On reading

The Lafayette Daily Advertiser looks - once again - into the matter of children and reading. Amanda Harris wonders, 'Will kids read Brontë in the Harry Potter age?'

On the other hand, forcing a child to read a book doesn't necessarily make for more voracious readers, Landrum said, pointing to her own experience with her son.
"Once he finished Jane Eyre it was like pulling teeth for him to read again," she said. "And he didn't pick up a book again for a long time."

Compulsory reading is a tricky matter. We sympathise with the children inasmuch as we don't like to be made to read either, but it's also true that some of these books will become favourites for some of the children. While discussing this matter previously we have read of children - girls mainly - who end up loving the plot. We believe the actual key to the matter lies in how the book is explained and its theory taught by the teacher and the way books are approached at home.

On a somewhat related note, Spanish writer Espido Freire - author of the book Querida Jane, Querida Charlotte (Dear Jane, Dear Charlotte) - talks about her generations, that is, 30-somethings - lack the referrals their parents and grandparents took from books. She says she is not surprised or appalled to hear of people her age who haven't read the classics, but nonetheless encourages them to do discover them, as an alternative to the most immediate and popular Internet, TV, etc. Wuthering Heights is one of her recommendations in an article from El Mundo.

Otra Hamlet misteriosa, contradictoria, es la linda Catherine en Cumbres borrascosas. Su amor por lo oscuro, por quien le hace daño, como las rocas que no se ven bajo las flores, le resulta destructivo e imprescindible. Es su única franja de libertad. En sus emociones no manda nadie.

Catherine in Wuthering Heights is another mysterious, contradictory female version of Hamlet. Her love for the obscure, for those who hurt her, such as the rocks which can't be seen under the flowers, is destructible and necessary. That is her only freedom. No one controls her emotions but her.

Ellen Steinbaum writes for The Boston Globe an article on something also related to all this: the way some characters seem to be as real as flesh-and-blood people.

"I think a lot about character," says Livesey, who recalls growing up under the spell of great 19th-century characters such as Heathcliff and Jane Eyre. "One of the reasons I love to write fiction is that it gives me a different way of looking at the world. I might find myself thinking, 'Verona wouldn't like that.' "
This day, as we sit in her living room, surrounded by paintings by her husband, artist Eric Garnick, we talk about how a story's characters can be so real that a reader can identify across lines of gender, race, age, and other details.
Livesey says, "It's a mixture of craft and luck. I know things I can do, the telling detail, to put a character on the page."

Margot Livesey is a real Brontëite too, and we have talked about her in several posts before.

Also interested in the characters, especially in their quandaries, is John Sutherland, who has recently published his memoir. John Linklater briefly summarises her life and works in the Sunday Herald.

The rest of the John Andrew Sutherland story is history, at least among fellow lit crit academics and readers of his literary detection puzzles (Is Heathcliff A Murderer? Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?) which stretched the original idea to three or four volumes. After blowing his A-levels, and a stint of national service, he scraped a place and graduated at Leicester University, to secure his first lecturer's appointment at Edinburgh.

Now for some reviews. Les Manuscrits Ne Brûlent Pas reviews Wuthering Heights in French. And rather more indirectly but worth the mention are these two: the Swedish newspaper Kristianstadsbladet reviews the Swedish translation of Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, Hustrur och döttrar: en vardagsberättelse, with a few passing mentions to Mrs Gaskell's friendship with Charlotte Brontë. The Washington Post reviews Margaret Forster's most recent novel, Keeping the World Away, with passing mentions of the 'madwoman in the attic' and Wide Sargasso Sea.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights