Almost Preternatural in its Power

Kathryn Hugues writes in The Guardian about George Elliot's The Mill on the Floss on the 150th anniversary of its publication. A Jane Eyre comparison crops up:

It is, though, Maggie Tulliver who towers over The Mill on the Floss, one of those great literary heroines whom bookish girls grow up wanting to be. Just like Anne of Green Gables or even Jane Eyre, Maggie captures exactly the dilemma of being the clever girl of the family, the ugly duckling, the misplaced foundling who longs to be recognised for the genius she secretly knows herself to be.

As a matter of fact George Elliot had Villette in great esteem:

I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading Villette, a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power... (George Elliot to Mrs Bray, February 15, 1853)

Patricia McLaughlin in The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch has a Heathcliff-like experience with a raincoat:

About a million years ago — OK, really more like 30 — I bought a raincoat at a thrift shop on Third Avenue in New York. (...) Apparently unremarkable except for its labels. One said GRENFELL CLOTH Made in England over a woven vignette of a man scaling a dark mountain, long-handled ice ax in left hand, a second snowy peak looming in the distance. In a white rectangle beneath the dark mountain, in red thread, were stitched the words:

IMPORTANT
WHEN WET
DRY BY A FIRE.

As if the coat's maker expected it to be worn by some Heathcliff who could count on finding a roaring fire in the grate at Wuthering Heights or Thrushcross Grange when he came in, drenched, from one of his lugubrious lovelorn rambles across the moors.

Another curious column today is Susie Boyt's in the Financial Times. About literary prejudices:

I was discussing with some friends the prejudices of our parents and whether we felt duty-bound to inherit them or had fought hard to resist. “I think the most powerful family prejudices to discard are the literary ones,” I said. “There is a whole ream of authors I know I am not quite meant to like, and the awful thing is that I don’t.” “My whole family is named after Jane Austen characters,” a pal said. “My mother read her novels aloud to me when I was in the womb, so what chance did I have?”
“Do you sometimes almost find yourself daring to prefer the Brontës out of – I don’t know – spite?”, I inquired. “I do not,” she says. “The thing is,” I continued, “once a parent has expressed to you that Beckett’s work has a ‘forced intensity’, or Wordsworth is humourless, or The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil is ‘so adolescent’, or Iris Murdoch reads ‘like a drawer with shoes and socks and even feet in it’, then it’s kind of hard to like those guys anymore.”

Gary A. Warner after his visit to Brontë country now publishes an article about Jane Austen's England in The Vancouver Sun. Talking about Chawton, he says:

To see Chawton is to understand Austen’s world, just as the bleak Yorkshire moors of Haworth shaped the Bronte sisters.

Frances Wilson reviews for The Times Literary Supplement Olena Beal's Dora Wordsworth. A Poet’s Daughter:

The life of Dora Wordsworth reads like a more complex version of the second half of Wuthering Heights, where the sickly children of Cathy and Heathcliff are doomed to repeat and repair the miseries of their parents.

The Independent (Ireland) reviews Lyndall Gordon's Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds:

In contrast to our ignorance about Shakespeare, we know a great deal about Emily's family. Her prosperous Old Testament father was Treasurer of Amherst College in Massachusetts, which was founded by her grandfather. She had a cold mother, a sister, disappointed in love, and a brother, Austin, as broodingly handsome as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. (Brian Lynch)

St Petersburg Times presents the second installment of the Charlotte Brontë adventures by Laura Joh Rowland:

Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë (Overlook) by Laura Joh Rowland is the second of a series of thriller-romances featuring the author of Jane Eyre; this time a mystery takes Charlotte into history's most notorious mental asylum. (Colette Bancroft)

BrontëBlog will publish a review of this book closer to the publication date.

The Catholic Herald publishes an extract of Criticising the Critics by Fr Aidan Nichols who quotes MP Dennis McShane saying

This does not sit well with our culture which, as the Labour Member of Parliament Denis McShane has written, "from Shakespeare to Pope to Brontë to Orwell has been about a deeply felt sense of language and history".

The quote comes from a 2008 article in The Telegraph.

Ocho Leguas, the travel supplement of El Mundo (Spain) has an article on Yorkshire ("Un jardín encantado en el corazón de Inglaterra") with obvious mentions to the Brontës and particularly Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights:

Un jardín con mil caras y expresiones que tan pronto aparece rodeado de cultura como la que envuelve a su principal museo en el mismo York y que incluye una de las instituciones arqueológicas más completas e interesantes de Gran Bretaña como se transforma en esos atormentados y emblemáticos páramos que inspiraron a Emily Brontë para escribir su famosa novela Cumbres Borrascosas.(...)
2.500 kilómetros cuadrados de superficie que engloban los páramos cubiertos de brezo que sirvieron para esconderse a los atormentados personajes de Emily Bronte, los bucólicos valles de los Yorkshire Dales. (Javier Mazorra) (Google translation)

Yorkshire is also present in Público (Spain) through an article about the publication of the Spanish translations of poems by Ted Hughes:

El condado ya se había hecho famoso antes de que naciera Hughes, con Cumbres borrascosas, que Emily Brontë escribió en 1847. (Peio H. Riaño) (Google translation)

A student in the Times-Transcript consider herself more an arts than a science student and uses a Wuthering Heights reference, Fantasy Magazine (Italy) reviews a recent Italian translation of Margaret Oliphant's A Little Pilgrim in the Unseen (1882) and the Brontës are mentioned, on Open Salon bloggers choose Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights as their ten books that influenced their lives, My Reading Garden posts a poem inspired by Wuthering Heights and River's Blue Elephants posts another one celebrating ten years of teaching Jane Eyre. A drugstore owner who loves Wuthering Heights 1939 in La Depêche (France).

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