Bertha's spam

The Times publishes an excerpt from the upcoming The Blue Hour: A portrait of Jean Rhys, by Lilian Pizzichini (to be published by Bloomsbury on May 5):

Jean Rhys’s earliest memory was of her mother bending over her crib, “smelling sweet in a low-cut black dress”, and kissing her. By the time Jean had become a young girl, however, this slim, pretty mother was a solid, frowning woman, austere and disapproving.

She was a “white Creole” – a member of the tiny white minority on Dominica, the Caribbean island – married to a Welsh doctor, and she had plenty to frown about. Her husband had developed a reckless attitude to money in his years in the tropics, and they had six children. She was already a harassed mother of three when Jean was born in 1890, and she had two more babies, by then into her forties. (Read more)

The Independent (Ireland) talks with the Irish celebrity couple Leigh Arnold and Marcus Sweeney:

"It is better if I don't go out, and stay at home and watch videos and eat lots of popcorn. And not hurt the world with my nastiness and my emotions," she laughs. "It is better to be in watching All About Eve, Rebecca or Wuthering Heights.''
Emily Bronte's only novel, Wuthering Heights, was the story that made Leigh Arnold want to be an actor, she says. "My ultimate role would be Cathy Earnshaw.'' As for her Heathcliff , Marcus Sweeney has, she says, "a genuine heart of gold. I have intense feelings for him.'' (Barry Egan)

The same newspaper has an article about how Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga attracts teenagers and their parents:

It has all the simmering undertones of desire you get in a Jane Austen novel coupled with the passion of Emily Bronte's saga, Wuthering Heights. Modernise this, add the fantasy element of the supernatural and set it against the backdrop of mundane, day-to-day life in a small town, high school goings on and relationships within the family dynamic. (Antonia Leslie)

Michael Kuser in The Sunday's Zaman (Turkey) finds a modern-day equivalent to the attic of Thornfield Hall:

OK, I said I’d look for it, and that’s how I ended up in my computer’s version of Mr. Rochester’s attic, the place where he hid his mad wife from Jane Eyre and everyone else. That’s right, I’m talking about my spam box.

After The Pig Did It, Joseph Caldwell returns to his porcine saga with The Pig Comes to Dinner which is reviewed in The Washington Times:

All these domestic shenanigans get in the way of Kathy's previously thriving literary career. She has profited handsomely from rewriting classics — for example, in "Jane Eyre," her version has Mr. Rochester dying in the fire and Jane becoming a close friend of his mad wife. She is currently working on a new version of George Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss" that she refers to as "The Bloody Mill on the Bloody Floss." (Muriel Dubbin)

Kevin Smokler posts a One Sentence Movie Review of Wuthering Heights 1939. The original book is reviewed on Scriptural (in French), Abijan defends on Bookstove that Nelly is someway responsible for Cathy's death in Wuthering Heights and أرصفــة posts about Jane Eyre 1996 and 2006 (in Arabic).

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights