Controlling Mr Rochester

Sheila Kohler, author of Becoming Jane Eyre, publishes an article in the Huffington Post linking her novel with the Twilight frenzy:

When our teacher asked us, a class of adolescent girls, how many of us would like to marry Heathcliff, all the hands in the class shot up. I imagine if she'd asked us about Mr Rochester we would have done the same thing. (...)
For this desire, which is probably part of today's "Twilight" phenomenon, mild and accommodating though these vampires may be, seems to be an intrinsic part of our make up. What is the origin of our desire for these Byronic heroes, these "bad boys," these men that we know can only disturb our dreams at night and cause us nothing but grief in our days.
What drove all three Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, whose lives I have recently explored in "Becoming Jane Eyre" to create very similar male characters, characters like Heathcliff who hangs poor Isabella's pet dog up on a tree, or Mr Rochester who storms around Thornfield, provoking Jane's jealousy and whom Jane calls "My master," or Huntingdon and his pack of dissolute friends. All three girls had read and admired Byron's work, including Don Juan; and they had watched their brother, Branwell, fall desperately in love with the mother of the boy he was tutoring at Thorp Green. He expected her to marry him when her husband died and when she didn't, turned to opium and drink, causing chaos in the poor parsonage, narrowly risking burning the place down as he lay unconscious in his bed. Charlotte, too, had fallen in love with her charismatic and temperamental professor in Belgium, her black swan as she called him.
But does this explain our fascination with the modern day phenomenon of vampires? Surely, much of this, the violence between the sexes, comes from our guilt, our female ( or male for that matter -- think of the great adulterous heroines like Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary) guilt at our sexual desires, our need to camouflage our desire for the other sex, causing them to become the ones who prey on us, the ones who drag us reluctantly to their beds; the ones who humiliate us and remain ultimately out of reach, adulterous or drugged and drunken, or simply resisting the urge to drink our blood.
We can only hope that with age comes the wisdom to renounce this sort of folly, to turn from these savage characters or like Charlotte Bronte, with Mr Rochester, to curb their violence, to control them, to turn the tables on them, to take the upper hand and enter into a real and useful partnership.

PopMatters interviews the composer Ludovico Einaudi who turns to be a Brontëite:

1. The latest book or movie that made you cry?
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. I wish I could have the force that this book has to capture the emotions in such a vivid and strong way.

Film in Focus publishes a complete article about the films premiered in the so-called best year in film history, 1939. William Wyler's Wuthering Heights appears:

True love didn't exactly run smoothly for Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, either, as Heathcliff and Cathy in William Wyler's handsome take on Emily Brontë's bodice-ripper, Wuthering Heights. (David Parkinson)

We read on The Bookseller how Bertrams is moving into the publishing business:

Book wholesaler Bertrams is moving into publishing with the launch of a range of budget classic titles available to independent booksellers for just £1.

Kicking off with 12 titles, including Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Dracula and Wuthering Heights, The Samphire Press officially goes live on 21st January. Although the books have a recommended retail price of £4, they will not carry the pricing on the back of the copy. All titles will be sold to retailers at 75% off, and Bertrams will supply "a pack of price stickers at £2, £3 and £4".

The Financial Chronicle (India) reviews Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter by Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman

Published by Penguin, it is an irreverent, profane and sometimes brilliant collection of 20 tweets on the ideas and themes of 60-some classic literary works. From Beowulf to Bronte, from Kafka to Kerouac, and from Dostoevsky to Dickens; it is a book about literature written in the purest and pithiest essence of Twitter. (Reji John)

Comics Bulletin reviews Graphic Classics: Louisa May Alcott, a comic adaptation of Little Women and several short Gothic stories from the author,

"A Whisper in the Dark" is the real find of this volume. The plot is a familiar one to any fan of Jane Eyre, , and The Woman in White--a young heiress goes to live with her uncle and handsome young cousin. Being of a romantic temperament, she believes a marriage is being planned for her and her cousin. (Penny Kenny)

Many and highly varied reviews on the blogosphere: Book-a-rama reviews the Classical Comics adaptation of Jane Eyre (as part of the All about the Brontës Challenge, also entered by Jayne's Books), BF77008 posts about Sharon Shinn's Jenna Starborn, The Reading Life reviews Wide Sargasso Sea, aabye grace talks about Jane Eyre 1944, Echostains Blog devotes a post to Chris Firth's Branwell Brontë's Barber's Tale, Gofita's Pages briefly discusses Syrie James's The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë, Cocola's posts in French about Jane Eyre, Precious Horizon talks about Wuthering Heights and the Brontës in Persian, In Christ Alone selects Jane Eyre as one of her favourite female period drama characters and Sinepil posts about Wuthering Heights 1992 in Turkish.

Blogging the Muse interviews author Cat Rambo:

Who do you like to read?
I read tons. People whose work I look for include Daniel Abraham, L. Timmel DuChamp, Kelley Eskridge, Jasper Fforde, Rachel Swirsky, Lilith St. Crow, Rob Thurman, Jeff VanderMeer.
I also reread a great deal. (...) My shelf of books I return to again and again include Aristophanes, Jane Austen, Djuna Barnes, Marion Zimmer Bradley, the Brontes (...)

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Comics, Fiction, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Sequels, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights