"I could have HIT her!"

There is a new book - released May 2008 - out there called Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West (that's the link to the book's official website - very tempting, if you ask us!) by Shannon McKenna Schmidt and Joni Rendon. A couple of sites talk about it today. From The Christian Science Monitor:

It can be read as an armchair travel book or relied upon as a trip planner. Either way, it catalogs and comments on a goodly number of book-related travel destinations. There are author homes (everything from John Milton’s cottage to Tolstoy’s country retreat), book-related sites (the house that stood in for Pemberly in “Pride and Prejudice,” the Yorkish town where Charlotte Bronte conceived and mentally set “Jane Eyre,” hotels that Edith Wharton and Henry James enjoyed on their grand tours), and information about literary walking tours, festivals, etc.

Intelligent Travel posts an interview with the authors together with a picture of the 'controversial' (to put it mildly) statue of the Brontë sisters in the Brontë Parsonage Museum backgarden.

What literary landmark moved you the most?
JR: For me, that would be the Brontë Parsonage Museum. I love the sisters’ gothic novels, whose settings drew so much from the eerily atmospheric Yorkshire moors. Not only did all three of the sisters die tragically young, but they also lost their mother at an early age and were raised by their clergyman father in the isolated parsonage, where they entertained themselves by making up stories. The house looks as if they just stepped out for a moment and contains many moving remnants of their time there, like the black couch on which 30-year-old Emily gasped her dying breath from tuberculosis.

You may want to see more book details or take a look at the Table of Contents now. Or even start planning the next 20 years holidays.

On the topic of inspiration but for education instead of travelling, the Times & Star features Sarah Gray curious story:

Academic life began at 30 for mature West Cumbrian student Sarah Gray, of Bird Dyke, Lamplugh. Inspired by a BBC TV adaptation of romantic novel Jane Eyre, she started studying humanities through the Open University.

If only for that the producers and team behind that adaptation should be feeling very, very proud as that's absolutely about the best thing that any adaptation can hope for in our opinion. We would like to wish all the best to Sarah Gray.

Dovegreyreader posts a fragment from a letter from Daphne du Maurier to Oriel Malet which brings us very much together in our rightful indignation on things Brontë:

'The thing that maddened me this week, on TV, was that writer called Margaret Drabble, who went to Haworth and had a programme on the Brontes...she flounced about in one of those long Maxi coats, with flowing blousy hair, even on the moors, and talked about the three unhappy sisters, sex-starved etc and longing to break away. I could have HIT her! Not a word about Gondal...said all Branwell ever did was to drink at the Black Bull and that Charlotte hated the Parsonage. It was a travesty!'

Oh, we know that feeling so, so well! What would Daphne make of the fact that Margaret Drabble is still quite active in the world of Brontë though?

And to conclude, A Chainless Soul wonders just how naturally - or unnaturally - an audiobook reader would read the many ---- in Agnes Grey. We stick to our opinion that Juliet Mills did very well with the similar obstacles in Jane Eyre, though.

Categories: Books, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Brontëites, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV