Release date for Jane Eyre 2011: March 11

Many movie websites are posting this press release from Focus Features.

Jane Eyre will begin its platform release in selected cities on Friday, March 11th, 2011. The film based on Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel just wrapped principal photography and is directed by Cary Fukunaga, whose debut feature was Focus’ award-winning Sin Nombre. Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, Jamie Bell, Juid Dench, Sally Hawkins, Tamzin Merchant, and Imogen Poots star in the romantic drama. In the story, Jane Eyre (Ms. Wasikowska) flees Thornfield House, where she works as a governess for wealthy Edward Rochester (Mr. Fassbender). The isolated and imposing residence – and Mr. Rochester’s coldness – have sorely tested the young woman’s resilience, forged years earlier when she was orphaned. As Jane reflects upon her past and recovers her natural curiosity, she will return to Mr. Rochester – and the terrible secret that he is hiding…The screenplay adaptation is by Moira Buffini; Ruby Films’ Alison Owen, an Academy Award nominee for Elizabeth, and Paul Trijbits are producing Jane Eyre. Christine Langan, Creative Director of BBC Films, is executive-producing for the BBC.

Let the count down begin then! If the release is confirmed it will put the premiere closer to the Berlinale than to Venice.

In other news, the Yorkshire Post tells the story of an Australian couple who have travelled to Yorkshire after discovering their personal Brontë connections:

Davina and John Greenwood, from Melbourne, visited Dewsbury Minster this week where 200 years ago a distant ancestor, the Rev John Buckworth, appointed Patrick Brontë as curate.
Mrs Greenwood is a distant relative of Patrick Brontë's brother William, who lived in Ireland and whose descendants have ended up in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, England and Scotland.
After a short stint at Dewsbury Patrick Brontë moved to Haworth where the rugged Yorkshire landscape inspired his daughters to pen the novels that became literary classics.
Mr Buckworth married the eldest daughter of local mill owner John Halliley, from whom Australian-born John Greenwood gets his middle name, Halliley.
Several generations of Hallileys in Australia can now trace their family tree back to people living in West Yorkshire in the early 1800s and before.
Last year Dewsbury Minster – a parish church in the 1800s – celebrated the 200th anniversary of Patrick Brontë's appointment as curate.
The Greenwoods were helped in their pilgrimage by Brontë enthusiast Imelda Marsden, 64, from Mirfield, who pointed out all the local connections.
As well as the Haworth connection, there are many other places in Yorkshire with links to one or other of the famous sisters.
Charlotte Brontë's lifelong friend Mary Taylor lived at Red House, Gomersal, which is now a museum.
The Greenwoods also toured the graveyard at Dewsbury Minster, where a number of Mr Greenwood's ancestors are buried, and took in Haworth and the Dales. (Andrew Robinson)

Readers of the Fortean Times share intriguing sleep stories and one of them tells a Brontë anecdote:

In Charlotte Brontë’s book Villette, her heroine, Lucy Snowe, accidentally takes too much opium, and spends an evening intensely tripping. When Ms Brontë was asked how she, a parson’s daughter in a remote Yorkshire village, could accurately describe what opium felt like, she said that every night, before she went to bed, she deliberately thought about this particular scene as she fell asleep. On the third night of trying this, she dreamt the entire scene in its entirety, with all the sensations and visions Lucy had.
Of course, this could have been a way of covering up the fact that her brother was an opium addict, and she probably got the facts from him. She did say, however, that she often used this method when she wasn’t sure how to write a scene, or how a character thought or felt. Many creative types use directed dreaming when they’re stuck. I’ve used it myself to overcome writer’s block. Sometimes it works spectacularly and sometimes my subconscious refuses to co-operate at all and I end up with incredibly dull dreams. [...]
Michelle Birkby
Hounslow, Middlesex

The story is told by Mrs Gaskell in her Life, chapter XXVII.

The New York Times also uses a Brontë-related quote to make a point about long(er) skirts:

JEAN RHYS knew a thing or two about style and, in particular, about the hauteur conveyed by the sweep of a hem. In her novel “Wide Sargasso Sea,” a Goth-tinged prequel to “Jane Eyre,” Christophine, a servant, lets the tail of her skirt fan out behind her — a gesture of breeding, the reader is told. Hitching up one’s hem, on the other hand, sends quite a different message. When your man is abusive, Christophine advises her young Creole mistress, just “pick up your skirt and walk out.” (Ruth La Ferla)

Radical Brontëite Tanya Gold includes a Jane Eyre simile in an anticle on online dating in the Daily Mail.

. . . but - but! - he later asks her: 'Have you ever heard of a man called Robert Louis Stevenson?'
Global_Gadabout duly freaks out, for she has been wronged.
'I had studied English at Oxford!' she wails, with all the thwarted melodrama of Jane Eyre discovering Rochester has a mad wife in the attic. I just wanted to slam her head into a fridge door.

The Daily Freeman features another Brontëite, author Carol Goodman.

Goodman’s fascination with the dark and brooding literature of the legendary Brontë sisters is translated to “Arcadia Falls,” a richly imaginative book critics have described as “genuinely haunting” and “superb storytelling.” (Paula Ann Mitchell)

The Picayune Item mentions Jane Eyre in a review of the Lost finale (BEWARE of spoilers!):

As the dust settles, I think back to what makes for great entertainment. I think back to my journey with Frodo Bagins in Lord of the Rings, Rose and Jack in Titanic, Luke and Leia in Star Wars, Jane in Jane Eyre and I can now add Jack Sheppard of Lost to a list of great characters who kept me captivated. (Tracy Williams)

And the Bay Area Reporter mentions the recent San Francisco Symphony concert featuring Stravinsky's Ode (which includes a movement for the rejected soundtrack of Jane Eyre 1944).

The Midland Daily News takes a look at Wuthering Heights and some of its adaptations.

The 1939 version of “Wuthering Heights” was nominated for numerous academy awards but that was the year that “Gone With The Wind” swept up the Oscars. The 1972 version, however, is the best one in my opinion. Actually filmed in West Riding of Yorkshire of England, the wild beauty and intense loneliness of the English moors adds much to the overall mood of the picture. (The 1939 version was shot on a studio lot in Hollywood.) Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon were in their thirties playing the young lovers while Timothy Dalton and Anne Calder-Marshall were in their early twenties, matching the ages of Cathy and Heathcliff in the book. The third version lacks a good script and ends up with wooden characters. Ralph Fiennes glowers and rages as Heathcliff but you never feel the agony of his unrequited love for Cathy that the book so tragically portrayed. (Virginia Florey) (Read the complete article)

Speaking of Wuthering Heights, the Las Vegas Weekly posts something that surely comes straight out of some journalist's textbook judgin by what we often see in our newsrounds:

The phrase: Heathcliff
Obscurogance level: Medium
Definition: Naw, not the cartoon tabby of your Sunday comics. I mean the brooding, bitter and vengeful anti-patriarch of Emily Brontë’s celebrated gothic novel Wuthering Heights. Abused as a foster child in the Earnshaw household in Yorkshire, Heathcliff nonetheless turns his simmering wrath to his advantage and grows up to become rich, a nicety that allows him to exact lifelong revenge against the Earnshaws. But Heathcliff’s slow-burn vendetta ultimately turns him into a tortured, hollow wraith, and he dies a broken man. Drop a Heathcliff to describe a particularly complicated, tormented jerk or psycho—when “jerk” or “psycho” just lacks a certain finesse.
Sample: “Can you just let it go already? Don’t be a Heathcliff about this.” “So what if he’s my ex-boyfriend? We were just talking. You don’t have to go all Heathcliff on me.” (Andrew Kiraly)

On the blogosphere: Wuthering Heights is discussed by Stuff Leaking Out Of My Brain and No Time to Blog. Readin' and Dreamin' posts about Agnes Grey and Les Brontë à Paris writes in French about Anne Brontë's time as a governess at Thorp Green. Also in French is Les élucubrations de Fleur's review of Charlotte Brontë's juvenile writing Stancliffe's Hotel. Finally, The Little Professor posts a July 1857 review of The Life of Charlotte Brontë in connection to Wuthering Heights.

Categories: Agnes Grey, Brontëana, Humour, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Villette, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights