That's what you get for saying 'yes, sir'

John Mullan, author of Anonymity, selects the best episodes of drunkenness in English literature in The Guardian. And Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall gets a mention:

Helen Graham tells of her marriage to a charming man who turns out to be an alcoholic. Worse still, his gentleman friends are fellow imbibers, and she must endure their flushed faces and drunken badinage. We must see how alcohol makes privileged chaps behave like beasts. In one hellish soirée, abuse turns into fighting as the claret flows.

Joe Queenan writes in The New York Times about the the current trend among reviewers of being generally too nice or too servile. The faithful readers of BrontëBlog will laugh reading this paragraph:

Authors are described as a cross between Madame de Staël and Arthur Conan Doyle, or are said to write like Charlotte Brontë on acid, or have out-Dostoyevskied Dostoyevsky and checkmated Euripides, when they are more of a cross between Candace Bushnell and Ngaio Marsh, or write like Willa Cather on Robitussin-DM, or have been narrowly out-Mavis Gallanted by Mavis Gallant, and were lucky to play Edna Ferber to a draw.

The Telegraph publishes a conversation between Elton John and Sam-Taylor Wood. Her current exhibition on London, Yes I Know is mentioned:

EJ: She's done a short film, photo shoots of people, two or three new series of videos, a new series of photographs, all in the last nine months. That's an awful lot of work. I think there is a deep-rooted drive in her that is fuelled by the fear of the cancer coming back.
STW: Yes, totally. You can see it with the Wuthering Heights [series of Brontë-inspired photographs, now on show at London's White Cube gallery]. Knowing how I felt when I did those pictures, being in that barren, disturbing landscape - there is a base level that definitely comes from what I've been through.

If some days ago we posted about a graffiti in Amsterdam with Brontë echoes, today Cherwell (Oxford's student newspaper) explores the Oxford's English Faculty toilets:

The same cubicle [Cubicle II] also showcases everyone's favourite: Jane Eyre. The famous line of ‘Reader I married him' receives the response that, unfortunately, ‘He ruined me' and the comment ‘well, that's what you get for saying ‘yes, sir' when he asked. Look it up'. Ah, Jane Eyre banter. It's underrated. (Gini Sharvill)

Patrick Brontë being a Cambridge man, we hope that the Cambridge toilets are up to scratch.

Now a (very) easy question from today's quiz at The Ottawa Citizen:

10. Who is the Charlotte Brontë character sent to Lowood Academy by her cruel aunt before becoming a governess at Thornfield Manor?

Precisely, Jane Eyre is one of the readers' picks of the Christian Science Monitor. The Mexican La Jornada Guerrero talks about the Cuban poet Pablo Armando who mentions his Brontëite origins:

Fui poseído por una voz que me alertaba que había seres abandonados, que sufrían, que carecían de voz y rostro y de los medios para sobrevivir; pero esa voz me llegaba en inglés”, narró.
Su interés por la literatura se arreció cuando escuchó en la radio Cumbres Borrascosas, de Emily Brontë. (Marisol Wences Mina)

Finally, Die Welt reviews in German Anne Donovan's Being Emily.

The blogosphere contains a review in Swedish of Wuthering Heights on Tiitis böcker. Cardiff to Catalonia! discusses the ending of Jane Eyre.

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights