And Patti is happy with Jane

Patti Smith's love for the Brontës has been previously documented here on BrontëBlog, today's mention in an interview for Eye Weekly is rather superficial but still in character:

You reference the bob dylan documentary don’t look back during the film. Are there other rock documentaries you like?
I think Don’t Look Back is the ultimate one. That’s the time I grew up in. Like everyone else, I liked The Beatles’ movies. I’m from a different era. I like Spinal Tap — there’s the great rock documentary. It’s the great rock ’n’ roll movie. But I like fiction, so I’m not generally one for documentaries. I’m just as happy as watching a detective movie or Jane Eyre. I don’t watch so-called “rockumentary” things. I don’t like to see the dark side of the people I romanticized on VH1 or something. I like people for the work they do, whether it’s Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan or Radiohead or Michael Stipe. I’m not the kind of person who gravitates toward trying to discover people’s secrets. (Damian Rogers)

Inspired or not by Patti Smith, the Eye Weekly staff also includes Wuthering Heights in their Idler’s Guide to Fall Reading:

Nov 17 and 18: November sublime: Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte (David Balzer, Lee Ferguson and Douglas Kwan)

The Miami Herald reviews once again the George Packer's theatre play Betrayed:

The single female interpreter, Intisar (Ceci Fernandez, whose expressive eyes tell the story), quotes Emily Bronte and dreams of being allowed to ride a bicycle through the streets like her brothers, without being punished for ''immodesty.'' She's already angered the Sadrists by refusing to wear a hijab, the traditional Arab head covering. (Eileen Spiegler)

The Millions interviews Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street:

TM: At the end of the novel, Abigail says her grandfather always thought "everyone had a book, or a writer, that was the key to their life." This is certainly the case for your characters: Sean refers to Keats, Cameron to Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Abigail to Dickens, and Dara to Charlotte Bronte. For better or for worse, your characters look to the stories and/or biographies of their favorite artists to help them navigate through life. I wonder if this theme, which seems central to the story in many ways, helped in your conception of these characters. Did it shape their destinies on the page? Were there particular challenges to weaving this real life art into your fictional world?
ML: The idea of giving each of my characters what I think of as a literary godparent came to me when I was working on Sean's section. As a graduate student of English he had to have an area of study and I decided that Keats - the poet of erotic love, early death and immortality - was the perfect choice. Then of course it got a little harder with my characters who weren't doing Ph.Ds, but I still loved the idea of how a literary godparent could point to a character's deepest concerns and enlarge the reader's understanding. My rule for picking the godparents was that they had to be well known and nineteenth century and somehow I had strong instinctive feelings about who was right for who - Dickens, for instance, would never have been a good fit for Dara. The biggest challenge was working the necessary information into the plot in a natural way so that the reader could enjoy this aspect of the novel. (Edan Lepucki)

Abaculus has visited the Brontë Parsonage Museum and posts quite a lot of pictures of the visit (the complete set of pictures can be found here). Bronte's Socratic Blog posts about Jane Eyre, Aelfwine translates into Spanish Charlotte Brontë's Passion in El Espejo Gótico and enlightenmentgirl reviews Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Poetry, References