A Brontë Manifesto

Michèle Roberts, author among others of Reader, I Married Him, is interviewed in The Scotsman:

"I'm interested in the way memoir can use the shapes of fiction," she says. "I'm interested in the way a novel such as Jane Eyre purports to be an autobiography to give itself gravitas as a work of realist fiction. (...)

MICHÈLE'S DESERT ISLAND BOOKS

• "I'd take a complete Brontë volume - all the siblings. I like thinking about writer's groups and the conversations that end up between the books. I think of the sisters scribbling in secret but then reading bits to each other and criticising and fighting and competing. It's very energising."

B.R. Myers writes in The Atlantic an authentic Reader's Manifesto, interesting read in itself and very thought-provoking, which unexpectedly contains a quotation from Agnes Grey:

This must be what satisfies critics that they are in the presence of a challenging writer—but more often than not "the dry shrivelled kernel," to borrow a line from Anne Brontë, "scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut."

The ContraCosta Times fashion journalist has a very, very stereotyped, bizarre and... well, just plain stupid idea of how the Brontë sisters looks would have been:

The trend: Emo (...)

The history: But it goes back a bit further than that. "Some of these silhouettes are identical to the 1820s and 1830s, and the romanticism sweeping through France and England at the time," he adds. "Think of the Bronte sisters, of women who look sickly, pale and vampire-y. It's weird to see some of these bands. They look like the paintings of (Eugene) Delacroix." (Jessica Yadegaran)

The Sun Chronicle comments on some book clubs' opinions on the books that have read. Wuthering Heights is one of them:

Similarly, the Attleboro Public Library's Monday Evening Book Club barely weathered "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte. According to discussion leader Margo Arel, "We were not as taken in with the love between Catherine and Heathcliff as we were with the negative nature and selfishness of the individuals whose lives were overtaken by their own character flaws." (Kathy Hickman)

By the way, another book club in New Hampshire is now reading Wuthering Heights:

Noontime Book Club, Mason
Reading Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Copies available at the library. 878-3867.

On the blogosphere: Jane Austen Quote of the Day quotes Charlotte Brontë on Jane Austen. Amsco Extra! gives a digest of the Brontë family story. Experiments in Reading checks Dame Darcy's illustrated edition of Jane Eyre.

On Mark Rafferty's blog you can read an essay comparing Wide Sargasso Sea's Antoinette and Medea by Euripides (Coleridge's Translation).

Both the play and the book show the audience a challenging point of view by reworking a particular myth. In Wide Sargasso Sea the author adapts characters from Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre. In Jane Eyre Mr. Rochester has a mad wife that he keeps locked up in an attic. This wife was a creole woman from the Caribbean. Wide Sargasso Sea is written from a sympathetic point of view towards Mr. Rochester's creole wife. In Euripides' Medea, the playwright alters the legend of Jason and Medea to tell a dramatic story. Euripides added to the story that the hero Medea, kills her own children and with the help of the gods and escapes without punishment. Both Euripides and Rhys have themes of the repressed female, the isolated stranger and the cowardly husband.

Patrick S. Vast talks in French about Wuthering Heights. Mea Culpa comments on Balthus and his Wuthering Heights illustrations in particular (in Portuguese). Finally, Pensées reminds us of one of those nineteenth-century first reviews of Wuthering Heights that couldn't understand the novel.

Categories: Anne Brontë, Jane Eyre, Illustrations, In the News, References, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights