Jane meets Alice

Mia Wasikowska, the next on-screen Jane Eyre, talks with The Toronto Star and finds similarities between Jane and Lewis Carroll's Alice:

Wasikowska will get an opportunity to take some stunning photos when she heads to Yorkshire shortly after Alice in Wonderland opens to begin work on Cary Fukunaga's version of the Charlotte Brontë classic, Jane Eyre. She'll play the lead in the dark romance with Michael Fassbender (Hunger) as the tortured Mr. Rochester.
While they are very different characters, she sees similarities between Alice and Jane. "What I admire about Jane is she has such self-respect and similar concepts to Alice in terms of how do you sacrifice for somebody else, and what do you do to feel fulfilled and empowered as your own person." (Linda Barnard)

Other news outlets which also mention Mia Wasikowska's part as Jane Eyre are Paste Magazine, the Daily Mail, the Boston Globe and Winnipeg Free Press.

Coincidentally, the premiere of Tim Burton's take on Alice in Wonderland is the reason behind this article in The Guardian by AS Byatt:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was written in 1862 and published in 1865. Through the Looking-Glass was published in 1871. The great children's books that shaped the imaginations of successive generations came later and many were written around the turn of the 20th century. Kipling's Jungle Books and Puck of Pook's Hill, E Nesbit's tales of children meeting psammeads and phoenixes and other opinionated beasts, George MacDonald's tales of Curdie the miner and his princess, L Frank Baum's tales of the land of Oz, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy, Mrs Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and JM Barrie's Peter Pan, even Treasure Island, have children making their own lives and fates in strange worlds outside the daily experience of family and school. Children in these books have a kind of emotional and moral autonomy which is new in literature. The child reader feels their problems, decisions and dangers differently from those of either children in real fairy stories (Hansel and Gretel) or children in novels who will grow up – Pip in terror by his parents' gravestone, Oliver Twist in the orphanage, David Copperfield tormented by the Murdstones, Jane Eyre in the Red Room, or furious, sulky Maggie Tulliver.

The Guardian also has an article about historical literary epistolary feuds and there's a mention of a Brontë-related one:

This was the charge, too, that lay at the heart of Elizabeth Gaskell's epistolary feud with Rev Carus Wilson 20 years later. In 1857, Gaskell's biography of her late friend Charlotte Brontë suggested that Lowood, the nightmare school described in the early chapters of Jane Eyre, was a direct transcription of Cowan Bridge, the establishment attended by the Brontë sisters in the 1820s. Gaskell had since visited the place and found it dirty, serving up sour milk in which dust, dirt and goodness knows what floated. It was this "want of cleanliness", implied Gaskell, which had been responsible for the deaths of the two eldest Brontë girls.
With a howl of indignation, the family of the school's founder, Rev Wilson, conducted a vicious letter campaign against Mrs Gaskell in which she was accused of being a fantasist. Battle lines were drawn, and a teary Mrs Gaskell marshalled her troops, including Charlotte Brontë's clerical widower, into responding on her behalf. And so, for several weeks in 1857, newspaper readers in the north of England were treated to the unedifying sight of a clutch of Church of England clergyman arguing over whether Britain's greatest female novelist of the day had really been forced to eat "bingy" porridge as a little girl. (Kathryn Hughes)

Not to mention that Arthur Bell Nichols also took part in the literary exchanges.

Edwin Heathcote's column in the Financial Times talks about cellars and attics and Thornfield Hall is mentioned:

As [Gaston] Bachelard suggests, these twin architectural poles are also bastions of the sinister, the deliberately buried or forgotten. Whether in Charlotte Brontë’s image of the mad Mrs Rochester shut away in the attic or in the terrifying nightmare reality of Josef Fritzl’s basement dungeon (in which he held his daughter for 24 years and which chillingly reminds us of the etymology of “cellar” as a collection of cells), the idea of both spaces also embodies a terrible notion of the imprisonment of the unwanted, both symbolic and actual.

Lyndall Gordon's biography of Emily Dickinson, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds, is reviewed by the Irish Times:

She kept abreast of new books, snapping up new editions of the Brontë sisters and George Eliot. She had a small but significant circle of admiring readers to whom she circulated hundreds of copies of her poems. (Vona Groarke)

Maud Newton reviews Brian Dillon's The Hypochondriacs, which is the US title of Tormented Hope for NPR's WBUR:

Charlotte Bronte, for instance, was beset by headaches, chest pain and nervous, melancholic breakdowns that became a central theme of her fiction and tended to lift when she finished a novel.

Lucy Mangan writes about (and rambles around) the upcoming World Book Day in The Guardian. Including a Jane Eyre mention:

World Book Day is a wondrous hive of activity. There are exhibitions, school visits by authors, story­time sessions, the distribution of vouchers, trips to libraries and book shops, and all of this is, of course, A Very Good Thing, pointing as it does the way for many to an unfamiliar source of entertainment. But it does all have that slightly worthy, top-down feel that only heightens the real problem with reading, which is that it is and always has been terminally uncool (even in Victorian times, the boy with the hoop and stick got more kudos than the one who got the third volume of Jane Eyre before anyone else).

The Seattle Times reviews one of the latest UK TV little gems, Red Riding:

"Yorkshire noir" is a fairly unpopulated genre, but after watching five gripping hours of the "Red Riding" trilogy, I hope there's more where this came from. A century and a half after "Wuthering Heights," this windswept region still shows up on screen with a terrifying remoteness; where houses look out over barren hillsides and there's a sense that, if you wander a few steps too far, no one will hear you scream. "This is the North," says a policeman in the film, as if stating his personal credo. "We do what we want." (Moira MacDonald)

Pascal Bonitzer, screenwriter of Les Soeurs Brontë (1977) is interviewed by BSC News Magazine:

Quand j'ai commencé à écrire, j'étais loin d'avoir de la méthode et d'être professionnel, donc ça c'est fait un peu sur le tas. Pour Téchiné, ça c'est fait un peu comme ça, il m'a proposé de retravailler une biographie des soeurs Bronté. Je n'étais pas spécialiste, mais « Les hauts de Hurlevent » avait été longtemps mon livre de chevet, donc cela m'intéressait et je me suis lancé avec lui. On a abouti à une espèce de monstre de plus de 200 pages, un film de plus de 3 heures, retravaillé et recoupé ensuite par Toscan du Plantier le producteur. Cela a donné le film que l'on connaît, qui a failli du reste mettre un terme prématurément à ma carrière puisqu'accueilli à Cannes par une kabbale dont je me souviens encore... (Élodie Trouvé) (Google translation)

O Globo (Brazil) talks about the recently opened Paula Rego museum in Cascais (Portugal):

A condição feminina é um tema favorito da artista. Influenciou até na escolha dos romances que servem de inspiração para outras séries, como "Jane Eyre", de Charlotte Brontë, e "O Crime do Padre Amaro", do conterrâneo Eça de Queirós, ou a peça "As criadas", de Jean Genet. (Gustavo Alves) (Google translation)

Página 12 (Argentina) defines the Olsen Sisters as the

(...) antítesis de las Bronte, al runaway de Nueva York y por otro la presentación de una línea de vestidos diseñados por Victoria Beckham. (Victoria Lescano) (Google translation)

L'Expression (Algeria) reviews the Folies Berbères (Théâtre régional de Constantine):

Dans un dosage d’ingrédients explosifs, rappelant le burlesque, palpant les maux les plus ancrés dans la société, puisant dans tous les répertoires dans un rituel époustouflant, de la danse, à la mimique, au chant, les artistes ont sublimé l’art sans frontières, sans tabous, exorcisant à l’épuisement les vieux démons des Hauts de Hurlevent d’Emily Brontë. (R.C.) (Google translation)

The Jornal do Comércio (Brazil) reviews the Portuguese translation of The Virago Book of Ghost Stories edited by Richard Dalby which includes Charlotte Brontë's Napoleon and the Spectre. TechNews Daily mentions the Nintendo DS Classic Book Collection, The Pocahontas Times wants to re-read Jane Eyre, bilkat7800 reviews on Open Salon Wide Sargasso Sea, an Emily Brontë T-shirt and the girl who wore it The Vanity Ward, Florcita de Pura Flor posts about Jane Eyre (in Spanish), Rarities, B-Sides and Other Stuff talks about Albert Niland's cover of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, References, Translations, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights