Jeanette Winterston talks about the contemporary obsession with celebrities and the cult of the personality in
The Times, suggesting a new possible reality show:
My new TV show, The X-Word, will feature hopefuls from creative writing programmes, alongside home-taught scribblers, and put them in front of a top literary agent, a shark-nosed publisher, a bookseller with attitude and a PR guru, and make them tell us why they should be on the nation's bookshelves. Of course they will have to be able to write, but they should be good-looking, funny, talkative, personable, the right shape for an Armani suit, and a bit of a psychopath.
Dickens might have made it. Emily Brontë would have had her Round 1 rejection slip sent by second-class post to The Parsonage in Haworth.
Fortunately, not everything is lost. Brenda MacDonald writes in
The Boston Herald a very nice story with Wuthering Heights in its core:
I spotted the girl in a bookstore. She looked about 15 years old, bursting into the small store with two girls her age. The three girls bubbled with enthusiasm, gasping over books the way other girls their age might sway at boys. I watched them with curiosity.
The girls stayed in a pack, browsing local author picks, store recommended choices, book group selections. Soon they separated. The girl wandered my way, stood next to me, seeming oblivious to me as we both perused the books in front of us.
She pulled a book off the shelf - Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights.”
“Oooh,” she said, calling to her friends. “I want this.”
The other girls gathered around here as she counted her money. She had $11. The paperback book cost $7. A bargain, I thought.
But she had a problem.
If you want to know what the problem is and the rest of the story, just click
here.
Veronica Horwell reviews
The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping (edited by Jill Foulston) in
The Guardian. The book features Jane Eyre
cringing at Mr Rochester's pre-wedding excess,
Jane Eyre at a warehouse (large cloth store) easily rejected Mr Rochester's proffered trousseau of amethyst silk and pink satin - these would have been lengths of textiles requiring dressmaking. Would she have been more tempted by his pasha act if the gowns had been assembled already in all their seraglio glamour?
We don't really think so. As Jane says in the aforementioned fragment:
With anxiety I watched his eye rove over the gay stores: he fixed on a rich silk of the most brilliant amethyst dye, and a superb pink satin. I told him in a new series of whispers, that he might as well buy me a gold gown and a silver bonnet at once: I should certainly never venture to wear his choice. With infinite difficulty, for he was stubborn as a stone, I persuaded him to make an exchange in favour of a sober black satin and pearl-grey silk. (Chapter XXIV)
The New York Times reviews Cleopatra's Nose by Judith Thurman, which contains an essay on Charlotte Brontë, as
we explained previously.
The Daily Mail reviews the recent edition of the
Letters of Ted Hughes selected and edited by Christopher Reid (Faber, £30). The reviewer describes the poet very colourfully:
Larkin used to say Plath belonged to the Hammer House Of Horror school of poetry. I think I'd come to think of Hughes as a combination of Herman Munster and Heathcliff. So I was completely unprepared for the quality of the letters which is most noticeable — namely their tenderness. (A N Wilson)
BookNut comments, not very positively, on Villette.
Gullible's Travels visits Haworth and the moors, although she seems a little bit confused about where the Brontë Falls are.
Costumes and Stuff posts some pictures of the designs by the blog owner, Heather Leigh Brown, of the 2004 production of
Jane Eyre in the Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Categories: Books, Haworth, Jane Eyre, References, Theatre, Villette, Wuthering Heights
0 comments:
Post a Comment