Mr Rochester, the literary cheater

Brian Dillon's Tormented Hope is on its way to becoming the most reviewed book ever. Today's review is by Lucasta Miller in The Times.

Warhol and Gould would have roundly resisted applying the stigma “hypochondriac” to their own terrors; it would have seemed to them a humiliating admission that they were making a fuss about nothing. By contrast, Dillon has clearly chosen his earliest two case studies, James Boswell and Charlotte Brontë, because they were unabashed in using the term to describe themselves: Boswell wrote a series of periodical essays under the name “The Hypochondriack”, while Brontë’s autobiographical novel Villette offers an in-depth study of its heroine’s “hypochondria”.
These earlier subjects were willing to call themselves hypochondriacs not just because they were more self-knowing than Gould or Warhol (which they were), but because the term had not yet acquired its modern meaning. For them, it signified a state of mind and body less localized, and perhaps more interesting, than a specific health delusion. Boswell’s early diaries – Dillon surprisingly concentrates far more on these than on the “Hypochondriack” essays – and Villette instead describe, in vivid experiential detail, what we today might call depression and anxiety wrought to the pitch of a nervous breakdown.

Mr Rochester finds himself on Flavorwire's Top Ten of Literary Cheaters.

3. Edward Rochester of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847)
Oh, Rochester. Just because you neglect your mentally unstable wife Bertha and keep her locked in the attic, that does not mean you are a single man. In fact, after reading Wide Sargasso Sea, we kind of think that you’re a dick. (Caitlin Brody)

Impossible to know what Mr Rochester would make of his portrayal in Wide Sargasso Sea, but in response to the accusations of 'neglect' he would like to point out that,

... though I possess an old house, Ferndean Manor, even more retired and hidden than this, where I could have lodged her safely enough, had not a scruple about the unhealthiness of the situation, in the heart of a wood, made my conscience recoil from the arrangement. Probably those damp walls would soon have eased me of her charge: but to each villain his own vice; and mine is not a tendency to indirect assassination, even of what I most hate. (Jane Eyre, chapter XXVII)

Associated Content reviews the 1983 film House of the Long Shadows:

Kenneth Magee is a young writer who makes a bet with his publisher Sam Allyson that, within 24 hours, he will be able to write a novel as good as Wuthering Heights. To get him in the mood, his publisher arranges for Magee to spend this 24 hours in a deserted manor house in Wales. (Genevieve Heely)

The Canberra Times publishes an extract from a longer interview with Chinese ambassador Fu Ying.

B: What did you most like about your time in Britain?
F: Personally I really enjoy visiting the home museums of the great writers, such as Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters. I make an effort wherever I go to try to find out what is around. For a few hours, I will sneak out and visit the place.

Today seems to be the 'love Jane Eyre' day out there on the blogosphere. Singing praises: December's Grace, Homebody Heroine, My Life Out in the Real World and Un hacedor en el desierto (in Spanish). Besides all that, Les Gens doesn't think Jane Eyre can be adapted for the screen again. Finally, Delitachan has uploaded to YouTube a short clip filmed at the Brontë Bridge on the moors.

Categories: Books, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Villette, Wuthering Heights