It's grim up there... but the truth is out there

The Herald talks about a new ITV show, Melvyn Bragg's Travels in Written Britain, which will be premiered next April 6:

The saying might be that "it's grim up north" - but it's not for novelists as the north of England has been named the best possible literary backdrop available in British literature.
The region - loosely defined as the land either side of the high Pennines, extending north to the Scottish Borders - was the winner in a survey carried out for a new ITV show, Melvyn Bragg's Travels in Written Britain.(...)
Voters cited the perennially successful Catherine Cookson novels, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte as some of the most memorable books set in the north of England. Both the Bronte sisters lived in Haworth, in Yorkshire, and were schooled in Lancashire.(...)
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was also voted the favourite book set in Britain, followed by four more classics: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Rebecca and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. (...)
The survey of around 2500 people was carried out to mark Bragg's television show, the first part of which is broadcast on April 6. During the one-hour programmes, Bragg also takes a look at the contrasting works of Scots authors Sir Walter Scott and Irvine Welsh. (Phil Miller - Reproduced with the permission of The Herald, Glasgow © 2008 Herald & Times Group)

Today we have a wide stock of Brontë references: Margaret Atwood writes in The Guardian about Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of the Green Gables saga and Jane Eyre makes an appearance:

Judging from what we know about the lives of orphans at that time, including the many "London street Arabs", as Marilla calls them, that were being sent to Canada by the Barnardo homes, a statistically accurate Anne would have continued to be poor and neglected. However, through luck and her own merits, Anne is rescued by the Cuthbert siblings, thus joining a long line of redeemed fictional Victorian orphans, from Jane Eyre to Oliver Twist to little Tom the chimney sweep in Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies.

The Scotsman reviews Other People's Daughters: The Life and Times of the Governess by Ruth Brandon:

THE MOST FAMOUS GOVERNESS IN literature is undoubtedly Jane Eyre, but as Ruth Brandon points out in this slightly misfiring study, her fate as the eventual wife of her employer was hardly the traditional lot of the Victorian governess. For most, it was a lonely job with long hours, little pay and scant appreciation of their efforts.
Brandon's approach is to look in detail at the lives of six governesses: Agnes Porter, Mary Wollstonecraft, Claire Clairmont, Nelly Weeton, Anna Leonowens and Anna Jameson. Of these six, perhaps Wollstonecraft is the most well-known, although Leonowens was the model for Deborah Kerr's governess in the film version of Leonowens's life, The King and I, and Clairmont was the step-sister of Mary Shelley, who also bore Byron a daughter.
In that sense, then, Wollstonecraft, Clairmont and Leonowens are as atypical of the governess experience as Jane Eyre was. (Read more) (Lesley McDowell)

The Times once again mentions the Heathcliff/Rochester inside Gordon Brown:

It's as bad as trying to find a Gordon Brown. Despite castings in the UK and global searches she can't find anyone to play him, “which is annoying as you don't know how long he'll be PM. The problem is he has very old-fashioned looks, Heathcliff or Rochester, tight breeches, muddy lanes, high collars, lambchop face. I've just found an odd-job man in Bulgaria who might fit the bill actually.” (Tim Teeman)

The New York Times Travel Spring 2008 Guide devotes an article to Taipei and discovers yet another set of the-Brontës-of (insert pertinent city/country):

Chu T'ien-hsin and her sister [Chu T'ien-Wen] are a bit like the Brontës of Taiwan. They're big time novelists and short-story writers. (Taipei's dailies publish literary supplements, so high brow short stories reach an unusually large audience.) I wanted to talk to Chu about her novella "The Old Capital", which came out in English last year. (Douglas MacGray)

TV Blink makes a very unlikely comparison: X-Files's Fox Mulder and Heathcliff:

During the clip reel of the nine-season show, “X-Philes” cheered for sci-fi Heathcliff Fox Mulder and savvy strawberry Sno-Cone Dana Scully. (Chad Rooney and Julieanne Smolinski)

The Eloy Enterprise's editor uses a Jane Eyre quote for the title of the article:

"Your self-love dreads a blunder," a certain Mr. Rochester told a literary heroine, Jane Eyre, once upon a time. (Lindsey Gemme)

Now for the blogosphere: neon epiphany posts about different Jane Eyre adaptations. Her favourite is Jane Eyre 1973. GirlDetective has seen Alan Stanford's adaptation of Jane Eyre at the Guthrie Theatre and is not at all thrilled:

I understand that details of the story must be cut or compacted to get the audience home before midnight. I missed many of my favorite scenes, such as Jane in the red room. I was disappointed in the staging decisions of others. (...) Perhaps this was enjoyable to those who hadn’t read the book at all, or for a long time. Perhaps it will inspire people to seek out the book. (...) I am too familiar and have too much affection for the source material to appreciate adaptations for themselves. And yet, I know I’ll continue to see them, if only for the brief moments that they bring to life wonderful parts of the books, like the humor in Jane Eyre that is so often overlooked in its reductive description as a dark, gothic tale.

A very different reaction to the same play can be read on wonderment:

But I will say that Jane Eyre at the Guthrie was wonderful. It was yet another take on a fantastic story. I’ve watched the BBC miniseries (my favorite), read the original book (not so excellent, but must be appreciated for the beauty that the story is, even if I didn’t care for the writing), and now seen the stage version. All were special in their own way. I thought the miniseries was more true to the book than the stage version, but the modifications for the stage made sense for that

Categories: Books, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Theatre