Rejecting the Brontës

Today you can't be too careful about blindly believing fake news stories. And either those included in today's newsround are all genuine or we are too gullible.

The Telegraph and Argus reviews the Bingley Little Theatre's production of Jane Eyre.

Love is in the air in Bingley Little Theatre’s adaptation of the Charlotte Bronte classic Jane Eyre this week.
Making her stage debut with BLT in the title role is Sally Edwards, a drama tutor with the theatre’s youth group, Kaleidoscope.
She looked the part, a plain Jane, a serious young girl who arrives as the new governess to Adele, the young ward of Edward Rochester, played by Jason Evens.
The play takes place in the library at Thornfield Hall, Rochester’s home, between 1846 and 1848, a time when everyone knew their place in society.
The set and costumes were superb. The actors playing the servants were excellent and provided comic relief in the sad household. Vicky Band was a natural as nosey maid Leah, Ian Atkinson was great as John the footman and Helen Clarke had great stage presence as nurse Grace Poole.
Alice Smithson, another Kaleidoscope member, was very believable as the excitable young French girl Adele as she pranced around the stage in glee in her pretty dresses and pantalets with her blonde ringlets dangling.
Directed by Jan Darnbrough, the play is adapted for the stage by Charles Vance. It runs until Saturday. (Sue Butterfield)

The BBC will be broadcasting a two-part documentary called Queens of British Pop. BBC News has an appetiser before tonight's first installment. Sadly, Kate Bush refused to speak to them, but 'one of Kate's biggest fans', John Lydon, appears instead.

John recounted the time when he played Wuthering Heights to his mum.
"Oh Johnny, it sounds like a bag of cats," she said, but for John, his love for Kate's music was instant and we spent an entertaining hour discussing it. (Dione Newton)

Sounds like an ordinary enough reaction to the song, though.

Michael Holroyd writes in The Times:

I received an invitation from Christopher Ondaatje to attend a private opening of his literary museum on the cliffs of north Devon. It was a bewildering get-together of images and books. The old laundry contains early printing presses, the earliest being a large cast-iron Albion (similar to Caxton’s wooden press). They are overlooked by Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer and others. The ground floor of the house is largely given over to the Bloomsbury group and its associates or bêtes noires: Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and members of the Memoir Club. The copy of a well-known portrait of Vita Sackville-West shares one corner with an original portrait of the young Violet Trefusis by the Scottish Royal Academician, William Rankin. Here and on the first floor the dead keep amiable if unlikely company with the living: Doris Lessing, Pepys, Michael Frayn, Tennyson, the Brontës . . . . Throughout the museum there are busts of Bernard Shaw, Ian Fleming, Dickens, Arthur C. Clarke, Rossetti and others.

It does sound like our kind of place.

Another place that sounds great is the Bloomsbury Tea Room, in Capitola, California. The review in the Santa Cruz Sentinel says that,

Even the bill was charming. It arrived tucked into a copy of "Wuthering Heights" -- accompanied by two buttery little bites of English toffee. (Ann Parker)

We don't quite know what Emily Brontë would have thought of it, but we sort of like it.

Now for one of those weird, complicated X meets X meets X. Today's - as seen on It Happened Last Night (a Zap 2 It blog) reviewing the latest episode of the TV series Reaper- is one of those that defies imagination.

Think “Wuthering Heights” by way of “Ghostbusters 2” set in a faux Home Depot and you get the gist. (Ryan McGee)

No, we don't get the gist at all.

And this statement from Salt Lake City Examiner might get to carry home the 'sweeping statement of the year' prize:

Now, men don't necessarily enjoy Charlotte Bronte or Jane Austen, but they can really get into a hot Romance by Jude Devereaux or Sherrilyn Kenyon. Or Jaid Black. Or Nora Roberts. (Fran Lee)

Please, tell us that isn't so. Our experience thankfully points quite in the opposite direction (ie. that they are horrified by Jude Deveraux et al and don't have that much of a problem reading the Brontës, for instance) but that other possibility has just left us scarred for life.

Some readers of the Guardian have written fake rejection letters to well-known authors. There are a few Brontë-related ones: Perklet (pretending to write from Mills & Boon) rejects Wuthering Heights, and pleasetickother comments on it as well. PaulSagar and bellawilfer reject Jane Eyre.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Music, Theatre, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights