"Carried away by the romance of the landscape"

The Guardian asks 'why everything about life in the north of England is the best in Britain' and several writers answer the question. Jenni Murray gives an important reason:

Our favourite book was Wuthering Heights and we would picture Cathy and Heathcliffe, carried away by the romance of the landscape that could change within seconds from the darkest of satanic hills to the greenest, gentlest rolling valleys.

The Times has an article on literary pilgrims:

Because admirers bring custom, institutions and municipalities eagerly advertise associations. On occasion, indeed, they have exaggerated the links. Schools and colleges hoard, and sometimes exhibit, memorabilia from past pupils. Thus, the curious may stare at Johnson’s teapot, Philip Larkin’s spectacles, numerous locks of hair, quills and inkhorns, even, in the case of Jeremy Bentham, his embalmed body. More orthodox stimulus comes from portraits and busts. In the dining hall of Trinity College, Cambridge, hang images of Byron and Tennyson. The Long Room of the eighteenth-century library at Trinity Dublin, boasts Roubillac’s head of Jonathan Swift, which is placed among the serried ranks of stern divines and forgotten scholars. Hull University Library proudly displays personal mementoes of Philip Larkin. In the Tate Gallery, the mawkishly mauve corpse of Chatterton, dead in his garret, in Henry Wallis’s posthumous image continues to fascinate. The National Trust, with its astute blend of commerce and high-mindedness, has long preserved authors’ houses. After all, one founder of the Trust was Beatrix Potter. As well as her Lake District home, the Trust’s équipe includes Thomas Hardy, T. E. Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling, Jane Austen, Bernard Shaw and Thomas Carlyle. Smaller organizations cherish Laurence Sterne, John Keats, William Wordsworth, the Brontës, William Morris, D. H. Lawrence, Barbara Pym and P. G. Wodehouse. Where no residence can serve as a museum, relics are venerated, graves tidied and monuments erected. More modest cults agitate for blue plaques to record men and women of letters. (Toby Barnard)

The Canberra Times publishes a review of that promising book called The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, and suggests other novels to counteract the withdrawal symptoms after reading it - Wuthering Heights is one of them.

Wuthering Heights is reviewed by the blog puskada badanekaayi. Libros y más reviews The Professor by Charlotte Brontë in Spanish and My Life of Movies has created several Jane Eyre 2006-inspired icons.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Haworth, Wuthering Heights