Brontë pre-history

Mammoth Screen joint managing director Damien Timmer writes for Broadcast mostly about the why and wherefore of the recent Lost in Austen, but he also slips in a comment about their forthcoming Wuthering Heights for ITV.

Truth #2 is that the big titles are coming around faster and faster. Mammoth Screen's upcoming Wuthering Heights comes 11 years after the previous version, which now seems like pre-history.

He is right in that. When it comes to Wuthering Heights, many people feel that no version has even come close to doing justice to the novel, with the arguable exception of Wuthering Heights 1939, which by those standards must be pre-pre-pre-pre-history. With Jane Eyre, on the other hand, a good many people have a favourite version which they claim is as close and loyal to the novel as possible, but - as we see it - that is not the case with any version of Wuthering Heights generally speaking.

And, of course, there is also the fear of producers to tackle lesser-known works (*cough* Villette *cough*, *cough* Shirley *cough*).

Stephenie Meyer and her Twilight series quite refuse to abandon our newsrounds. From The Globe and Mail:

Informed less by millennia of vampire tales, or centuries of fiction, then films, Twilight is also grossly indebted to Jane Eyre and that novel's own brutish, wild Edward (Rochester), dangerous pastoral setting and plain-Jane heroine.
While Meyer's Bella reads Jane Austen, it puts her to sleep: The sexually omnivorous imagination of Charlotte Bronte is awakened when, as with Rochester meeting Jane, Edward meets Bella and behaves like a furious animal, which, of course, makes him all the more, meta-Harlequin alluring. (Lynn Crosbie)

'Brutish, wild Edward', huh?

But Stephenie Meyer is not the only one inspired by Jane Eyre. Singer Laura Marling tries to describe to the Guardian what her new album will be like.

Marling also read Jane Eyre three times in the three months before she made the album. 'I love that Brontë era, the creepy, dark romance. It's funny how much what you're reading influences what you think.' (Alice Fisher)

Salon.com reviews Margaret Atwood's Payback:

That fiery gypsy Heathcliff may have loved and lost Cathy, but he paid her back by snatching up her encumbered estate. (As Atwood drolly notes, "The best nineteenth-century revenge is not seeing your enemy's red blood all over the floor but seeing the red ink all over his balance sheet.") (Louis Bayard)

And Eureka Street also uses Wuthering Heights as an example to introduce an article on 'migrants':

In a famous scene in English Literature, conventional Lockwood, the outsider unable to find his way home, is doubly displaced when he is forced to stay the night at Wuthering Heights, a house so strange as to be a foreign land. During the night he experiences a dream-haunting: Catherine, dead 20 years, comes to his broken window and begs and pleads to be let in. Lockwood, terrified, rubs her wrist to and fro upon the shards of glass.
Migrants are like Heathcliff's Cathy, tapping persistently at the window of the past. They realise they can never truly go home again, yet their hearts and spirits continue to yearn. (Gillian Bouras)

Kent News (the news website of the State University of Kent, Ohio)has an article on theatre labs, and a costume lab currently working on Jane Eyre turns up:

Kent's theater productions also benefit from the lab classes. Currently, students are working on costumes for the School of Theatre and Dance's production of "Jane Eyre," opening next semester. "They are making orphan costumes because we have lots of orphans," Russell said, "so we figured it would be a good project for them." (Lauren Crist)

On the blogosphere we find a couple of new readers: The Walking Canvas is reading Jane Eyre and YU has just started The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Hopefully the latter will take some things with a pinch of salt.

Finally, the Brontë Parsonage Blog posts a link to a report from BBC's Look North where the matter of clamping in Haworth is debated.

Categories: Brontëites, Haworth, In the News, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights