth the Goblin King was meant to stand in for various aspects of her inner life.
"I played on that, because part of the costume is like Heathcliff, Brontë's Heathcliff, so a romantic figure. Also he's dangerous, so I gave him a leather jacket, like a leather boy," Froud says. (Pam Grady)

On the blogosphere. A nice description of a walk to the Brontë Falls and Top Withins by Maddalena De Leo and Richard Wilcocks on the Brontë Parsonage Blog. Maya Reynolds revisits Jane Eyre, the book that A Journal of Sorts has finished and loved.

(1) By the way, we read around that some echoes of Jane Eyre can be found in Ariana Dumbledore's story in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Categories: Brontëites, In the News, Jane Eyre, References, Wuthering Heights