Moby Dick meets Jane Eyre... the good classics

The Daily Express celebrates several British literary landmarks. Including

Norton Conyers, near Ripon, Yorkshire, is a Gothic manor house that captivated Charlotte Bronte when she visited in 1839. She was so taken by the ornate house and the legend of a mad woman confined in the attic that she was inspired to set Jane Eyre there, transforming it into Thornfield, home of Mr Rochester. Under a plum tree in the front garden of Keats House, Hampstead, North London, the then 23-year-old poet John keats took just a few hours to pen his Ode To A Nightingale in 1819. (Jane Warren)

Sonia Sotomayor's hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee have indirectly generated Brontë news. The Rush Limbaugh show discussed this comment by Senator Patrick Leahy:

She graduated as the valedictorian of her class at Blessed Sacrament and at Cardinal Spellman High School in New York. She was a member of just the third class at Princeton University in which women were included. She continued to work hard, including reading classics that had been unavailable to her when she was younger and arranging tutoring to improve her writing.

A Cardinal Spellman's class companion called the programme and challenged that statement:

CALLER: I just called to say that I went to Cardinal Spellman High School. I was in Sonia Sotomayor's 1972 graduating class. And when Senator Leahy said that, I got so angry -- (...)
Cardinal Spellman was a wonderful school and she had the same curriculum as I did and other kids that went there and we had Shakespeare and Bronte and all the classics and she had to take everything that everybody else did. She was number one in the class, she was the smartest one there, and her academic achievements were wonderful, but the school was filled with Sonia Sotomayors, and myself, and that's what made it such a great school, too, is that --
RUSH: All right, you are telling me that you had to take Shakespeare?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: That you had to read Emily Bronte?
CALLER: Yes.

From now on the conversation goes a bit surrealistic talking about the good classics and bad classics and mixing Hegel with Marx, Brontë or Shakespeare. We wonder what would happen if Mr Limbaugh knew of Terry Eagleton's readings of Wuthering Heights.

The Telegraph & Argus reviews a Michael McIntyre performance in Bradford. It seems that the comedian didn't attend the Cardinal Spellman High School.

One of McIntyre’s strengths is picking up on a nugget of information from an audience member and turning it into a line.
He missed a trick though with a woman who told him she was called Anne from Haworth which, let’s face it, could’ve given him a good five minutes of Bronte gags. He confessed he’d never heard of Haworth, the North/South divide working against him that time. (Emma Clayton)

The Philadelphia Daily News makes a curious connection between Heathcliff and The Mentalist through this review of the TV series Dark Blue:

Like every brooding hero from Emily Bronte's Heathcliff to "The Mentalist's" Patrick Jane, [Lt. Carter] Shaw's a guy with the kind of problems that nearly always have a woman at the root. (Ellen Gray)

A student in The Livingston Daily and Adventures of a married woman... don't like Jane Eyre contrasting with Normblog's post in its Writer's Choice series a Jane Eyre discussion by Professor Anne Stott:

Jane Eyre is a more controversial character than her creator was ready to admit, disturbing to many contemporary readers because she insists on being true to her own nature and refuses to live her life by the terms laid down for her by others, even when these others are two figures of authority - a landed gentleman and a clergyman.
It is a trite statement, but it has to be said: Jane Eyre is one of the most gripping novels ever written. (Read more)

Examples of Jane Eyre's gripping power: posts on Girl Mogul, Divine Caroline and Crescent City Reviews. Boktimmen reviews (with little enthusiasm) Agnes Grey (in Swedish). Echostains Blog has a more positive review of Justine Picardie's Daphne, La Hora del Cuento devotes a post to Emily Brontë (with the wrong picture) in Spanish. Flickr user tazzy-tazzle has uploaded a set of pictures of Haworth and Top Withens.

Finally, this hilarious (and creepy at the same time) piece on Welcome to my yard show gives some crossover ideas:

Me: Okay, it’s Moby Dick meets Jane Eyre.

Editor (holding head as if in pain). I’m not seeing it, I’m just not seeing it. Give me a little more.

Me: Jane Eyre moves to Thornfield, falls in love with Mr. Rochester, then finds out he’s got a cannibal locked in the attic. The cannibal tries to eat Mr. Rochester, but Jane saves him. The cannibal keeps escaping and leaving shrunken heads on Jane’s bedside table. Then, as Jane and Mr. Rochester are standing at the altar to get married, someone cries out, “He already has a wife!” And his wife is the cannibal. Jane Eyre is so shocked she runs away to sea, and signs on as a harpooner on a whaling ship in search of Moby Dick. Then--
Editor: Too complicated. Remember: one sentence. One sentence.

Categories: Agnes Grey, Books, Humour, Jane Eyre, References, Wuthering Heights