Will the real Heathcliff please stand up?

First of all, do make sure you don't miss today's Very Important News below.

That done, let's go on with the rest of today's newsround. They are having the old debate for or against wind turbines in the upper Calder Valley, according to the Halifax Evening Courier:

Steve Beasley, who lives at nearby Crimsworth Dean, is also against the turbine.
"The upper Calder Valley is an extremely beautiful landscape. It's unique and all these developments are spoiling the whole area.
"We rely on tourism to bring in revenue.
"These are the areas that inspired the Brontes and Ted Hughes.
"People come from miles to see the tranquility and the ruggedness of these hills." (Ruth Mosalski)

The Yorkshire Evening Post discusses politicians who cry in public.

I like to think of Alastair [Campbell, director of communications and strategy for exPrime Minister Tony Blair] as the Heathcliff of politics – a bit wild and rough round the edges. Always ready with a sarcastic put-down or a breathtakingly brutal insult. I don't want to see him getting a bit upset. (Jayne Dawson)

But that's not today's only odd Heathcliff. The Sydney Morning Herald reviews the film The Wolfman and says,

[Benicio] Del Toro broods like a Mills & Boon Heathcliff on the moors. . . (Paul Byrnes)

What's exactly a Mills & Boon Heathcliff? Like a bad copy?

io9 picks science fiction's ten most epic love stories. One of them is likened to Jane Eyre.

Aral Vorkosigan and Cordelia Naismith (Shards Of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold): It's a classic recasting of Jane Eyre, as Jurgen Wehrmann writes in the essay "Jane Eyre in Outer Space": Cordelia is a kick-ass commander of a survey spaceship who's unlucky in love, while Aral Vorkosigan has suffered from an epically bad first marriage. On an expedition to an uncharted planet, Aral captures Cordelia, but they're soon cut off from both their crews and forced to work together to survive. They fall in love, but when Cordelia returns to her feminist utopia on Beta Colony, her love for Aral is viewed as a mental illness or a sign of brainwashing — and the "therapy" for this turns out to be very nasty indeed. Cordelia survives a hostile planet, war, and the threat of mindfuckery to return to Aral's side — where she later proves herself his ideal mate by bringing the severed head of Count Vidal Vordarian into a meeting of her husband and several of the Count's partisans. (Charlie Jane Anders)

The film An Education - with its Jane Eyre references - is reviewed by RVANews:

Not everyone is going to allow themselves to be seduced by an older guy, but there is a strange moment in our lives when we realize that, if we wanted, we could make those sorts of things happen. It’s heady and exciting and, if we’ve spent a lot of our time living in the pages of the books we read, makes us feel like Jane Eyre (before we remember the book’s ending). (Susan Howson)

Jane Eyre is of course being taught in schools today and the St Petersburg Times brings it up:

Both Stephanie and Sarah are in advanced placement literature and composition and so have been reading classics. Right now they are reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Other books tackled in that class are Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. (Paulette Lash Ritchie)

According to Xinhuanet, though, Chinese readers are moving away from the Brontës:

Readers in the Chinese mainland are no longer eyeing Western stories by Jane Austin [sic] and the Bronte sisters, or sentimental tales by Taiwan's Chiung Yao (Qiong Yao) and Xi Juan. Instead, they've shifted their attention to local writers.

A couple of blogs for today: Justice Jennifer Reads posts about Wuthering Heights and The Lost Entwife reviews Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre.

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