Britney Buttoned Up

The New York Sun reviews Mad, bad and sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present by Lisa Appignanesiñ. The review begins with a paragraph that successfully (?) manages to link Bertha Mason with... Britney Spears:

Could it be that imprisoned inside every sane woman is a Mrs. Rochester — the madwoman in the attic whose untamed presence, like that of "some strange wild animal," haunts "Jane Eyre" — yowling to get out? Are we women now, as in the 19th and 20th centuries, in danger of coming down, sooner or later, with some configuration of what Elaine Showalter described as "the female malady"? Some culturally constructed and fashionably diagnosed form of emotional instability, that is, ranging from "weak" nerves to full-blown Britney Spears meltdown? (Daphne Merkin)

We read in the Martha's Vineyard Times a nice article partly telling about a visit to the Parsonage in Haworth:

The Brontë sisters lived in a little village called Haworth (pronounced Howarth) in Yorkshire. They wrote their bestsellers at home, laboring with pen and ink and taking their inspiration from their surroundings. Their books reflect the physical environment in which they lived and died, and their other influences can only be assumed to be books and whatever news their paterfamilias and brother gave them. The Pennine hills are dramatic and brooding, and folks like Heathcliff are nice representations of a forbidding environment.
If you go to visit Haworth today, you'll find it surprisingly unchanged from the day of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Granted, the whole area is called Brontë Country and there is a fair commerce in Brontë souvenirs, but the place itself is little changed by two centuries of progress. Tourism exists side by side with a deeply rooted sense of tradition. They don't seem inclined to take down buildings just because they're 300 years old. They make do.
The parsonage where the Brontës lived has been turned into a museum devoted to all things Brontë. A writing table, a pen, the unchanging view. It's all there for the scholar or the tourist to enjoy, putting himself in their world. Which begs the question: can you imagine having objects that are used for not weeks, but years? A good pen refilled (!) not tossed in the trash once it reaches its last drop of ink. Here are the three dimensional objects (in the parlance of the museum trade) once used by the sisters. And, here too, are the papers that record the lives lived and the books written. (Susan Wilson)

The Independent reports the death of the actor Willoughby Goddard who was Mr. Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre 1963.

L.A. Weekly reviews Do Me: Tales of Sex & Love from Tin House. One of the stories is described like this:

Thankfully, Do Me also includes some gems from the impressive roster of contributors Tin House has amassed in its 10 years of publishing. Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Millhauser’s “The Room in the Attic” is a marvelously creepy gothic tale, Jane Eyre for teenage boys. (Hillary Johnson)

An alert from Petaluma, California, for tomorrow, May 2:

AUTHOR MAUREEN ADAMS AT PETALUMA LIBRARY

A discussion and book signing with Maureen Adams, author of “Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton and Emily Bronte,” is at 2 p.m. May 2 at the Petaluma Library, 100 Fairgrounds Drive. Admission is free. Call 763-9801 ext. 5 for information. (Petaluma360.com)

The OUP Blog posts about The Oddest English Spellings which contains an interesting comment on Wuthering Heights:

Present day English has no words spelled with initial wu-. The few exceptions are dialectal forms recorded by linguists centuries after the phonetic processes mentioned here had been completed, and the only one most of us know is wuther, thanks to Emily Bronte’s title Wuthering Heights. (Anatoly Liberman)

Oached Pish posts about a fascinating parallel universe literary world where

Shelley had left the field to Keats, whose poetry and novels dominate the century. Each more brilliant than the last, and more insightful, Keats steadfastly refused to enter politics, though he was encouraged by all. Instead, he moved to Cambridge, where he taught literature, establishing the first classes that women were encouraged to attend. Among his early students were a numerous family by the name of Bronte: their living in the college he established for those whose families could not afford the reguar fees guaranteed their survival. Thus it was that Anne Bronte, in collaboration with her sister Emily, inspired the rich field of children's literature with their other-world fantasy series, Gondaland, bolstered by Branwell Bronte's adult series Angria, from which Bram Stoker later took his inspiration. (zornhau)

Doveygreyreader reviews Justine Picardie's My Mother's Wedding Dress: The Life and Afterlife of Clothes which, as we posted on our own review, has a very interesting Charlotte Brontë connection.

Shoot for Eternity compares Austen and Brontë:

Many people refer to the Bronte books (by sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne) as "dark". Well, people, life is dark. Life is not all romantic dilemmas of misunderstandings and girly dramatic assumptions as to what the male species is thinking. Life is a moral challenge, a tug at your heart as to what you should do when ethics combat your emotions. Bronte does that, she reaches in and pulls at your heart. That is writing. (Alicia)

Another Jane Eyre reader shares her thoughts on the blogosphere and Jahaja posts about Wuthering Heights in Swedish.

And finally a serious contender for the most bizarre Brontë metaphor of the year. Read on Adotas an article about Epic Advertising:

In response to the complaint, by 2007 Epic had completely changed its approach to policing itself. It started spending about 5% of its budget on compliance issues, Sprouse said. At that point, the company was more buttoned up than a repressed governess in a Bronte novel. (Kathleen)

Categories: Alert, Books, Haworth, Jane Eyre, References, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights