Emily Brontë in an Aga and Shirley in Stalag Luft III

Let's begin our newsround with Jeannette Winterson's article in The Times with the irresistible title of Jeanette Winterson leaves her mobile phone in the Aga - and blames it on Emily Brontë:

IT HAS BEEN A BAD WEEK; first I dropped my mobile phone down the loo, and then I gave it the Iraq treatment in the top oven of my Aga. (...)
But it was Emily Brontë's fault anyway - the phone in the Aga.
I was thinking about her, wild, troubled, alive, free, and I wasn't thinking about my toytown mobile phone, so I put it in the wrong oven - the bottom oven where the cat sometimes sleeps would have been fine.
What would Emily Brontë have done with a mobile phone? Who would she have had on speed dial? Charlotte? The Rev Patrick?
And if Heathcliffe (sic) could have texted Cathy, how many wet walks across the moors could have been avoided?
In fact, the whole drama of Wuthering Heights could have been played out with no effort at all, and Nelly could have saved everyone a lot of trouble by sending two “copy all” texts: CATHY DYING. CATHY DEAD.
But it's not the real stuff I want to avoid, but the rest, the stuff masquerading as real life, that isn't worth much time and energy.
Books - writing them, reading them - are worth all the time and energy they need, because they give it back a hundred-fold.
So the next time someone glances up from their psychotic mobile phone-mania and says that they are too busy to read, tell them that all texts are not equal, and give them Wuthering Heights.

Now a couple of Brontëites:

The Daily Mail interviews author Celia Walden:

What book first gave you the reading bug?
Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. It was the first book that really set my imagination alight - and also the first to make me cry.
Even now, Helen's death scene could reduce me to tears. My brothers hated it. Maybe it just hits that nerve with women.

We read in The Telegraph's obituary of Eric Dowling an interesting Brontë connection:

Eric Dowling, who died on July 21 aged 92, was among the PoWs in Stalag Luft III whose exploits later became celebrated in the Hollywood film The Great Escape (1963); Dowling himself was not among those who attempted to get out of the camp, but played a valuable part in the preparations, which culminated in 76 men breaking for freedom on March 24 1944. (...)
Dowling kept a detailed record of his life in Stalag Luft III, where he was incarcerated for nearly three years. During this period he learned five languages, and noted meticulously every one of the 411 books he read – these included works of fiction such as Beverley Nichols's Patchwork and Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, and biographies of Pepys, Shakespeare, Dickens and Oscar Wilde.

The Yorkshire Post has an article about a recurring topic. Why televisions and filmmakers always adapt the same novels?

BEFORE the cameras even start rolling, the latest movie production of Wuthering Heights has already seen high drama that doesn't feature in the pages of Emily Brontë's novel.
The names of various high-profile actresses were previously associated with the part of heroine Catherine Earnshaw – Natalie Portman, Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller allegedly among them. But Australian Abbie Cornish is now said to have signed up to play opposite Michael Fassbender as Heathcliff.
However, there's now the problem of finding the right director to replace John Maybury, who was slated to make the movie but has withdrawn from the project. (...)
I just feel a certain jaded acceptance that when producers and screenwriters don't quite know what to do next, they know that Austen and Brontë will sell not only on home turf but in terms of lucrative international sales.
Austen's body of six brilliant completed novels has attracted film makers' attention because of their depth, great characters, fabulous frocks, stately homes and portrayal of social mores and the class system of the day. But let's give it a rest for at least a decade. The palate of this avid Austen fan is beginning to develop a coating of white, furry Austenphobia. (...)
With all this money being thrown at the long-dead Misses Austen and Brontë, I feel sorry for modern writers whose work well deserves TV or cinematic treatment. Why not shelve the dependence on safe classic fiction and vary the diet more, with treatments of the works of fantastic contemporary writers such as Maggie O'Farrell and Helen Dunmore and the sparkling domestic wit of Wendy Holden? (Sheena Hastings)

Anthony McGowan explains in The Guardian's Book Blog which books, in his opinion, should not be read by teenagers:

OK, so not many teenagers are going to be reading Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade, but there's a whole world of books that I'd ban straight away if I got the chance: pink books. Yes, down there with Nietzsche and De Sade I'd place those terrible teeny-chick lit "novels", the ones about snogging and boyfriends and make-up and nothing else. The novel is supposed (says who? says me) to exalt the soul, to show humanity what, in its greatest moments, it might achieve; and yet also to reveal our vulnerability and our helplessness.

The leathery-skinned hacks who churn out the Pink books present a vision of young people as self-obsessed, shallow, blind automata, swilling about in a moronic inferno. Reading these books will leave your soul as shrivelled as one of those pistachios you sometimes find, blackened, in the bottom of the bag. Teenage girls, read the Brontës, read Elizabeth Gaskell, read George Eliot, read anything else - even Jane Austen - but keep the pink off your shelves.

EDIT: It's worthwhile to check some of the comments of the aforementioned post where Wuthering Heights is discussed and Terry Eagleton's Myths of Power is profusely quoted! You can check Austenblog's reply here.

Chortle reviews Watson And Oliver sketch comedy show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2008. Regrettably the only thing that the reviewer didn't like was the Wuthering Heights sketch:

Only one sketch failed to ignite. A sideways look at Wuthering Heights did not possess the sharpness or skill of their other offerings and petered out, but this was the only hiccup in an otherwise seamless show. (Corry Shaw)

NY Arts interviews artist Margarita Gluzberg whose most recent show, The Money Plot, was on display in London in June:

You also use literary inspiration, especially that which is based on philosophy or a sociology, as a vehicle through which to examine what is going on in modern Western society. Can you comment on the relationship of the works in The Money Plot to your interpretation of its literary origins in Balzac’s novel?
(...) The show’s title, "The Money Plot," has origins that are quite direct. In my edition of Cousin Bette, a novel of love, intrigue, and money, the editors supply a synopsis of the novel but in terms of all of the financial transactions between the characters. The implication is that in order to properly understand all the human relations in the novel, the reader must understand how they connect to one another financially! It struck me then that every seemingly romantic novel I read seemed to be about money. In Jane Eyre, the heroine doesn’t actually find love and happiness until she comes into an unexpected inheritance. Wuthering Heights is a novel about class and wealth—very similar to The Great Gatsby. And then back to my own situation at the time—I returned to the autobiographical—the mesh started to form. (Éva Pelczer)

The Valley News Dispatch presents the performances of Charles Ludlum's The Mystery of Irma Vep which opens today in Indiana, PA:

"The Mystery of Irma Vep" opens today at the Philadelphia Street Playhouse in Indiana, and if you're not familiar with the plot, think of "The Curse of the Mummy." Or maybe "Jane Eyre." Or even Alfred Hitchcock's "Rebecca." (Maryann Gogniat Eidemiller)

The Independent reviews Strange Music by Laura Fish:

Yet with notable exceptions, like Jean Rhys's classic Wide Sargasso Sea, fiction has under-explored the shadows cast by slavery over British life. So Strange Music is more than welcome. Spanning the years 1837 to 1840, it focuses on the family of the poet Elizabeth Barrett, both in England and at the family plantation in Jamaica, Cinnamon Hill. (Andrea Stuart)

We never could imagine that we will see the mythical Florence Foster Jenkins sharing the same paragraph that Charlotte Brontë. The Independent (NY) reviews Souvenir. A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins by Stephen Temperley:

There are numerous recordings, programs from annual recitals at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in New York, and a program from the sold-out 1944 Carnegie Hall concert attesting to Foster Jenkins' genuineness and, if one must, her eccentricities. Souvenir is a love story, a love story as deeply felt and as honest and intense as anything by Charlotte Bronte or her sisters, despite the fact that there are no bodice-ripping, breathless confessions or heated confrontations. (Charles Kondek)

The Dewsbury Reporter announces next month's Luddite Walk organized by David and Imelda Marsden (more information on this previous post):

WALK in the footsteps of the Luddites at a special event being organised in the Spen Valley and Mirfield.
The Luddite Walk will be led by North Kirklees Ramblers Association member Ken Dews and a talk will be given by academic Dr J A Hargreaves, an expert on the Luddites.
The meeting point is the Dumb Steeple, Mirfield, at 1.30pm on Sunday September 7 and will take in parts of the Luddite landscape.
The sponsored walk will raise money for Holly Bank School, Mirfield, which the famous literary Bronte sisters attended between 1831-1836 (then called Roe Head school).
The school is for people aged five-19 who have severe physical disabilities and caters for those up to age 25 with a specialist independence-training project.

The Huddersfield Daily Examiner explains the following anecdote:

The two anaesthetists who were to prepare me that Tuesday morning looked rather sad and I felt needed cheering up. “Have you heard?” I said, “the remains of a dinosaur have been found in Haworth. They think it’s a Bronte-saurus.” The two gentlemen looked even more depressed. “For goodness sake let’s get him under quick before we have any more comments like that.” (Sue Bardon)

We totally agree with the two anaesthetists.

By the way, the British press has a found a new goldmine with another Gordon Brown comment. It seems that the Heathcliffgate leaves space to the new Scottgate. Read it in The Daily Mail, The Independent, The Sun, The Telegraph or BBC News.

On the blogosphere, Sarah Jane Swift blames Jane Eyre for her tastes in literature, Vulpes Libris interviews Karen Wenborn of Classical Comics (which will publish a comic adaptation of Jane Eyre next month and of Wuthering Heights next year). Comical Hell Sin posts about Goodreads average reader scores of the novels by the Brontë sisters. The second one on that classification, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, is reviewed briefly on The Susanne. Meanderings reviews Wuthering Heights. Livres de Malice posts about Jane Eyre and André Téchiné's film Les Soeurs Brontë (in French).

Categories: Brontëites, Emily Brontë, Humour, In the News, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Shirley, Theatre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights