Positively sphinx-like

A letter to the Huntington Town Crier describes the recent performances of Gordon & Caird's Jane Eyre musical in St. Ives:

We've just returned from watching SIMADS' latest production Jane Eyre.
Although I am not great fan of Charlotte Bronte's works, my wife is a devotee.
I was surprised then to be converted by this musical drama (perhaps more of an opera with 42 musical pieces).
It was put together in a magical way which told the initially sad story with its happy ending. To start with the setting was grey and the music subdued. This created an aura of the times – sprawling urban slums with poverty and disease stalking the people.
Gradually the pace increased with the music having echoes of Les Miserables and the settings a cross between Oliver and Gosford Park.
All was superbly put together and the players rose to the occasion with enthusiasm and talent.
The two leads – Jane and Rochester – were strong and convincing in both acting and singing and they were very well supported by the cast.
Well done SIMADS, the orchestra and all those behind the scenes. (Peter Bake)

The List has an article about Anne Donovan's Being Emily:

New novel Being Emily features the same language and settings to her other books but is much darker and comes five years after Buddha Da. Was it hard to follow? ‘Well, first I wrote a novel that didn’t quite work,’ Donovan says now, very matter-of-factly. ‘But there was no pressure. Then I had the idea for Being Emily, about a girl relating to Emily Bronte, being fascinated by the whole family mythology and that romantic idea of the sisters who live on a moor. Emily was mystical, positively sphinx-like, she hardly went around with anyone else. I thought it was a good start for a short story. Everything I’ve done so far begins that way; I think of myself as a short story writer who occasionally writes a novel by mistake.’ (Rodge Glass)

Shangols reviews Jean-Luc Godard's Week End (with its infamous Emily Brontë appearance). The Brontë Parsonage Blog posts about the recent Chaffinches and Churchyards activity:

The museum’s education officer Susan Newby, who ran the activities, said, “As well as being really interesting places to explore historically, churchyards can be a haven to a surprising range of species, all coming alive at this time of year. It was great to have a dig around and to see what turned up!”

Dovegreyreader talks about Alison Light's Forever England, Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, published by Routledge in 1991, particularly a chapter entitled, 'Daphne du Maurier's romance with the past'.

There is a fascinating exposition of Daphne's 'lifelong debt to the Brontes and her self-conscious re-shaping of their imaginative terrain and there they are again, and with Alison Light's assistance the debt becomes clear.
Jamaica Inn as a reworking of Wuthering Heights, echoes of Jane Eyre in Rebecca, the fascination with those on the margins of society so evident in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the themes of 'drunkenness, theft, murder and madness and marital abuse' all surfacing in Jamaica Inn. The greatest debt of course taking the form of The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte and an entire chapter in Vanishing Cornwall devoted to tracing the Branwell family roots in Penzance.

MischieFuriose briefly discusses Jane Eyre in Italian.

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