Emily Brontë's favourite brand of cosmetics

Let's begin our daily newsround by figuratively shaking hands with a few Brontëites of sorts.

Arthur has an article on Cynthia Good ('former editorial director of Penguin Books Canada Limited and highly-respected figure in the field of publishing'), for whom Wuthering Heights opened up a world of possibilities.

Another epiphany in Cynthia’s life of reading was when she came upon Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Drawn in by the love and romance of the novel, she learned that there was a frame around the narrative of the book. She became more interested in the narrator and less in the narrative. It was the point of views and the way stories are told that she became enthralled by. Quoting one of her favourite authors, D.H. Lawrence, she was captivated by interior consciousness, or, “the action inside.” (Teresa Cheng)

The website of the University of Vermont has an interview with Robyn Warhol-Down, who is currently working on her new book, Better Left Unsaid: What Doesn’t Happen in Nineteenth Century British Novels, where she

looks “at the ways (authors like Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and Henry James) have of talking about what they won’t talk about in their novels.” (Amanda Kenyon Waite)

Could be interesting.

SantBanta chats to actress Celina Jaitley, who shows her exasperation at being just a pretty girl.

"Otherwise I'm just perceived as a body with no brains," says Celina who claims she reads anything from Emily Bronte to comic books. (Subhash K Jha)

We wonder what she thought of it, though.

Jane Austen crops up in a couple of websites. Firstly, in a review of The Jane Austen Bookclub published in Style.

Turning up her nose at science fiction, a female member in “The Jane Austen Book Club” argues that Austen’s books, by contrast, are interested in real, complex people. An audience member might retort that movies with glass characters shouldn’t throw stones. “I stick with Jane Austen and Jane Eyre,” the same character declares, which is silly-sounding — if not an embarrassing mistake. The scene is the movie in a nutshell, appealing as quirky fantasy, but just plain dumb whenever it pretends to have higher aspirations. (Wayne Melton)

We don't see it quite so awful, except that it reminds us of the great The Arts and How They Was Done by the National Theatre of Brent, where Patrick Brontë, gathering his 'daughters the Brontë Sisters', asked, 'Oh, alright then, so are you all here then? Charlotte? Anne? Emily? Jane Eyre and... Jane Austen?'

Also WriterJack's Weblog has an in-depth post on Jane Austen, and when writing about Lady Susan we read the following:

Lady Susan, Austen’s short epistolary novel, written before her twentieth birthday, is the culmination of Austen’s youthful imagination, revealing a totally fascinating and completely immoral woman as the heroine. Charlotte Brontë would have found it much more difficult to characterize Austen’s writing as tame and well-mannered if she had encountered Lady Susan.

Which is extremely interesting. We have Lady Susan (e-text here) among our books but we have not read it yet. We are very curious to do so soon now, though.

Talking about writing. IfConfig reflects on the advice of 'writing what you know'.

There were these sisters. They lived a very staid, boring, middle-class life, which was made even more boring because they were living in the Victorian era when things were pretty quiet all the time anyway. They almost never left the tiny village where they lived; never married; never had jobs, save perhaps the genteel profession of governess.
Their names were Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Bronte, and they wrote some of the most breathtaking works of fiction ever - books that are still grabbing readers and not letting go more than a century later.
And the thing is - they did write what they knew. They knew people. Their characters went places they'd never been and did things they'd never done, but they knew them, and because of that they could make us believe in them.
It's not about knowing, really. It's about observing - about really seeing what's going on around you, and using it. Shamelessly.

Even if we don't completely agree with the Brontë facts as given here, we do like the idea behind this fragment.

If anyone feels like travelling momentarily - without leaving their desk - to Haworth, the blog Travel Information offers the chance to do so thanks to a lengthy, detailed post on the village.

We shall conclude on a couple of weird Brontë connections. From the Washington Post advice column and not precisely on writing matters:

It's normal, if not entirely healthy, to immerse yourself in a romance when you're pretty young and it's all pretty new. You just have to keep "natural" from falling off the cliff into "feral" and not neglect every reliable source of long-term satisfaction, like family, education, friends, talents and hobbies -- the components of selfhood, really -- just to play Cathy and Heathcliff. (Carolyn Hax)

That must be a more cultured way of saying 'playing doctors' :P

And Sugar Shock review some Moor Allure products, a brand of cosmetics (!).

For me, the idea of a moor brings to mind the foggy British landscapes of Charlotte Bronte's brooding gothic novel Jane Eyre. But those mossy, ancient reserves of nutrient-rich plants and herbs known as moors exist not only in Victorian romances, but also right here in my home and native land of Canada.

We wonder what Emily Brontë - ever intrinsically connected to the moors - who famously said that she wished to be as God had made her would make of this. She would have found it somewhat puzzling to say the least.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Haworth, Scholar, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights