Two Brontës remain in the new curriculum

News sites in the UK are echoing the news that the secondary school curriculum in the UK has been slightly changed. Both the Guardian and BBC News comment on the fact that students will still have to read Charlotte Brontë. However, looking at the actual press release we see that Emily Brontë has been kept too.

The range of literature studied should include:
texts that enable students to understand the nature, significance and influence over time of texts from the English literary heritage. This should include work selected from the following pre-twentieth-century writers: Matthew Arnold, Jane Austen, William Blake, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Robert Browning, John Bunyan, Lord Byron, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Congreve, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, John Donne, John Dryden, George Eliot, Henry Fielding, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Hardy, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Henry James, John Keats, Christopher Marlowe, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, RB Sheridan, Edmund Spenser, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, Henry Vaughan, HG Wells, Oscar Wilde, William Wordsworth and Sir Thomas Wyatt

As you can see, Elizabeth Gaskell and other Brontë contemporaries remain on the reading list as well.

Still on the serious side of the news, Halifax Today reports the 'happy ending' to Juliet Barker's (and about 800 other people's) battle to stop a developer from building a so-called eco-village in Colden Valley. The developer is now looking to sell this plot of land at auction. Hopefully whoever buys it will have something nice and actually nature-friendly in mind.

Now for some more relaxed mentions. Channel 4 briefly looks at sequels and spin-offs given that 'imitation is the most sincere form of flattery':

And, in spin-off vein, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys pays homage to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. It imagines the life of Rochester and his first wife (the one who goes mad and is held in the tower) in the Caribbean.

Actually we don't think Jean Rhys intended to flatter so much as to put right something she saw wrong.

But there are more Brontëites today with clearer motives. The blog Stephenie Meyer - who pays tribute to the author of Twilight - publishes a short autobiography by Stephenie Meyer herself where she talks about her influences:

My favorite authors/biggest influences are (in no particular order) Orson Scott Card, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Maeve Binchy, Charlotte Bronte, Daphne DuMaurier, L.M. Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, Eva Ibbotson, William Goldman, Douglas Adams, Janet Evanovich... the list goes on, but I think I hit the highlights.

This Next interviews Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires, who has been written down as a Brontëite before.

TN: If you were a book, you’d be ________.
MJL: Jane Eyre.

The Mystery of Irma Vep - a theatre play with passing resemblances to Wuthering Heights, is on stage at Shimberg Playhouse-Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Florida, according to Creative Loafing. See the theatre's website for further information.

Categories: Brontëites, In the News, Theatre, Wide Sargasso Sea