The Brontës are 'dude-safe' too

Jeanette Winterson writes in The Times about crime fiction and recalls her personal experience with Jane Eyre that later became part of her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (and eventually of a song by Los Campesinos!):

My mother never recovered from the fact that Jane Eyre doesn't marry St John Rivers, and to cushion me from a similar cardiac disappointment, she altered the end, so that when she read it to me, she simply carried on turning the pages, but making it up as she went along. I have to say it was a shock of a different kind when I read Jane Eyre for myself, but it was one of the things that taught me how to be a writer. Just make it up, and if it has been written already - make it up some more.

The Scotsman interviews John Hurt (who is/was/could be attached to the Brontë biopic project) and he remembers a Laurence Olivier anecdote. No mention to the aforementioned picture.

"I remember talking to Olivier when we were doing Lear," he says in that grand, gravelly voice that rolls over vowels and savours consonants. Even when he orders a double espresso in the London hotel where we meet, it sounds like a great lost line intended for the stage. "He said: 'When it comes to your obituary they will only mention two or three performances, and they will be the ones that defined you early on.' I said: 'What will they write about you?' 'Richard III and Wuthering Heights,' he replied. And he was right." (Chitra Ramaswamy)

Another Brontë-related anecdote is provided by Edward Hirsch in The Washington Post:

His grandfather, a stringer for a Yiddish newspaper, wrote poems and copied them into the backs of books. When he died, his grief-stricken grandson would spend endless hours in the cold Chicago basement where those books were kept, looking for the scribbled verse. One day, leafing through an anthology, the boy stumbled on Emily Brontë's "Spellbound" (The night is darkening round me,/The wild winds coldly blow;/But a tyrant spell has bound me/And I cannot, cannot go). "I was totally riveted," he says, "there had been a rage within me, a terrible sorrow, and the poem was a consolation." (Marie Arana)

The effect of this poem on Edward Hirsch was really powerful because this is not the first time that he has mentioned it.

Now, the traditional mixture of ignorance and stupidity that goes along with a sexist reading of the Brontës or Austen. You know, girlish stuff... that sort of cliché. It's particularly distressing when the comments come from a woman. This is how Tina Fey sells the upcoming film Baby Mama, where she plays the lead:

"This is not Sense and Sensibility. This is not Wuthering Heights," Fey says. "I think this is pretty dude-safe. It's got a lot of funny dudes in it." She mentions Dax Shepard, Romany Malco and Steve Martin. Greg Kinnear plays her love interest, a juice-bar owner with an improbably perfect townhouse. (Philadelphia Enquirer)

The Guardian reviews the exhibition Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book currently at the Victoria and Albert Museum and makes special reference to the Brontës:

When the book is as substantial as Miró's Le Courtisan Grotesque, Paula Rego's version of Jane Eyre or Balthus's Wuthering Heights (bound in goatskin dyed grey-green to "evoke the Yorkshire moors"), it is frustrating not to be able to leaf through. (...)
And some [artists], such as Tom Phillips and Rego, are excellent readers, finding new meanings in old texts. (Blake Morrison)

In the Brisbane Times we read about a visit to the Hay-On-Wye Festival. The article ends with this most bibliophile experience:

We'll be able to revisit the bookstores online but that will never match the real experience: ducking under the low lintel to enter yet another shop, spotting a beloved book in its first hardback edition on the shelf, opening it at the flyleaf and reading the names of previous owners, such as that in a 1900 edition of Mrs Gaskell's The Life Of Charlotte Bronte, inscribed in ink: Edith Smith, June 10th, 1901. As I catalogue each book, I write my own name and imagine someone reading it in 100 years. (Carol Middleton)

And finally, more horse race results (and more) of Charlotte Brontë (the horse). Days of Wine and Roses discusses I Walked With a Zombie (in Greek). This thread in the Times Educational Supplement compares Austen and Charlotte Brontë's juvenilia.


Categories: Art-Exhbitions, Jane Eyre, Juvenilia, Movies-DVD-TV, Poetry, References, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights