Stay-at-home plans

For those of you in the snow-blanketed UK, The Huddersfield Daily Examiner has a plan that you may want to copy:

At least I have my essential supplies and yes, it’s snowing again. We could easily be marooned for the duration. A good book is looking a safe bet. Forget thinking warm, I may spend this week under a duvet with Jane Eyre.

And actually the rest of you, whether in other snow-covered countries or not, might want to follow suit as well.

Donna Whitehead, columnist at the Lakeville Wicked Local, has an interesting plan too.

I’m rereading old books. [...]
Sometimes it’s the place that brings me back. A desire to revisit 221B Baker St., the moors of Wuthering Heights, Bag End of Middle Earth or Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The plot may no longer hold surprises but the magic of the world created, the beauty of the setting, brings me back for a visit.

Wait, we have more plans for staying snugly indoors. Opera News Online (February 2009 vol 73, no. 8) looks at this month's Metropolitan broadcast operas:

Lucia di Lammermoor, Il Trovatore, Adriana Lecouvreur and Eugene Onegin may be wildly different in musical style and subject matter, but all four works provide an intriguing cross-section of the competing artistic visions of that fascinating crossroads-era when Romanticism overlapped with modernism. (Steve Vineberg)

Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor is of course compared to Wuthering Heights:

There's a political plot in Lucia, too, but it's far less significant; in fact it's so reduced as to be barely comprehensible. What marks Edgardo as an outcast is that he's the last vestige of an ancient family disenfranchised by Enrico's family, the Ashtons. And he plays the role brilliantly: he's a brooding, volatile figure, like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Lucia's love for him brings her into tension with her family, which is really the institution that embodies social norms here. The chaplain, Raimondo, manipulates her into giving Edgardo up by calling on her loyalty to her family, urging her to submit to her brother's wishes to marry her off to Arturo (the only man who can restore his fallen political star) — or, Raimondo says, "your mother in her grave / will shudder with horror because of you." That the chaplain encourages Lucia to make a loveless match compounds the social forces against her and Edgardo; the church weighs in on the side of the family. [...]
The feminine expression of passion is an idea warmly promoted by Romanticism in some of its forms — in English literary characters such as Emily Brontë's Catherine Earnshaw and Thomas Hardy's Eustacia Vye and George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke, for example — but nowhere more potently than in the heroines of nineteenth-century Italian operas. (Steve Vineberg)

However, The Retriever Weekly - the University of Maryland's student newspaper - pauses to wonder other things in connection with Wuthering Heights:

Yes, Chick-fil-A opened its doors in the University Center Study Space this semester, begging the question: Is it still a Study Space if everyone's eating fried chicken and imbibing carbonated beverages? Maybe the answer depends on what you're trying to study. The chatter and frantic chewing of poultry might be a little distracting while attempting to read Wuthering Heights or understand quantum physics (that's a thing, right?). (Katrina Cohen)

We have quite a varied selection of blogs today: Rusty Sarcasm reviews Wuthering Heights 2009. GothOptimist reviews Jane Eyre in Italian, and Rare Rocks, who is currently reading the novel, posts about Helen Burns. shannon_zhang writes for the Livejournal community Twilight Sucks a post on Jane Eyre's Edward vs Twilight's Edward. Finally, Forlilia publishes a Jane Eyre-inspired poem.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Opera, Wuthering Heights