Lucrezia Borgia or Jane Eyre?

Two authors of recently-published books with a Brontë connection have made it into the news today.

Lee Smith, author of On Agate Hill, is the protagonist of a Q&A in The Columbus Dispatch.

Lee Smith describes her latest novel, On Agate Hill, as "Jane Eyre with sex." [...]
Q: What do Molly and Jane Eyre have in common?
A: Their situation, I suppose -- orphans alone in the world. And a sense of grit and determination to have their own lives, even though their time and place and situation conspire against them. They're just the kind of heroines I always loved when I was a girl.
Q: There's something of Wuthering Heights here, too.
A: This is kind of an homage, I think, to some of my own touchstones. I've never written about the Civil War because growing up in the mountains, we were just not even interested in it. There was nothing about the traditional South there.
But, like every other 20th-century writer, I've been enormously influenced by Faulkner and the Southern sense of the past and how it weighs on the present. And also a sense of the enormity of what happened to this country with the Civil War. (Margaret Quamme)

If you're interested in this work, you might like to go to this if you're nearby:

• Lee Smith will appear during a Thurber House "Evenings With Authors" program at 7:30 tonight in the Columbus Performing Arts Center, 549 Franklin Ave. Tickets cost $15 to $20. Call 614-464-1032 or visit www.thurber house.org.

Valerie Martin, author of Trespass, is the object of an article in The Buffalo News.

“What do you know about her? Is she even a citizen? Is she after a green card? She’s trying to trap you. . . . She’s more interested in this house than she is you. . . . You’re being played for a fool.”
The words, indelible in 21-year-old Tony Dale’s head, belong to his mother, Chloe Dale, a respected children’s illustrator whose instant dislike and suspicion of Salome Drago seems to come out of nowhere and quickly poisons every aspect of Chloe’s heretofore comfortable life. Veteran anti-war protester and purported champion of human rights, Chloe is suddenly and inexplicably beside herself — seeing darkness not only in the exotic Salome but also in a poacher she encounters on the Dales’ property, and in the sketches she is preparing for a young readers’ version of “Wuthering Heights.”[...]
While Chloe, at work in her studio, asks, “Exactly how dark is Heathcliff?” the Croatian woman is recalling how, “One day you get up and look out the window and there’s some small change, something so small you might not notice it if you weren’t already tense from waiting, a gate ajar in a neighbor’s yard, the smell of rubber burning, a dog whimpering at his own front door. It’s here. The war is here. It has begun.” [...]
At one point, Chloe looks at her work on “Wuthering Heights” and sees in Heathcliff what we assume she believes of Salome as refugee: “He wants to get even with those who took him in and failed to love him. No, he’s not the romantic vision of an overheated female imagination. He’s something new: the vengeful orphan, the ungrateful outsider, the coming retribution of the great underclass.” (Karen Brady)

The Times has a couple of articles with mentions to the Brontës. The first one is clearly more relavant to this blog since it features Ruth Wilson (Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre 2006) and her brother Matt Wilson. They both chat about their lives.

MATT: To be honest, acting never struck me as the obvious career for Ruth. I used to take the mick that she was going to train for two years to be a professional waitress, but she confounded me by getting the Jane Eyre job straight out of drama school. So I’ve had to change my angle of attack. I’ve always taken the piss out of her, but it’s keep-your-feet-on-the-ground stuff rather than any real criticism. I think she’s a brilliant actress. [...]
At school Ruth was the annoying person who was good at sport and got straight As. I’m inherently lazy. I have to be really interested in something before I’ll do it, and then I’ll almost push it too far. Ruth commits to everything 100%, if she’s enjoying it or not. She’d have put the same effort into the TV series Suburban Shootout as she did into Jane Eyre. [...]
RUTH: [...] My family really influences the way I pick roles. It’s often down to what I know they’ll respect and be intrigued by. My brothers take the piss out of me and keep me grounded. They’ll tell me if a show’s not good or if they’re proud. When I was in Suburban Shootout, a Channel 5 comedy, all the boys got comments about their sister in a short skirt, so they didn’t particularly like it. But with Jane Eyre they were incredibly supportive and wrote lovely letters. (Lauren St John)

The second article is on the family quarrels about Luciano Pavarotti's will. His widow is likened to two self-excluding 'stereotypes':

Since Pavarotti’s funeral she has been portrayed, in the words of her friend Anna Maria Bernini, a lawyer, as a Lucrezia Borgia – a Renaissance pope’s daughter rumoured to have employed a poisoner to eliminate her dinner guests. But, the lawyer countered: “If anything, she’s like a heroine from a romantic novel of the 19th century.”
Lucrezia Borgia or Jane Eyre, Nicoletta has yet another blow to contend with. Massimo Di Patria, the acting chief prosecutor in Pesaro, the town near the Adriatic coast where Pavarotti owned a holiday villa, last month launched a judicial investigation focusing on the will the singer signed six weeks before his death, making Nicoletta the sole administrator and beneficiary of a trust fund containing all his assets in America. The ongoing probe, which does not name any suspects, is to establish whether he was of sound mind and body, and will involve questioning his doctors and nurses. (John Follain)

The Brontës and their most famous characters are definitely the journalists' favourite people. We're beginning to think that when a journalist reaches, say, 100 mentions he/she qualifies for some extra money or a superior status among his/her peers.

An article in the Argentinian newspaper La Nación classifies men according to whether they belong in the Darcy or the Heathcliff group. But the journalist also mentions briefly the upcoming film Brontë and unsurprisingly wonders how such reclusive sisters could have written such books. Always the same old thing.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights