The Brontë writing on the wall ~ BrontëBlog

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

The Brontë writing on the wall

Tuesday, April 28, 2009 1:34 pm by Cristina in Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Poetry, References, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights No comments

The ranks of Brontëites are ever-growing, no doubt about it. To begin with, the Denver Examiner introduces 'emerging author', Amy Greene.

Amy says reading has always inspired her to write, and cites the Bronte Sisters, Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and, surprisingly, Stephen King (“His influence is probably still visible in my writing, even though I don't write horror.”) as having most influenced the development of her particular style. (Zack Kopp)

And last but not least, the bulk of the Brontëites: those anonymous readers that we sometimes find in real life, on blogs, etc. The Los Angeles Times blog Jacket Copy writes about the "What Are You Reading" graffiti wall at the recent Festival of Books, were people were welcome to add their particular choice. The article highlights just a few of the many, many writings (see the photos here).

And "Pastoralia," George Saunders; "Villette," Charlotte Bronte; "Maps and Legends," Michael Chabon; "Consider the Lobster," "The Lovely Bones," "The Diary of Anne Frank," "Blood Meridian," The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," "Gone With the Wind," "Less Than Zero," Ann Coulter and "The Audacity of Hope."

Hard to know for sure, but we have a feeling that Villette wasn't the only Brontë read on the wall. And what a great inititiave at any rate!

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick is once more connected in some way or other to the Brontës, this time on NPR.

Murder, madness, unbridled passion — It's the stuff of romance novels. But Robert Goolrick's new book A Reliable Wife is more complex than that. Sure, Goolrick makes good use of some familiar literary types: the lonely, wealthy man with dark secrets in his past, the expected arrival of a prim, proper woman who will change his life and share his mansion in the middle of nowhere.
But the mail-order bride who steps off the train as the book begins is no Jane Eyre. She is a beauty and a liar with her own dark secrets and her own sinister plans. In his first novel, Goolrick, who until now has been best known for his memoir The End of the World As We Know It has spun a tale that will keep many a reader turning the pages late at night to find out what happens next.

An improbable book to be mentioned on BrontëBlog is Direct Red: A Surgeon's Story by Gabriel Weston. However, The Globe and Mail makes a connection for us:

[Describing the author, Gabriel Weston] She has the delicate complexion and busy blue eyes of a moor-side Brontë heroine and the slender, sinewy build of the caffeinated urban careerist. (Olivia Stren)

PopMatters quotes a charming fragment from Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's.

There’s a scene in Truman Capote’s classic, Breakfast at Tiffany’s that sums up how I feel about the movie adaptation of the book. The narrator of the story, “Fred”, is having an argument with lead character, Holly Golightly about literature because he thinks she can’t appreciate it. He’s asks her to give him an example of a literary work that means something to her. When her answer turns out to be Wuthering Heights, he is outraged.
“But that’s unreasonable,” he says. “You’re talking about a work of genius.”

“It was, wasn’t it? My wild sweet Cathy. God, I cried buckets. I saw it ten times,” she says.

“Oh,” Fred says. “The movie.”
(Jennifer Makowsky)

The National describes French actress Isabelle Huppert as follows:

Fittingly, when the director André Téchiné made The Brontë Sisters in 1979, Huppert played Anne, the least celebrated of the novelist siblings, but in hindsight perhaps the most talented. Whereas her sisters specialised in romanticism, Anne Brontë wrote with a sharp and ironic vigour that sidestepped fantasy. The same could be said of Huppert, who has always offered a vision of the real, while most French actresses are the epitome of glamour. (Kaleem Aftab)

It might be true that Anne's style is more down-to-earth than her sisters', but that doesn't automatically turn them into empty-headed romantics, which is what that sounds like.

The blogosphere is all about Jane Eyre today: Soon Remembered Tales, The Gentle Reader and Bibliofreak all discuss the novel. KM Stitchery has made a lovely stencilled shirt of Charlotte Brontë, for sale on Etsy. She promises more Brontë things to come this week too. Snowflakes in Rain writes about Agnes Grey in Swedish. And Echostains Blog posts a few pictures of Haworth. Finally, NCArts has uploaded to YouTube a video from NC Poetry Out Loud 2009 where 'Alyssa Matthewson, of Chatham Central High School, recites "Shall earth no more inspire thee" by Emily Jane Bronte'

EDIT: An alert for today, April 28, from Lima (Perú):