"Erasing sentences may not wash away history"

The New York Press reviews the film An Education directed by Lone Scherfig, written by Nick Hornby and based on Lynn Barber's memoirs. An unexpected Jane Eyre reference is quoted:

This is their Merchant-Ivory version of Juno.
Instead of Juno’s adolescent-hipster whimsy, An Education gets high-toned. Jenny writes a book report titled “Passion and Practicality in Jane Eyre”; she coos over Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne- Jones (David urges her to bid for the painting The Tree of Forgiveness at a ritzy auction); and she brags to her virginal classmates about David taking her to Paris—even bringing back bottles of perfume as souvenirs. The plot’s a cynical/sentimental rip-off of Flaubert’s novel Sentimental Education, yet full of commercial calculation—including Scherfig’s romantic view of the Paris assignation. (Armond White)

Brian Dillon's Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives is reviewed in the New Statesman:

Charlotte Brontë's hypochondria, which afflicted her when she was 19 and teaching at Roe Head School, now looks more like a nervous breakdown - a "heavy gloom" connected to her frustration at not having enough time to write. It found its way into both Jane Eyre and, particularly, The Professor (her first novel, published posthumously in 1857). (John O'Connell)

Back Stage reviews the comedy Penny Penniworth by Chris Weikel, now on stage at the Emerging Artists Theatre at TADA! Youth Theater:

Charles Dickens inspires the bulk of the plot and the sentimentality to skewer, with an occasional assist from two of the three Brontë sisters and others. The House of Goody's on-the-nose 19th-century costumes, with their breakaway wraparounds for lightning-quick costume changes, keep the audience rooted in the supposed period while providing anachronistic commentary. (Robert Windeler)

Sarah Churchwell discusses in The Independent how good or bad literature has nothing to do with the social identity of their authors:

If we are judging literature according to the nationality of its author, declaring that those writing about their own nation and moment, or from a position of imperial power, are disbarred from writing great literature, then we shall have to dispense with Jane Austen, all three Brontë sisters, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot, Dickens, Kipling and Hardy. If historical writing need not apply then wave goodbye to Shakespeare. If it has to be global in its sweep and eschew insularity, then I'm afraid Virginia Woolf is out.

The Telegraph (India) has an article about how evil children have been portrayed in literature:

The wayward older Catherine in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) can be said, in this sense, never to have grown up because the child who had asked her father to bring back a whip for her from his trip abroad could, as a young woman, heedlessly fling the baby Hareton from her lap to run after Heathcliff in Chapter IX. But then, living on a windswept heath, cut off from human society, has certain advantages.
One has to consider, of course, the fact that Catherine’s story is narrated by the redoubtable Nelly Dean, and so is coloured by her sympathies and disapprovals. (...)
I was reminded of the scene in Wuthering Heights where Catherine sits at the feet of her father, and glad that she is subdued for a while, Mr Earnshaw remarks, “Why canst thou not always be a good lass, Cathy?” At this, Catherine laughs and answers, “Why cannot you always be a good man, father?” (Anusua Mukherjee)

BSC interviews Sharon Shinn, author of the Jane Eyre à la space opera retelling Jenna Starborn,

Who was a writing idol when you were starting out, and whom do you particularly admire now? (Elena Nola)
I think my major influences were a whole raft of 19th century authors (Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope), followed eventually by Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Sayers, Western writer Ernest Haycox, and Anne McCaffrey. Throw in some Peter Beagle and Robin McKinley, shake well, and you pretty much get a sense of my writing style.

The Derby Telegraph announces some activities for the upcoming World Heritage Discovery Day at the Ritz cinema in Belper, Derbyshire:

"We always try and feature locally-made films at the end of October to mark World Heritage Discovery week and this year had chosen to screen Jane Eyre and The Virgin and the Gypsy, which were both made in Derbyshire" (Amanda Mundin)

Saturday 24th October, Jane Eyre (PG) (1996) - 6.00pm

Hard News contributes to the debate about the political correctness of the classics:

Why shouldn't the Jamaicans create uproar at Bertha Mason being the 'Madwoman in the Attic' in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre? While Bronte's book is one of the classics, Bertha Mason is burnt and killed. Or why shouldn't Shakespeare be summoned from his grave, to clarify why exactly is Othello the violent Moor and why Shylock has to pay with his flesh?
The answer is that time has gone and the writers are dead. What they wrote was a depiction of a social situation and power dynamics of their time. Erasing sentences may not wash away history. And what good can questioning old ideologies do, when the change they have undergone over the years is not radical enough? (Ankita Chawla Delhi)

And finally, a Brontëite at the Millersville University mentioned in The Snapper.

Categories: Alert, Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Theatre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights