T' maister's dahn i' t'fowld

John Mullan writes in The Guardian about the different uses of dialect in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting and compares it to Emily Brontë's use of Yorkshire dialect in Wuthering Heights:

Such dialect may be thoroughly non-standard in its spelling, but it is transparent compared with, say, the speech of the servant Joseph in the first edition of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. "'T'maister's dahn i' fowld. Goa rahnd by th'end u' laith, if you went tuh spake tull him." This is his first sentence in the book, and makes Welsh's Edinburgh smack addicts seem lucid in comparison. (After Emily Brontë's death, her sister Charlotte rewrote the dialect to make it easier for those she called "Southerns".)

Well, actually the first edition of Wuthering Heighs reads: "T' maister's dahn i' t'fowld. Goa rahnd by th'end ut'laith, if yah went tuh spake tull him". Charlotte Brontë edited it to: "T' maister's down i' t' fowld. Go round by th' end o' t' laith, if ye went to spake to him". And later editors seem to have taken it upon themselves to edit Joseph's dialect as well.

Daoud Hari, the author of The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur has been featured previously on BrontëBlog. Now, The Times interviews him:

His father sent him away for safety to boarding school in the city of El Fasher, where he learnt his English and developed a deep and perhaps improbable affection for classic English literature. 'We had very good education for English in Sudan in the 1980s, and some very good teachers,' he says. 'They taught us the classics: Treasure Island, Animal Farm, Oliver Twist. My favourites were Jane Eyre and Kidnapped. I read them over and over. Even now, the characters are with me.' (Richard Grant)

Will Self in his column in The Independent succumbs to the Haworth misspelling disease:

Yes, it was that time of the year again when I spent a day with the successful bidder in The Independent's Christmas charity auction. This year the Reverend Liz Cannon had bought me, ably assisted by her husband, David, a retired systems analyst, who – among other talents – has internet auctions down to a fine art. (...)
And after a curacy in Norfolk, during which she and David met and married, they moved to a parish at Cross Roads near Keighley in West Yorkshire. The parish abutted the Brontë's Howarth, but it was more the experience of working in a hilly, and ethnically mixed community, that struck the couple. That, and the way the position crept up on Liz: "Initially I found the moors very claustrophobic, and the town looked very dour.

The Book Reporter interviews Stephenie Meyer. Although her Twilight saga has been linked to Wuthering Heights several times when asked what are her favourite authors, she says:

Q: What adult authors do you read?
SM: I’ve been reading books for adults my entire life. Growing up I was an avid reader --- the thicker the book, the better. PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, GONE WITH THE WIND, THE SWORD OF SHANNARA, JANE EYRE, REBECCA, etc. I’m a huge fan of Orson Scott Card, and Jane Austen --- I can’t go through a year without re-reading her stuff again.

The Montclair Times reviews “Darkness to Light,” a play by Alan Shapiro about Ludwig von Beethoven's life and thinks that:

The dialogue and the characterizations, the lines and the acting, are in that straightforward, literate earnestness we’ve come to expect from Masterpiece Theatre adaptations of Jane Austin [sic] and the Bronte sisters. (Thom Molyneaux)

Comedy Queen talks about Jane Eyre 2006. Millennium of British Lit describes a visit to Brontë country. My West Virginia Life has seen the Clay Center's performances of Polly Teale's Jane Eyre. And Romantic Times reviews the upcoming Dangerous by Monica Burns:

Jane Eyre meets The Mummy, with lots of passionate sex thrown in for extra spice! Burns' characters are so multidimensional that readers will swear they're based on real people. Fans of Egyptology, gothic mysteries, ghost stories, romance and/or erotica will love every word -- and Lucien's meddling grandmother too.

The author seems to be a truly Jane Eyre fan, as can be read here.

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