Imogen Poots as Blanche

The London Evening Standard confirms that Imogen Poots's role in Jane Eyre 2011 is as Blanche Ingram (another blonde Blanche).

The answer is: making quite a name for herself; this is just one of six major films Poots has coming up, from Centurion, in which she plays a woad-covered wise woman, to Blanche Ingram in a big-screen version of Jane Eyre. (...)
Their chemistry will be reprised this summer when she plays Blanche Ingram opposite Fassbender's Mr Rochester in Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre. Fukunaga says he saw her playing Jane Austen's niece Fanny in Miss Austen Regrets for the BBC and was impressed by her sense of period. 'You can tell there's a lot going on behind the eyes, a fierce intelligence and humour. In Jane Eyre, she's an accomplished young lady who has to sing 1830s operetta and I asked her how she was going to sing it and she said, "Like Johnny Cash?" which I thought showed her sense of humour, which seems quite zany. I'm really looking forward to seeing how her face works on camera.'
As for Imogen, she says of her haracter: 'Blanche is self-obsessed and conniving and feels she can walk in and claim Mr Rochester. She's obsessed with class and money and she's pretty irritating as a person. I think everyone's met a Blanche, once or twice...'
As for Imogen, she says of her haracter: 'Blanche is self-obsessed and conniving and feels she can walk in and claim Mr Rochester. She's obsessed with class and money and she's pretty irritating as a person. I think everyone's met a Blanche, once or twice...' (Pip Clements)

The Wellesley Townsman announces a New England Brontë Society meeting:

Mary A. Haigh of Wellesley, the New England representative of the Bronte Society in England, is hosting an annual meeting of the Bronte Society at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury on Sunday, April 18.
The tie that binds the Longfellows and the Brontes is slim. The Longfellow family originated in England and generations were buried in the grounds of the Parish Church of St. Enoch in the town of Guisely in Yorkshire. It is the Church the Rev. Patrick Bronte and Maria Branwell chose for their marriage in 1812.
On Sunday, the Bronte members will tour the Wayside Inn, the Grist Mill, its water wheel and stream and the Martha Mary Chapel. A docent will tell the story of Mary’s Little Lamb in the little Red School House. Lunch will be in the Howe Room of the Inn.
To honor the Longfellow and Bronte authors, members will read the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Rev. Patrick, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Bronte.

The Basingstoke Gazette announces the Watermill Theatre performances of Polly Teale's Brontë:

A NEW collaboration at The Watermill Theatre, encouraging newcomers to the industry, is starting with Brontë.
Director Nancy Meckler and theatre company Shared Experience have paired up for a production of Brontë, by Polly Teale, which offers a fascinating glimpse into the life, mind and works of the Brontë family. (...)
Constrained by their background and sex, three girls grow up in an isolated parsonage on the Yorkshire moors with an overbearing father and a brother unable to cope with the weight of his family’s expectations.
Against this backdrop, the Brontë sisters write novels and create powerful and passionate characters that have ensured their place in our literary history.
Heathcliffe (sic), Cathy Earnshaw, Arthur Huntingdon and the first Mrs Rochester come to life on stage as the sisters’ story unfolds.

Ben Lovegrove has written telling us about yesterday's performance:

I have been to see this and I enjoyed it, I did however feel that Emily and Anne were a bit sidelined as the play was mostly about Charlotte. I thought the music added atmosphere and I was suprised that the actors did real Yorkshire accents, or tried to, as you don't hear those very often down here in the south!
The Watermill Theatre is small and intimate and felt like a really historical place.

Joe Queenan in The New York Times uncovers some intolerable censorship in Jane Eyre:

Happily, precious few novels mention the Yankees, the Lakers, Duke, U.S.C. or Manchester United, much less the Cowboys. This is no accident. Editors have long understood that allowing an author to link his characters with a widely execrated sports franchise would turn off millions of potential readers, so they have gently urged these authors to excise such references, particularly if they occur early in the book, when the reader is still making up his mind whether it is worth plowing ahead. Here are a few examples of passages that were wisely deleted from famous writers’ manuscripts before they went to press: (...)
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. So Rochester suggested that we all crochet mittens with the America’s Team logo.” (“Jane Eyre”)

Library Journal presents, among others, Jandy Nelson's The Sky is Everywhere:

Nelson’s debut begins with the death of Bailey, the older, talented sister of 17-year-old Lennie, a band-geek and poet whose favorite book is Wuthering Heights. (Angelina Benedetti)

Kirkus Reviews has published a review of the upcoming new novel by Laura Joh Rowland, Bedlam:

The surprising success of Jane Eyre has thrust Charlotte Brontë into the glare of the public spotlight, but this is a mixed blessing. Her sisters Anne and Emily have recently died after living through the commercial failures of their fiction, and...

Local teacher or students and Brontëites are highlighted in the Pembroke Mariner & Reporter and in The Hindu; another Heathcliff-Gordon Brown pairing in The Telegraph; Pages of the Mind reviews Jane Eyre, a book that Paulus Torchus is reading; Books in the Attic reviews Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre. The Crowded Leaf reviews Romancing Miss Brontë by Juliet Gael and finally Marmelade de Livres posts about Jane Eyre in French.

Categories: Alert, Brontë Society, Fiction, Humour, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Theatre