The Brontës, of course

Brontëite Barbara Taylor-Bradford is interviewed in The Yorkshire Post and she cannot help saying:

Name your favourite Yorkshire book or author.
It's the Brontës, of course; I grew up with them. I think Emily Brontë is one of the geniuses of English Literature. Wuthering Heights is an amazing book, it's written with two narrators, Nellie Dean and Mr Lockwood. To my way of thinking, it's not a great love story – it's really a book about revenge. It's a man coming back to exact revenge on those who demeaned and abandoned him.

Jane Sullivan replies in The Age to an article by Lynn Truss in The Guardian about the physical description of characters. Once again, Jane Eyre is taken as an example:

The Victorians went in for exhaustive inventories: they believed that the physiognomy revealed the inner nature of the person. Yet the great writers are not as prolix as we might expect. When Jane Eyre catches her first sight of Mr Rochester, who has just fallen off his horse and is not in a good mood, she sees just this: "A dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow; his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted". He is neither young nor handsome and this encourages her: "I felt no fear of him, and but little shyness".

The New York Times reviews Sue Miller's The Senator's Wife which has some Jane Eyre references:

With her husband broken in body, mind and spirit, Delia at last finds true happiness. (Shades of “Jane Eyre,” Meri[one of the characters] muses.) (Judith Warner)

The Telegraph reviews various vamp novels. Including Dark Possession: a Carpathian Novel by Christine Feehan. Spanish readers, please don't laugh.

Vampires have come a long way from scratching creepily at windows. Now they are sizzling sexpots, such as the "Carpathian" Manolito de la Cruz, with whom our heroine MaryAnn finds herself trapped on a steamy island populated with vampires and Jaguar-Men. (...)
Being mysterious/brooding/outwardly-harsh-yet-inwardly-tender, Manolito fits the Heathcliff outline, while MaryAnn is a post-feminist with a supernatural secret, even if this is not so supernatural as the secret in Manolito's trousers, at the manifestation of which any trace of feminism in the narrative vanishes like mist.

Now for some other weird stuff. Do you want to know what kind of plants the Cathy Earnshaws are? Read The Tampa Tribune:

And then we have the Cathy Earnshaws, those so like the tragically conflicted romantic in Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights." They're just doomed.

Foxtail palm
Alexander palm - [Mike] Dickens discourages anyone in the Bay area from even trying them.
Impatiens and other annuals - They turn to mush.

Hal Boedeker publishes in The Orlando Sentinel his predictions for tomorrow's Golden Globes 'ceremony':

Movie or mini actress: Ruth Wilson was wonderful in PBS' "Jane Eyre." But I think voters will prefer veteran Sissy Spacek in CBS' "Pictures of Hollis Woods." The other contenders are Bryce Dallas Howard in HBO's "As You Like It," Debra Messing in USA's "The Starter Wife" and Queen Latifah in HBO's "Life Support."

On the blogosphere today: ¿Pero qué broma es esta? comments in Spanish Wuthering Heights, starting with a quote from Diane Setterfeld's The Thirteenth Tale. This Italian blog talks about Jane Eyre 2006. Près de la plume... au coin du feu recommends Jane Eyre in French. Books... A Splendid World of Knowledge, Passion, and Imagination ! does the same with Wuthering Heights. The [Poet] that Never Writes... posts what seems to be a scene from a script based on Jane Eyre: A Living Death. Suite 101 posts about Jane Eyre at Marsh End. Worthwhile Books talks about The Dark Quartet by Lynne Reid Banks and Rebecca Fraser's The Brontës: Charlotte Brontë and her Family.

Womat's World looks into Jane Eyre's vocabulary and on My, she was yar! we have found something that made us laugh. We don't know if it's a real conversation or not but... se non è vero è ben trovato:

When I look up at them she's pointing to Jane Eyre, confessing, "I could never get into Jane Austen. I'd keep trying to start one but I'd just get so bored."
He, tall, curly-haired, unshaven, protests, "But that's not Jane Eyre!"
"It doesn't matter. All those books are the same," she insists. "The people all talk the same way."

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