The return of the governess

Tutors and governesses are back. The Times talks about this new education trend and, of course, Jane Eyre has to be quoted:

THE governess is back. More than 160 years after Jane Eyre fell in love with her boss, Mr Rochester, parents are welcoming bright young women into their homes to help with their children’s education.
But far from the travails Jane faced, today’s governesses enjoy high pay and even holidays with their charges. (Sian Griffiths and Roger Waite)

We have two writers who like (or not) the Brontës. In the positive side the South African Finuala Dowling who talks with the poet Michelle McGrane at the Franschhoek Literary Festival:

Tell me about a few of your favourite books and why they are important to you.
I have a special affinity for the confiding tone of first-person narration, the “I” of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter. (kagablog)

On the negative side, Newsweek interviews Antonya Nelson:

A classic you revisited with disappointment: "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë: What I thought was naughty and necessary romance and drama turns out to be more like melodrama.

The vampire-Heathcliff connection is once again mentioned in a Sunday Star Times article about the TV show True Blood. Talking about Buffy, the Vampire Slayer:

Buffy had it all: great scriptwriting, a female role model and a brooding honey of a boyfriend (played by Bones' David Boreanaz) who was the Heathcliff of the vampire world he eventually left to star in Angel. (Karen Tay)

Elaine Showalter will present her new book A Jury of Her Peers (which is also reviewed in The Boston Globe) at the The New York State Writers Institute on Thursday, March 26, 2009 in Campus Center 375 on the State University of New York at Albany’s uptown campus.

June Cleaver After a Six-Pack has seen Wuthering Heights 1939. The polarising (you love it or you hate it) quality of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is perfectly epitomized today on the net:
Féu Bourbonnaise has read the novel and reviews it with enthusiasm (in French) and I'm Not Prone to Hyperbole But... doesn't quite feel the same. Other reviews of the novel can be found on Justgreatbooks (a videopost) and Romanzi 2.0 (in Italian).

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