Brontë 'diehard-ness'

The Independent reviews Jude Morgan's The Taste of Sorrow:

"It's writing that makes living tolerable." This sentence is the nub of The Taste of Sorrow, Jude Morgan's absorbing novel about the lives of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. It occurs at that part of their story where, without distancing themselves, the noisy self-annihilation of their brother, Branwell, could have become intolerable. "Writing" covers being able to escape into the imagination – a capacity the children developed early, in response to the loneliness of the Yorkshire moorland around them, and the accumulation of sorrow. It is not just the taste but a diet of sorrow on which they live.
The losses start, as does the novel, with the agonised death of their mother. The six children are all under ten, Maria and Elizabeth the eldest. Patrick, their clergyman father, pious Aunt Branwell, a servant or two and some dogs make up their immediate world. It might have been a straitjacket but for their high intelligence and their father's belief in educating girls. While he taught them himself, all seems to have been well. But, unconventionally, he kept his one boy close while posting all but the youngest girl off to boarding school. It was a choice with extraordinary and disastrous consequences.
The Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge: as Lowood Institution in Jane Eyre, Charlotte allowed it redeeming features. Morgan does not. He gives us the deadening curriculum, constant criticism and prayer and penitential conditions. Lording over them is the grotesque patron, the Reverend Carus Wilson, who deplores the imagination while spouting fantastic hellfire homilies. That his regime hastens death for some, Maria and Elizabeth included, he can count as gain, as death preserves from sin.
Once freed from this terrible place, the world of the imagination sustains Charlotte, Emily and Anne for the rest of their brief, difficult lives. That they were able to transform that world into fiction is not only a gift to generations of readers, but a continuing cry for freethinking education, especially for girls. (Ruth Pavey)

DVD Movies Examiner picks the top ten films of 1939. Wuthering Heights makes it to position number 10.

Wuthering Heights, United Artists, Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, Donald Crisp, David Niven. Director: William Wyler. Producer: Samuel Goldwyn. Screenwriters: Charles MacArthur, Ben Hecht. Olivier stars as the brooding master of Wuthering Heights, who roams the English moors in search of his lost love, Cathy, played by Oberon. Gregg Toland’s moody cinematography combines with Alfred Newman's highly romantic score to infuse the Emily Brontë-based film with a haunting atmosphere. (Charles Wiebe)

And the Boston Review makes a reference to that film as well.

[My mother] would walk into my room and whisper, “Heath-cliff, Heath-cliff.” Now I know that she was recalling Merle Oberon’s cry on the moors of Wuthering Heights—the dead lover, Kathy [sic], who had married the wrong man calling to her true love. (Colin Dayan)

And calling people names from Wuthering Heights is not a new trend. Even Sir Winston Churchill did it, according to The Press and Journal.

Winston Churchill thought [Lord] Reith [founding director of the BBC] was something of a pest, and called him “Old Wuthering Heights”. (Ron Ferguson)

Why bother picking just one character when you can use the whole novel, right?

And the free, vacuous assumption of the day comes from the Brisbane Times:

Bookish nerd that I am, I have found good advice from my Aunt Jane: Jane Austen, in particular. Perhaps her life and letters are not for everyone - and certainly not diehard Bronte fans. (Damon Young)

We believe this blog serves to prove our Brontë 'diehard-ness' and we are certainly very fond of Jane Austen, her life and letters and, of course, her works, as are many other Brontë fans, and vice versa. So we don't like that 'certainly not'.

Finally, The Crafty Princess Diaries reports that knitters' meeting point Ravelry now has a Brontë group. And Jane Austen Today is hosting an all-day-long Q&A online meeting with Syrie James, whose Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë are now widely available.

Categories: Books, Movies-DVD-TV, Websites, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights