If Brontë had been Salinger, no Rhys would have happened

Tom Sutcliffe raises an interesting question in an article in The Independent about J.D. Salinger's reappearance stopping the publication of a sequel of The Catcher of the Rye:

Had Jane Eyre still been in copyright when Jean Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea, Charlotte Brontë could presumably have prevented publication. But would readers have really wanted her to?

The Guardian also mentions sequels and prequels of Jane Eyre in an article about the same subject:

Once well-known figures are out of copyright, they fall very rapidly into other hands. By now, the minority of Sherlock Holmes's appearances are in stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. ­Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is neatly book-ended by both a prequel (Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea) and a sequel: DS Thomas's Charlotte. Emma ­Tennant has been the most active heroine ­smuggler, transplanting heroines from Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy into her own fiction. (Mark Lawson)

The Film Music Society reports about the recent Motion Picture Academy Tribute to the legendary lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman:

Michel Legrand flew in from Paris for the event, playing the piano and singing "I Was Born in Love With You" from Wuthering Heights (1970). The evening's highlight for many, however, was the stunning duet of Legrand and Alan Bergman on one of their most famous songs, "The Windmills of Your Mind" from The Thomas Crown Affair that also included footage of Steve McQueen's glider sequence that inspired it. (Jon Burlingname)

The New Statesman reviews the latest book by Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger and talks about country-house novels:

There are two main traditions of country-house novel. One of them, the one these novels have in mind, is the Gothic tradition, which extends back to what is usually thought of as the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s preposterous The Castle of Otranto, and takes in Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher, Bartram-Haugh in She­ridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre, Bly House in The Turn of the Screw, Manderley in Rebecca, et al. (John O'Connell)

Now, a gem of random thinking. In the Indian Financial Chronicle we find a paragraph which is able to link together running naked (among wolves, sic), Titanic and Wuthering Heights:

For some, passion is running naked with the wolves… it’s so extreme! I remember this one scene from the movie Titanic, when Kate Winslet jumps out of her lifeboat, just as happy to sink or swim with Leonardo Di Caprio. In that moment any woman would have traded places with her. Remember the movie Wuthering heights? Certainly passion gripped the audience hearts as much as the actors. (Bubbles Shabharwal)

Also in The Independent Elaine Showalter's latest book (A Jury of Her Peers) is reviewed, The Portsmouth News and The Leamington Spa Courier have a reminder of the current Tamasha Theatre's performances of Wuthering Heights (with a wrong picture, though).

Brontës.nl informs of a new Dutch theatrical adaptation of Wuthering Heights which will be premiered next October 20 in Den Bosch by the Theater Artemis company. The adaptation has been written by Jeroen Olyslaegers and will be directed by Floor Huygen.

Nöja posts a brief review of Agnes Grey in Swedish, Collected Works of Richard C Mather publishes an extract from an original (and juvenile) parody of Wuthering Heights and Paxton Holley converts Jane Eyre into a sort of Beatrix Kiddo, ...borgs hjørne talks about Wuthering Heights in Norwegian, PageTurner posts about Jane Eyre, Erodiade2008 uploads a video of Emily Brontë's poem I'm Happiest When Most Away and The American Scene reproduces the (in)famous Charlotte Brontë's eliminated preface to Shirley: A Word to the Quarterly.

Categories: Agnes Grey, Humour, Jane Eyre, Music, Poetry, References, Theatre, Wuthering Heights