Escape to Victory in Wuthering Heights

The Sunday Herald talks about Stephen Pearson, Scottish football player now in the Derby County team. For some reason, the journalist thinks that Wuthering Heights references are quite fitting:

IT WASN'T a typical afternoon for a footballer. Stephen Pearson, in steel toe cap boots, was balancing on a small wooden beam by the side of a forest with the late autumn sun bouncing off a nearby lake, making the Derbyshire countryside look like something straight out of Wuthering Heights.
There was to be no Cathy for the Scottish Heathcliff, but instead 20 volunteers from the Prince's Trust who had spent the week making a wooden play area for local children. (...)
Scotland at Euro 2008? Now that's a story that would have stretched the imagination of Emily Bronte. (Philip Dorward)

Maybe Emily Brontë's second novel was an antecedent of John Huston's Victory with Heathcliff as centre forward. A very uneasy idea.

The Observer publishes an article about Timothy Spall and his son Rafe Spall. Rafe Spall was Edward Rochester in last year's BBC4 adaptation of Wide Sargasso Sea and this is how he showed his work to his father:

Tim remembers the point at which he stopped worrying about his son (kind of): last year, Rafe brought home a rough cut of Wide Sargasso Sea, a steamy adaptation of the Jean Rhys novel in which he played Edward Rochester.

Tim smiles. 'We watched it quite late, me, Shane and Rafe. I was a bit pissed, but I thought: "I can die now." Rafe was embarrassed by the sex scenes - he left the room for each one - but I've seen his arse many a time.' Rafe sighs. 'Not in the past few years.' Tim ignores him. 'I don't know how to say this without sounding egotistical, but I was just grateful. I knew what he was doing was brilliant. But I can't take any responsibility. He simply grew up listening to me slagging off things on television.' (Amy Raphael)

The Dubuque Telegraph Herald publishes a Halloween story full with literary references, including Heathcliff and Bertha Rochester. The Miami Herald comments on the work of artist Naomi Fisher. The journalist sees some Wuthering Heights connections:

Fisher, a Palmetto Bay girl whose father is a botanist at Fairchild Tropical BotanicGarden, pauses before her own contribution, an eerie Jungian study of a woman gazing at her reflection in a lake, a castle looming in the background. The image came to her in a dream the night before she met with the inmates at MOD 11, and the deeply romantic piece could be a setting for Wuthering Heights, an analogy that Fisher acknowledges with a laugh. (...) Along one wall are different renditions of Fisher's effort from MOD 11, with some of the darker versions even more suited to Heathcliff prowling the moor on a dank night. (Tom Austin)

More information on the MOD11 exhibition here.

Finally, the Brussels Brontë Blog talks about their recent talk Letters to Brussels (check previous posts):

Derek [Blyth] gave a highly personal talk about his feelings on reading Charlotte's letters to M. Heger, the unanswered questions that puzzle him and his expedition to the British Library to see them for himself (the keeper of rare manuscripts at the Library told him a Charlotte Brontë ghost story which is fairly well known in Brontë circles but probably less familiar to our Brussels audience). (Helen MacEwan)

You can listen to Derek Blyth interviewed by Brussel FM here. A very nice interview, by the way.

Categories: Brussels, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights