I like period dramas where there’s mud on skirts

Kent News talks with Andrea Arnold, brand-new Bafta winner in the English film category for Fish Tank and next director of Wuthering Heights:

Arnold’s next movie project is Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
She said: “It’s a story that’s very close to my heart. It’s close to a lot of people’s hearts, which makes it a huge responsibility.
“It dropped out of the sky before Christmas for me. I never thought I would ever take on an adaptation of a book.
“Think about Heathcliff: he’s an outsider, a gypsy. It’s a big class story. All my films have been about class and Wuthering Heights is more of the same.”

And The Times interviews Mia Wasikowska, who is in the middle of the Alice in Wonderland promotion, and says about her next project Jane Eyre:

And she will shortly start shooting Jane Eyre, with Michael Fassbender as Mr Rochester.
“She’s another incredible female character,” she acknowledges, “but I’m really excited because of Cary Fukunaga, the director. He’s not British, and his previous film, Sin Nombre, was about illegal immigration into America. I think it’s a brilliant choice, because he’s not following any preconceived notions, so it’s going to be really exciting to see what he does with it. I like period dramas that aren’t afraid to be messy, where there’s mud on skirts.” (Christopher Goodwin)

The Independent (Ireland) interviews Leslie Kenton, author of Love Affair, who describes the disturbing relationship between her and her father, the noteworthy jazz musician Stan Kenton:

And yet, despite the almost identical landscape of this story, the resonance is less Humbert Humbert and Lolita than Cathy and Heathcliffe of Wuthering Heights. It is a story of two people impacted together against their peers, their relatives, their circumstances. Against the world. (Anne Harris)

Kirkus Reviews publishes an account of Adèle, Grace, and Céline. The Other Woman of Jane Eyre:

Adele Varens was an inquisitive, intuitive child while growing up at Thornfield Manor, the home of her guardian, Edward Rochester. She discovered a crazy woman in the attic early in her stay, and could also sense the connection between her governess, Jane, and the man she would eventually knowas her father, Rochester himself. Adele’s natural gift of insight comes in handy when she becomes one of the first women to attend university in London and during the war in Crimea where she works alongside Florence Nightingale. When she marries Sir Garnet Gresham and settles at Drayton Abbey, Adele eschews a life of leisure. Instead, she works hard to restore an herb garden to glory, raises her children, makes friends and keeps up with current scientific knowledge and theory. When Adele inherits the letters that passed between her mother, Celine, and Grace, the servant who took care of the mad woman in the attic at Rochester’s estate, she learns much more, good and bad, about her family and the people she loves. Jane Eyre has become an iconic novel, sparking many sequels, revisions, screen and stage versions. Moïse writes hers with a delicate 19th-century sensibility that serves her characters well. They thrive under the author’s care, much like the herb gardens under Adele’s green thumb. Even as she tackles tough subjects of the times, like the clash between the religious view of how life began and the newfangled theories of evolution, the writing is entertaining and deft. Readers will easily follow Moïse’s smooth transitions between the epistolary form and Adele’s first-person narrative, even with a multitude of characters from past and present to account for.
Authentic, exciting and well-researched.

The Day (Connecticut) talks about Ruben Toledo's cover for Wuthering Heights, the Tampa Bay Online announces the new season of the American Stage Theatre Company including

Charles Ludlam's Gothic spoof "The Mystery of Irma Vep" (Sept. 17-Oct. 10) lampoons classic whodunits and horror films. Referencing Alfred Hitchcock's film noir "Rebecca," "Wuthering Heights," mummies and vampires, "Irma Vep" (an anagram for vampire) is campy fun that has achieved cult status. (Kathy L. Greenberg)

Another Brontë horse, Heathcliff, in the Cheltenham Festival reported in News of the World, the other 'professional' Heathcliff around, i.e. Gordon Brown, features in the Daily Mail (quoting again the Heathcliffgate) and The Independent (Ireland):

Hilariously, when Brown discovered that some idiot had lost a computer disk containing 20 million British people's personal banking details, he leaped across his desk to grab the lapels of his deputy chief of staff and snarled: "They're out to get me." Forget Heathcliff; cue the James Bond theme music. (Carol Hunt)

Associated Content publishes an article with the title What Does the Color Red Symbolize in Jane Eyre? by Morgan Drake Eckstein, a Portuguese blog, Janela de Guilhotina, a French one, Lectures d'un dévoreuse de livres... and Bookmarked discuss Jane Eyre (the latter in the Dame Darcy illustrated edition). Finally, an interesting guide to Jane Eyre adaptations has been posted on HubPages (including a first reaction from the Literature Network Forum defending Jane Eyre 1997).

Categories: Sequels, Books, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights