Nobel Prize and Brontëite

We think this is the first time we find a Brontë reference in the prestigious science journal Nature. The journal celebrates the Medicine Nobel Prize winner Rita Levi-Montalcini's one hundredth birthday:

The Rita Levi Montalcini Foundation has supported education for more than 6,000 African women — "to improve their chances of becoming scientists", she says. A keen writer, she has published 21 popular books. As a young bookworm, her favourite among the classics was Emily Brontë's tale of dark passion, Wuthering Heights. Such romantic inclinations remained literary though — despite a brief engagement while at medical school, she never had any long-term romances. In a 1988 interview with Omni magazine she said, tellingly, that even in a marriage of two brilliant people, "one might resent the other being more successful". (Alison Abbott)

The Guardian talks about the BBC1 documentary Queens of British Pop and lists several British singers. Including Kate Bush:

Here's willowy mind-pop hermit Bush in the video for Wuthering Heights, swaying and flexing like a bendy academic tulip against that most evocative and timeless of music video backdrops: some grass. Written as a plea from Dead Cathy to Not Dead Yet Heathcliff ("let me in-ah your windowohwaawooaaah!" etc), the unimpeachable 1978 Bronte tribute would secure for the shy 19-year-old a wholly deserved four-week stint at No 1. Proper genius, with brain-shaped bells on. (Sarah Dempster)

And The Independent publishes a review:

The biggest surprise here was John Lydon, on hand to express his enthusiasm for the music of Kate Bush. "Those shrieks and warbles," he said of "Wuthering Heights", "are beautiful beyond belief to me." His mum didn't agree, apparently. "Oh Johnny," she said, "it sounds like a bag of cats." Curiously, they were both right. (Tom Sutcliffe)

PopMatters reviews Robert Goolrick's A Reliable Wife, making a rather improbable comparison:

The tone Goolrick establishes here is florid and descriptive with moments reminiscent of Jane Eyre, if that book were set in America and if Jane Eyre were an opium-smoking prostitute. Certainly the frozen landscape of rural Wisconsin works as well as the moors of England to portray isolation and severity. But this gothic landscape also works against Goolrick in that it makes the story feel overly familiar, as though you can predict the ending before you begin. (Joy Lanzendorfer)

The Independent talks about the revision of the UK primary-school curriculum and its technology-oriented changes:

Her study followed the progress made by children in primary and secondary schools which have introduced hand-held devices – phones with word processing and internet capability – in Bristol and Wolverhampton.
It found that around 20 per cent of pupils in Years Five to Seven hardly used the devices for researching and planning their work. "When we talked to them about this, they said it was because they didn't really know how to use them. These are the ones who are not getting support from friends and families. If we don't pick this up in school, these will be the ones missing out, because they don't come from backgrounds where a lot of people are using the technologies," she says.
Her study found no evidence that the children were reading less since being given the devices. "New cultural processes very rarely replace the old ones," she says. "We didn't stop going to the theatre when cinemas were built and we didn't stop going to the cinema when television was invented. There was some evidence that it helped boys who were reluctant readers because they were more likely to read digital text such as e-books. After all, how many 16-year-old-boys read Jane Eyre?" (Liz Lightfoot)

The writer R.P. MacIntyre says in the Red Deer Advocate:

Perhaps the biggest problem is failing to understand the importance of using setting to help create characters, said MacIntyre.
For instance, would Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights have been the same novel if its characters weren’t shaped by the bleak, wild and isolated English moors? (Lana Michelin)

The BBC News Magazine has an article about the obsession for happy endings. One of the readers has left the following comment:

The problem with happy endings is that they have become more and more predictable. The not-so-happy endings never disappoint me, and I don't think they ever will. Some of the best classic novels have the protagonists die, but it is these characters we love and can identify with, to some extent. Just take Wuthering Heights, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest or 1984, Marley & Me. Need I go on? The hopelessness we experience at the end of a novel or movie is simply a reflection of our knowledge that there isn't a happy ending for everybody. We are in denial when we think bad things happen to other people, but won't happen to ourselves. If you can't bear the lack of happyendingification, stick to Disney movies or fairytales. (Stephanie Smith, Preston, Lancashire)

Next Saturday, The New England Youth Theatre premieres an original musical by Peter Amidon & Stephen Stears: Truth. According to The Brattleboro Reformer it has some Jane Eyre references:

On Saturday, the New England Youth Theatre's Senior Company opens a brand new musical called "Truth," conceived and written by NEYT founder Stearns, with music composed by Amidon. Performances run through April 12.
The story itself is a wild, fanciful journey, with elements borrowed from, well, only the finest sources.
"I was really getting into 'Sense and Sensibility,' 'Pride and Prejudice,' Jane Eyre,' Dickens," said Stearns, who also sprinkled in references to Shakespeare and even a splash of Monty Python. (Jon Potter)

Finally, the Chicago Examiner has an article about Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair.

On the blogosphere, Brian James, author of the upcoming young-adult Wuthering Heights retelling: The Heights, writes on his blog, Saving the World One Story at a Time, about his latest book:

My new book The Heights comes out next month and I'm really excited about it. It's a retelling of Wuthering Heights, set in San Francisco. Heathcliff (named in Henry in my novel) and Catherine are teenagers and I chose to tell it in alternating first person from each of their points of view. Since the original was written in third person, from the point of view of an observing character, I thought this was a way to bring something new to the story.
As I was reading Bronte's book, I found myself imagining what Catherine and Heathcliff were thinking. She wrote it in such a way that you can't help but do that. The voices I gave them are what I imagined their inner personalities be like.
The challenge was to get their voices to be very distinct. They both have such unique perspectives and it had to come through in the way they thought. It became almost like writing two novels at once. I went through many drafts of rearranging things and breaking things down. It was frustrating, but by the end of it, I felt like I accomplished what I wanted to do.

Joan Slings Words interviews the author Annette Blair who says:

Soon I moved to the higher shelves and discovered the Brontes and Jane Austen, and I fell into an amazing new world.

Vulpes Libris reviews Ted Hughes's Elmet (with photographs by Fay Goodwin, recently exhibited at the Brontë Parsonage Museum) and finds several echoes of Emily Brontë. El Bazar de las sorpresas (in Spanish) posts about the upcoming broadcast, see details on our sidebar, of Jane Eyre 2006 in Europa, Europa TV (for Latin America). Jim Clark has uploaded to youtube another poem animation: Anne Brontë's If this be all (a favourite of BrontëBlog's, by the way). Cedes003 has created a new Wuthering Heights wordle. The Albany Public Library invites us to read Wuthering Heights this month and finally, The Inn at Lambton (in French) has an ongoing poll: What's your favourite Jane Eyre adaptation?

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Poetry, References, Sequels, Wuthering Heights