A Jane for everyone

The Guardian has received a correction to last weekend's article written by Lucasta Miller where she stated that when Virginia Woolf visited Haworth in 1904 the Parsonage was already a museum. BrontëBlog spotted this mistake when we reported the article too.

So Virginia Woolf visited the Bronte Parsonage Museum in 1904. Well, only if she had a time machine. It was not until 1928 that textile magnate Sir James Roberts bought the Haworth Parsonage and provided funds for it to be a museum. In 1904 the Bronte Society museum was on the upper floor of the Yorkshire Penny Bank, now the Tourist Information Centre.
Robert Buckley
Haworth

The Scotsman reviews today Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War by Virginia Nicholson (Viking) and guess who makes a guest appearance:

"'READER, I MARRIED HIM ...' IS THE biggest sigh of relief in English literature," writes Virginia Nicholson in one of the most fascinating and compelling pieces of social history published so far this year. It's a sigh of relief because it means that Jane Eyre, too plain and too clever to be marriage material and therefore doomed forever to remain a spinster, has finally been saved.
For a generation of women who lost fiancés, sweethearts, husbands - or even that potential mate they hadn't yet set eyes on - in the carnage of the First World War, there would be no such saviour. Not even a blinded Rochester; so many of the men who returned from the war were too emotionally scarred, never mind physically broken, to cope with marriage. (Lesley MacDowell)

So many decades of feminist readings of Jane Eyre to finally see what was obvious from the beginning: that Jane Eyre is saved from being a dark, sad, embittered spinster by Mr. Rochester. Or maybe not. According to The Age's review of Penelope Lively's Consequences, Jane Eyre is just the opposite:

Molly's story belongs to the 1960s. More confident and resourceful than her mother, and better educated, she makes a career in the world of books. Dismissed from her post as a librarian for publicly urging a debate on the censorship of Lady Chatterley's Lover, she becomes personal assistant to a successful publisher who is also immensely rich. A latter-day Jane Eyre, wary of male dominance, Molly refuses his offer of marriage and brings up their daughter alone. (Brenda Niall)

Jasper Fforde is interviewed in The Australian about the latest installment of his Thursday Next series, First Among Sequels. In the interview we can read some comments about yet another version of Jane: the one from the first book of the series, The Eyre Affair:

"That's the gag," Fforde says. "Writing The Eyre Affair, it wouldn't have worked if instead of Jane Eyre I'd used some obscure novel by Voltaire or Baudelaire because no one would have known what the hell I was talking about. Even if you haven't read the book or seen the film, you will know that it is a classic of British literature. It's hallowed ground and you don't mess with it; if you know that, then you will understand the gag of what I'm doing. It's like sniggering at the back of English class. You're meant to take them seriously, you don't mess around with the Bard, but I'm like, 'Why not?"' (Stephen Jewell)

The Colorado Springs Gazette publishes a brief comment on Maureen Adams's Shaggy Muses.

The Globe and Mail reviews Late Fragment, an experimental interactive film presented at the Toronto Film Festival. For some reason, the reviewer mentions Wuthering Heights:

On a beach under scrub-covered cliffs, Théo is about to confront the man who abused him as a child. The setting is Scarborough, but it seems like something out of Wuthering Heights. (Shawn Micallef)

It's difficult to imagine a landscape more different from Wuthering Heights than Scarborough, so we don't really get it.
EDIT: Our mistake, the reviewer is talking about the Scarborough Cliffs in Ontario, Canada.

On the blogosphere: Lost in Books is doing the Smithsonian's Mystery Lover's England and Scotland tour and yesterday she visited the Brontë Parsonage Museum with Robert Barnard, no less, as cicerone! (picture).
Mirian's Site reviews Wuthering Heights 1992 in Portuguese; Red Garnier, erotic romance author, posts about her passion for Wuthering Heights and The Long Saturday of the Soul reviews Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie (1943).

Categories: Books, Brontëites, In the News, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights