The best Wuthering Heights film ever

FemaleFirst reports the recent words pronounced by Gemma Arterton on her 'former' role as Cathy in Wuthering Heights:

Gemma Arterton is not starring in a big screen remake of Wuthering Heights.
It had been reported that Arterton was all set to star as Catherine Earnshaw in the Andrea Arnold directed movie alongside Ed Westwick as Heathcliff.
Speaking to MSN.com the actress said:"I was hoping that that would work out, but actually she's looking for a pure Yorkshire lass - so any Yorkshire lasses out there who want to be Cathy in Wuthering Heights, she's doing open auditioning."
She added: "I think she [Arnold] will make the best Wuthering Heights film ever, she's such an amazing director."

Hollywood Reporter says that HanWay is doing well on the pre-sales of the film:

HanWay Films said Monday it had struck multiple pre-sales worldwide for BAFTA-winner Andrea Arnold's upcoming "Wuthering Heights," the Ecosse Films/Film Four production to be produced by Kevin Loader, Robert Bernstein and Douglas Rae.
Arnold, who last week won the BAFTA best British film award for coming of age drama "Fish Tank," is working on the remake of Emily Bronte's passionate and tragic love story setting against the unforgiving backdrop of the Yorkshire moors. Casting has yet to be announced.
Hanway has concluded deals in 21 territories including Artificial Eye and Film 4 in the U.K., Diaphana in France, Prokino in Germany, Alta in Spain, Transmission in Australia and Ster Kinekor in South Africa.
Other deals have been signed in Portugal, Switzerland, Benelux Greece, Romania, Czech Republic, Poland, the former Yugoslavia, Iceland, Hong Kong / Singapore, Turkey, the Middle East, Russia, Korea and Latin America.
"Distributors are buying a love story about teenage outsiders driven by deeply intense passion -- Andrea's brilliance delivers a contemporary distinctive edge," said Tim Haslam, HanWay CEO. (Mimi Turner)

On to something else now, as Sheila Kohler, author of Becoming Jane Eyre, is featured in the Princeton University News:

In a Manchester, England, lodging house in 1846, a young woman is caring for her father after an operation. As he sleeps, her pencil furiously scratches against a page. The young woman is Charlotte Brontë, and she is writing her masterpiece, "Jane Eyre."
A new novel by Sheila Kohler, a lecturer in creative writing and the Lewis Center for the Arts, brings to life the composition of "Jane Eyre" and the struggle of the three Brontë sisters to introduce their literary talents to the world. In "Becoming Jane Eyre," published in January by Penguin Books, Kohler explores her famous subject with the same incisive approach that has marked her other award-winning -- and frequently autobiographical -- novels.
"I have tried to imagine," said Kohler, "what might have happened in that room where, sitting by her father's side, Brontë wrote half of 'Jane Eyre' in six weeks."
"Becoming Jane Eyre" is Kohler's seventh novel. A writer known for elegant prose and disquieting psychological plotlines, Kohler was born in South Africa under apartheid and lived in Paris for 15 years before coming to the United States in 1981. She has been teaching creative writing at Princeton since 2007, bringing to the classroom her gift for penetrating the inner lives of her characters.
In writing her newest novel, Kohler researched biographies, letters and literary works of the Brontë family. Living in an underheated parsonage in the gloomy Yorkshire moors of northern England, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë endured poverty, loneliness and the death of their beloved mother and two eldest siblings. Their novels repeatedly were rejected by publishers. Yet they persevered, and eventually gained recognition as one of the most talented families of writers in the English-speaking world.
Joyce Carol Oates, the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities, called the novel "a tour de force of style, vision and imagination; a deeply moving and utterly convincing reconstruction of the private, inner life of Charlotte Brontë."
Kohler was driven to write "Becoming Jane Eyre" in part by thinking about a question that fiction writers are often asked: Does the novel stem from the author's life?
"What interested me was exploring how much of Brontë's life came into 'Jane Eyre,'" Kohler said.
And so, in "Becoming Jane Eyre," Brontë is motivated to work on her novel by the rejection letter she receives from a publisher on the morning of her father's operation. She also resolves not to waste any more time penning beseeching letters to her former professor, with whom she has fallen in love. She will, however, "use him in her work, the ultimate revenge," Kohler writes. "She will use all those who have snubbed and ignored her. She will write out of rage, out of a deep sense of her own worth and of the injustice of the world's reception of her words. She will write about something she knows well: her passion."
Kohler recalls being asked the "How much of the novel is true?" query by a fan of her first novel, "A Perfect Place," a psychological tale about a woman who has repressed a shocking secret.
"I said, 'None of it,' and my husband said, 'Every word.' In a way we were both telling the truth. You don't make it up. It comes from somewhere," Kohler said. [...]
In "Becoming Jane Eyre," Kohler believed she was leaving autobiographical fiction behind for the comfort of a historical novel. But she was surprised to find elements of her own experiences as a writer creeping in to Brontë's story."When one takes a historical character, that person acts as a sort of screen behind which one can both hide and onto which one can project so much that is true in one's own life," Kohler recently wrote in a blog about the inspiration for the book. "Believing I was writing about someone else's life, I was able to create a middle distance and to find myself in her story." (Jennifer Greenstein Altmann)

Another recent fictional account of the life of another writer is Jerome Charyn's The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. The Daily Beast reviews it and mentions Charlotte Brontë in passing.

Jane Eyre also appears in a book to be released on May 26th according to Publishers Weekly:

Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature
Emma Donoghue.
Knopf, $27.95 (304p)
ISBN 978-0-307-27094-8
“The past is a wild party; check your preconceptions at the door,” warns British literary historian and novelist Donoghue (Slammerkin) in her comprehensive catalogue of a thousand years of Western literature. “[I]n Western culture passion between women is always a big deal, whether presented as glorious or shameful, angelic or monstrous,” she claims. These passions are not always, strictly speaking, lesbian, Donoghue says, as she sorts them into categories (e.g., cross-dressing and the resulting “ 'accident' of same-sex desire' ”; women friends who remain inseparable despite all obstacles). She links them to historical developments and deciphers their sometimes obscure language. “Morbid,” for example, was often a code word for “lesbian” in the 19th century. Delivering on her promise of a wild party, Donoghue reads Clarissa as a rivalry between Lovelace and Anna for Clarissa's heart; she considers Jane Eyre as an early schoolgirl novel (note Jane's crush on her schoolmate Helen), whose form would be adapted by early lesbian coming-out novels. With her excellent reading list, readers can test for themselves the “unexpected continuity” Donoghue finds in the presence of passion between women in Western literature. 19 photos. (May 26)

A couple of 'this reminds me of the Brontës' sightings.

The light on the austere church in the barren landscape was eerily reminiscent of Jane Eyre . (Sheila Sullivan in The Irish Times)

and

Shirley, 53, says: "Seeing this chapel sat on top of the hill as I drove in from Huddersfield just reminded me of somewhere you would expect to find Cathy and Heathcliff!" (Emma Davison in The Huddersfield Daily Examiner)

The Classic Literature Blog on About.com reminds us that March is Women's History Month and among others suggests...

Charlotte Bronte (or one of her sisters: Emily or Anne)? (Esther Lombardi)

On the blogosphere, Golden Moon posts about Jane Eyre and El Sueño Eterno discuses the 1944 adaptation - both in Spanish. Story Like Mine writes about Wuthering Heights. And Flickr user cobbybrook has uploaded an 'acrylic on canvas' inspired by Wuthering Heights/Top Withens.

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