Heathcliff glower

It's just a pity that from time to time we have to report comments which once more use a gender-oriented cliché about the Brontë sisters. From a TiVo review in The Sydney Morning Herald:

I have already set up season passes for some favourite shows, which means each episode will automatically record without me touching a button. I am also hoping to store a bank of gender neutral TV programs for combined viewing (this category excludes MythBusters, TopGear or anything by the Bronte sisters). The Mystery Of The Mary Celeste fills this niche nicely. (Louisa Hearn)

The Danbury News-Times reviews a local production of Marsha Norman's musical setting of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden and compares the novel to Jane Eyre:

Burnett's novel, adapted by Marsha Norman for the stage, is replete with 19th-century melodramatic literary themes -- plague in India, an orphan sent to live with a strange uncle in a strange house, ghostly sobs -- in short, similar elements to those that made "Jane Eyre" and its genre popular with the public. (Chesley Plemmons)

And now our daily dose of Twilight meets Heathcliff (or Rochester, you choose) references:

Thirteen-year-old Caroline Sibley believes vampires are the modern answer to Heathcliff from "Wuthering Heights," the prototypical romantic hero.
She read "Wuthering Heights" because Stephanie Meyer, author of the four-book, vampire romance series, "Twilight," said the second in her string of novels was based on the Emily Bronte classic. It was a brief interruption of the books Sibley can't get enough of since "Twilight" transformed her reading habits. (Regan Robinson in The Hickory Record)

EDWARD
Meyer named Twilight's vampire hero after Jane Eyre's Byronic Mr. Rochester and Sense and Sensibility's Edward Ferrars. (Jennifer DeCamp & Holly M. Braford in St. Petersburg Times)

Bella could be any Hollywood heroine in love with a good boy whom society callously misunderstands. She's Natalie Wood to Edward's James Dean (in Rebel Without a Cause) or Richard Beymer (in West Side Story). Cathy, meet Heathcliff. Juliet, Romeo. (Richard Corliss in Time)

Here, as in Stephenie Meyer's 2005 novel, Edward is Romeo, Heathcliff, James Dean, and Brad Pitt all rolled into one: a scruffy-gorgeous bloodsucker pinup who is really an angelic protector. (Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly)

Twilight introduces the floridly named high schooler Bella Swann (Kristen Stewart), who has just moved to a small town in Washington. The local boys are all over this hottie newcomer, but Bella finds herself drawn to the mysterious Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson, he of the Heathcliff glower and untamed eyebrows). (Alison Hallett in The Portland Mercury)

Vampires have their roots in stories about the bad boys of literature - think Heathcliff in "Wuthering Heights," or bad Byron, a lord but a romantic poet for all that, who mocked and defied prim and proper 19th century social conventions. But something else is going on here. Those bad boys weren't out for blood. (Suzanne Fields in The Washington Times)

Hardwicke, whose first film was the harrowing mother-daughter melodrama Thirteen (2003), has a keen sense memory for female adolescence—not just the social insecurity of that time but the grandiosity that can make self-destructive decisions feel somehow divinely fated. Unwholesome, sure, but arguably no more so than Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, two better-written Gothic romances about young women in thrall to a remote, charismatic, often cruel hero. (Dana Stevens in Slate)

BuzzSugar interviews the actor Kevin McKidd, now in Grey's Anatomy who confirms he is officially Heathcliff at the Seattle Grace:

You already have the "Mc" in McKidd, obviously, but have you gotten an official Grey's Mc-name yet?
I don't know when that happens. [Laughs] I know that Shonda is calling me Heathcliff at the moment.

The Daily Times (BanglaDesh) analyses love (no less) and Wuthering Heights is mentioned, of course:

In Wuthering Heights, the unresolved passion between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw eventually destroys them and many around them. (Mohammad Badrul Ahsan)

Finally, let's take a walk around the blogosphere: In Spring It is the Dawn and Savidge Reads review Wuthering Heights, bibliographing posts about Eliza Reed's character in Jane Eyre, inspired-quill describes Jane Eyre and Después del Naufragio... talks about Wide Sargasso Sea in Spanish.

Categories: Jane Eyre, References, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights