Book Lists and battles

The Washington Post lists Justine Picardie's Daphne as one of the 2008 Historical Fiction Best Books:

Daphne, by Justine Picardie (Bloomsbury). A complicated tale-within-a-tale about Daphne du Maurier's obsession with the Brontës.-- (Nicholas Delban)

The list also includes other books with Brontë connections:

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Dial). Characters spring to life in letters and telegrams exchanged over the course of nine months shortly after the end of World War II. (Wendy Smith)
The House on Fortune Street, by Margot Livesey (Harper). The most durable structure here is not a house but the novel itself, whose design unites so seamlessly with its intentions that one wants to admire it from every angle. (Donna Rifkind)

Nigel Hawkes in The Times makes his own selection of Christmas Science Books:

Catharine Arnold clearly has a Gothic imagination of Brontë dimensions. Fresh from writing about London's dead in Necropolis, her new tale of madness Bedlam: London and its Mad (Simon & Schuster, £14.99/ £13.49) interweaves the history of the Bethlem Hospital with that of changing attitudes towards the insane. Bethlem was mostly a ghastly place, home to the violent, the depressed and the simply dotty, such as Margaret Nicholson, who tried to kill George III with a cake knife. (Its former building now houses the Imperial War Museum, by the way.)

Curiously, Charlotte Brontë visited Bedlam. Quoting Robert & Louise Barnard's A Brontë Encyclopedia:

[Bedlam was] visited by Charlotte during her last London visit in 1853, when she chose to see “rather the real than the decorative side of Life” (to EN, 19 Jan 1853)

OfficialWire tells a nice story of Brontë readers in Alaska:

I'll call her Molly, though I doubt that is her name. I never asked her name. She came into the bookstore at the Anchorage airport, where I work part-time. (...)"I am reading Wuthering Heights now," she told me, sparkly-eyed. "I love it! But I am almost finished with that one."
I asked her if she had read Jane Eyre. "Oh, yes!" she replied. "That one was very good, but I am liking Wuthering Heights better."
I expressed some mild surprise at that: most teenage girls, I remember, seemed to prefer Jane Eyre.
"I think it's because it reminds me of Barrow," she went on to explain. "All that roaming on the moors. It's like the tundra—and the way the wind sweeps over it. And how they call out to the wind! I used to do that!" (Wayne Mergler)

The Twilight phenomenon is analyzed on The Guardian:

And in Buffy's wake came a flood of fang fiction aimed at a female readership hungering for worthy successors to Heathcliff, Mr Rochester and Darcy. Typically, these stories are narrated by a plain Jane Eyre type — usually a virgin — who considers herself nothing special (though she may be gifted with paranormal abilities) but who, to her amazement, finds herself acting like catnip on a seductive male vampire who in centuries of existence has never encountered a young woman as beguiling as she. It's the love that lasts for ever. Wishful thinking, or what? (Anne Billson)

Catholic Online has its own opinion:

Perhaps the darkness of Edward’s true nature when seen onscreen was too unsettling for even the most loyal fans. Maybe Bella’s blind devotion to Edward pales in the gloomy light of the cinema, and this film dwindles in stature from a modern rendering of the gothic “Wuthering Heights” down to just another unhealthy teenage relationship?
Perhaps a generation of young women who haven’t read such classics are seeking the darkness into light of a true gothic romance, or a strong, strangely chivalrous romantic man (it admit it’s a unique device to make Edward seem noble for saving Bella from himself!) Couldn’t these young women so hungry for masculinity, self-sacrificing love, and romance find a better story than “Twilight”? (Leticia Velasquez)

Afaqs! informs of the upcoming broadcast of Jane Eyre 2006 on the Indian TV channel Zee Studio:

You certainly don’t want to miss out on an interesting adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s much-adored classic Jane Eyre on Friday Jan 23 & Jan 30 on Zee Studio. The adaptation mines Bronte's novel for every ounce of passion, drama, color, madness and horror available, bringing to life Jane's inner world with beauty, humor and at times great sadness.

The Australian discusses a possible top-five list of Australian films. Including Jane Campion's The Piano:

Her inspirations included Wuthering Heights, Emily Dickinson's poetry, Roman Polanski's short film Two Men and a Wardrobe, and records of NZ colonial history. (Evan Williams)

Also in The Australian we can read about the wonders of summer reading:

David Malouf, who writes of Australia with great insight and tenderness, recalls the intensity of reading during the holidays as a child. It was the Christmas break between his 12th and 13th years. His family had taken a house in Southport on the Gold Coast, and he read Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, William Harrison's Old Saint Paul's. He has visual memories of reading on the beach and while lying in bed. (Miriam Cosic)

Ackworth born, gone West posts about Ian M. Emberson's Mourning Ring chapbook of poems:

Mourning Ring by poet and artist, Ian M Emberson, is not just a collection of nine poems with a Brontë connection. The chapbook is a work of art in itself. The poems are printed using a script-font that resembles writing but is very easy to read. The margins of the pages are covered by Ian's charcoal-like drawings.

Elastic Pop reviews the Studio One Anthology DVD release (with Wuthering Heights 1950), South London Women Artists introduces a new Brontëite, Alicia Logan:

The inspirations behind my work are the romantic writers such as Emily Bronte, and William Blake, who had a solid idea of the spirit world and hell; and Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacra and Simulation’, where the media is taken as obscuring reality.

The Stuck In a Book Jane Eyre vs Wuthering Heights battle was finally won by the former inmate of Lowood School:

Congratulations... Jane Eyre!
To be honest, I had a suspicion that the vote would swing that way. Jane Eyre received 23 votes, Wuthering Heights only 10, with a couple abstentions.

Nevertheless, Life must be filled up defends her Emily Brontë choice on the quiz. A choice that surely Literary Corner Cafe would share. Jane Eyre has also her own supporters: A Devoted Reader, Just Books or acorna-cat.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights