How retro! How Brontë!

A few days ago we posted that Peter Webber has abandoned the Wuthering Heights film project. However, in an interview in The Scotsman with Ecosse Films producer Douglas Rae which might have taken place before or after Peter Webber left, the project seems to be still on.

Casting American actress Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen in Becoming Jane helped to make it the highest-grossing independent movie of 2006, but daring to make a film version of Brideshead Revisited last year resulted in a box-office-destroying critical savaging. Laughs Rae: "It was almost like, 'How dare you make something that can't be bettered?' But if you thought that way you'd never do anything. You'd never do Shakespeare again, or Dickens or Brontë."
As it happens, Rae is doing Brontë next. Ecosse has a new version of Wuthering Heights scheduled to start shooting in the Borders in the spring. (Alistair Harkness)

The Sexist - a Washington City Paper blog - discusses the subject of male pseudonyms, and of course the Brontës are mentioned.

Yesterday, career Web guy James Chartrand admitted that “he” is a woman, actually. Chartrand said that after she adopted the male pseudonym several years ago—one that sounded like it “might command respect”—she did command respect, and began to ascend from struggling single-mom writer to respected male Web entrepreneur. [...]
Meanwhile, Broadsheet’s Kate Harding saw Chartrand’s pseudonym as a reminder that some old-school feminist battles have not been laid to rest: “I get furious when people insist that western women have achieved full equality,” Harding wrote. “But even I’ve bought into the myth of meritocracy enough that my first thought upon learning a female writer massively increased her success by adopting a male pseudonym was, ‘Wow, how retro! How Brontë, how Eliot, how Sand.’ Certainly not ‘how Rowling.’” (Amanda Hess)

Now for some Twilight, as seen on Worthington News.

Worthingway Middle School English teacher Jen Baker admits she's "hooked" on the young adult series by Stephenie Meyer, populated by young and earnest vampires. Baker is using the series and other popular young adult books to hook students on reading and to teach classic themes in literature."
Using young adult lit gives students a window into other literature," she said.
Baker compares Twilight to the classic Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.
"The text of Wuthering Heights is extremely dense and even I struggled to get through it in college," she said. "But once students see that Jacob in Twilight is Heathcliff and Bella is Catherine, and Edward is a combination of Edgar and Heathcliff, suddenly the story makes more sense because they can apply what they already know about the Bella-Jacob-Edward triangle to Catherine, Heathcliff and Edgar." (Pamela Willis)

The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel looks at 'good books you may give to loved ones for holidays'.

That book [Pride and Prejudice] and “Jane Eyre” are as well-received these days as they were back when they were published. (Betty Stein)

More Brontë gifts on The Daily Green:

Train your mind on the guy who's always buzzing about the new David Sedaris – and head to your bookshelf! Seriously, when was the last time you read Moby Dick? Jane Eyre? Everyone’s got books lying around that they'll never read, or that they finished and placed right back on the shelf. (Jodi Newbern)

And a couple of references to Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights. First from an MTV text on singer Marina and the Diamonds:

For those people who mistake gender for a clumsy misspelling of genre, Marina And The Diamonds is bound to be confusing. From behind that deliberately pluralised name (she is Marina, you are her diamonds), Marina Diamond is creating some of the most arrestingly and original pop music since Kate Bush first howled about Heathcliff.

And then from another interview in The Scotsman, this time with Mylo, a DJ.

When did you lose your virginity?
In 1994, listening to Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush.

The blog Life Is Beautiful reviews André Téchiné's Les Soeurs Brontë. The scholar blog English 9A posts about Jane Eyre.

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