When Ginsberg read Wuthering Heights

Swans commentary reviews the upcoming Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters (July 2010) and highlights the following Ginsberg to Kerouac fragment from a letter:

"I'm reading Jane Austen and finishing Dickens's Great Expectations," Ginsberg wrote in his first letter to Kerouac in August 1944. "I also started Wuthering Heights for the second time for an English course." (p.3-4) Books electrified him more than girls -- or boys. Kerouac wrote back immediately. "Look at Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses and The Magic Mountain," he exclaimed, aiming to bring Ginsberg out of Victorian literature and into 20th-century modernism. (p.5) Both of these letters and 178 others are collected in a new essential book for all aficionados of the Beats that's entitled Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, edited by Bill Morgan, Ginsberg's dedicated bibliographer, and David Stanford, who was a longtime editor at Viking Penguin. (Jonah Raskin)

A teenager reading Jane Eyre in the Napa Valley Register, the Brontë Parsonage is used as an example of museum which still "bears the trace of those who lived there" in the Guardian. Parisgirl9 gives 3 stars to Laura Joh Rowland's The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë (in its audiobook version), Bona-fide book reviews has not enjoyed Villette very much. Two Hectobooks reviews Wide Sargasso Sea. Poetictouchchannel has uploaded a YouTube video with a reading by Celestina Willow of Emily Brontë's Remembrance.

Categories: Books, Fiction, Jane Eyre, Poetry, References, Villette, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights