A Wuthering Heights adaptation made this century

While we haven't actually seen the trailer but we are pretty sure that this reader of The New Zealand Herald is rather off-base:

A Westmere reader was interested to see TV One's trailer for Wuthering Heights describe it as "a brand new adaptation". It was made in 1998. He wonders how they would bill an adaptation made this century. (Ana Samways)

So, it might be a wild guess on our part, but given that last Sunday the first part of the 2009 miniseries was broadcast by that same TV channel, we would hazard that 'the brand new adaptation' statement was correct and that's how they actually 'bill an adaptation made this century'.

Speaking of adaptations made last century, News.com.au is not convinced by Ralph Fiennes's take on Heathcliff in the 1992 screen adaptation.

Actually, thinking about it, for an actor with such immense talent I can’t think of a single role where Ralph Fiennes has had wonderful on-screen chemistry with his leading lady. Even in the remake of Wuthering Heights he seems rather self-contained for a guy who is well off the deep with in love with a woman. (Evan Maloney)

That might be, at least in part, because that entire adaptation was rather self-contained as a whole.

The new novel The Servants’ Quarters by Lynn Freed is recommended by UC Davis (University of California) for summer reading:

For escapists, English Professor Lynn Freed's latest novel offers a love story that has absolutely nothing to do with global warming, 9/11 or other 21st-century problems. Fellow novelist Amy Tan, in a book-jacket blurb, hails Freed's as the voice "of an observant and wickedly truthful Jane Eyre.” Booklist had this to say: "Echoes of Jane Eyre are so strong, the story could almost be seen as a retelling, but the South African setting and World War II time frame give it a fully fresh feeling … a strange and beautifully told story of love and growth."

One more boys' reads vs girls' reads story is told in The American Spectator:

A couple of weeks later the janitors dropped off the shipped boxes at each classroom, cut them open, and the nuns covered their large desks with tall stacks of shiny, new paperbacks: Mark Twain, Washington Irving, the Brontës, Harper Lee, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper and Daniel Defoe. [...]
There was definitely a literary divide between boys and girls books. The guys preferred adventure fiction such as The Call of the Wild and The Last of the Mohicans; the gals Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights or To Kill a Mockingbird, all those with sympathetic female characters. There were also big stacks of The Diary of Anne Frank: most of the girls had a copy; none of the boys did. The boys read and traded The Red Badge of Courage and Treasure Island, or anything else about war, Indians and pirates. (Bill Croke)

To tip the balance, we have a nice story from Norwood Bulletin :

All of this said, however, I certainly understand the reasons the benefactors and designers of the original Morrill Memorial Library carved such illustrious names upon the granite walls. Hugo, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Cervantes earned their place on the exterior walls of the 1898 building facing Beacon Street. Plato, Keats, Dante, Horace, and Taine were added at the back of the Plimpton wing built in 1928 just years before the Great Depression. These latter five were poets and philosophers, Greek, English, Italian, Roman, and Italian.
Americans Longfellow, Poe, Franklin, and Emerson were four of the 11 names surrounding the original front door of the library; all of them were carefully re-carved when the door was reconstructed after the addition of 1965. The majority of those 11 writers wrote during the century that the library was built and many of them had died only a decade or so before.
Following the addition of 1965 a committee was formed in 1968 to add 33 additional names to the building. [...]
The new names included Gandhi, Thoreau, Melville, and Swift. Interestingly, the committee noted that no woman had heretofore been granted such an honor on the library’s exterior walls. Five women, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, and Charlotte and Emily Bronte joined the ranks and their names were proudly inscribed along with Melville, Swift, Huxley, Kipling, and Frost and others.
The committee could not decide exactly which Bronte sister to honor; we’ll never know their preference because the last name has stood for both. (Read the whole article to find out which other female authors were added later)

That last bit is quite nice, though we prefer to think in terms of three sisters, rather than just two.

The Guardian remarks on something that the poet Edward Lear had in common with the fictional Jane Eyre:

In some of the grander houses he started in the servant's hall but, like Jane Eyre, was brought up to the drawing room to entertain the company, something which caused him agonies of shyness – and probably didn't endearing him to the servants, either. (Maev Kennedy)

A stroll around the blogosphere brings the following: a post - with pictures - on Stonegappe (where Charlotte Brontë worked as a governess) on the Brontë Parsonage Blog. A brief review of Jane Eyre on Cindy's Blog of Everything. And a picture of Samuel Goldwyn Jr. posing next to a Wuthering Heights 1939 poster at the recent screening at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills on Alternative Film Guide.

Categories: Books, Brontëana, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights