Jane Eyre lives and Heathcliff wears an earring

The Northern Echo picks up the story that governesses are back.

JANE Eyre lives. Governesses are back in fashion. Bad luck for all those Mr Rochesters. Parents are so keen to keep their children at home and yet get them a decent education that they are hiring live-in tutors. Like au-pairs and nannies, the teaching staff go everywhere with the family – a summer at the Olympics, a winter ski-ing, life on the yacht... [...]
In books, of course, governesses were always the poor relations of the Victorian household. Being a governess was just about the only job available to a well brought-up young woman who had to earn her own living. But they were caught in a social trap – too posh for the servants’ hall, not posh enough to eat with the family. Not to mention having to cope with the odd mad wife in the attic. Amazing, really, that they ever got to marry the boss.
But now it’s a different world. An American family is apparently offering a tutor and governess salaries of over £100,000, plus a flat, a car and travel by private jet. Given those options, Jane Eyre would never have needed to marry Mr Rochester.
Reader, I didn’t marry him – I had a better offer in the States instead. (Sharon Griffiths)

Nah, we don't quite like that ending.

Mary Schmich from the Chicago Tribune asked readers what it is they wouldn't sell. One of them replied,

"I would never sell my very nicely framed icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe," wrote Mary Ann Reardon Dilan, former Chicagoan. "I'd sell all the furniture, but not the pillows and blankets. All my books, except "The Brothers Karamazov," "Villette" by Charlotte Bronte and the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (Catholic edition.)"

The Jewish Week forgets one key ingredient when retelling this famous story:

Which, naturally, reminds me of Charlotte Bronte. This 19th-century novelist, famous for “Jane Eyre,” the story of a poor governess who falls in love with her married employer (whose crazy wife lives in the attic), also suffered in the love department.
Like Jane Eyre, Charlotte fell for unavailable men. And then, at the ripe old age of 37, she married someone she had known for a long time. Arthur Nicholls was her father’s curate, which to my Jewish ear is akin to an assistant rabbi, only we’re talking about an assistant to a reverend of a parish in a village in Yorkshire.
You see, Arthur was a close friend of the family. He saw Charlotte through the death of three siblings and even adopted her late sister’s dogs. And he was crazy about Charlotte, in a very restrained way, of course, being a Victorian gentleman. At first, Charlotte rejected this strongly built, “diligent, serious-minded and widely read,” man, who was a few years her junior.
But then this “tiny sparrow of a woman” returned his love. By all accounts they were deliriously happy together. And then, barely a year later, she took to her bed and died.
Why did Charlotte reject Arthur at first? And then what made her change her mind?
Perhaps the moral of this story is that the gentlemen who dazzle at first are perhaps all glitter and no gold. (Abigail Pickus)

That key ingredient, of course, being as important as, I don't know, salt: the fact that her father, Patrick Brontë, oppsed the marriage had huge weight in its development.

Maureen Corrigan reviews the book Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies for the NPR programme Books we Like:

And, it's a double bonus that this whole sad story takes place within the fenced-in groves of academe and that Gillies then-husband is a professor poet (think "Heathcliff with an earring," she tells us). It's always fascinating to read about academics acting on their ids rather than their intellects.

The Independent (Uganda) has a Heathcliff analogy too:

One only need read the classic novel Wuthering Heights by the 19th century English novelist Emily Brontë to understand the tormented soul of the Museveni-like character Heathcliff and his resentment toward the genteel and privileged Earnshaw family that adopts and raises him, to grasp where Museveni is coming from in relation to such prominent Ankole families as the royal family as well as the prominent Katanywa and the Byanyima families of Ankole, as well as Museveni’s fascination with the current Toro royal family. (Timothy Kalyegira)

Huliq News has a review of The Mystery of Irma Vep, now on stage at Horsecross Theatre, Perth, UK. The unavoidable Wuthering Heights reference is made, of course.

Blogs du jour: A Meaningless Title posts 'random thoughts on reading Wuthering Heights'. Regency Romance Novels reviews Jane Eyre 2006 and comments on other previous versions. And Author's Studio has invited Linda Swift, a Wild Rose Press Author, to talk about her visit to Haworth.

Categories: Books, Charlotte Brontë, Haworth, Jane Eyre, References, Theatre, Villette, Wuthering Heights