Farewell Jean Simmons and other news

The Guardian and the Leicester Mercury review last night's BBC One Imagine: Growing Old Disgracefully featuring 92-year-old editor and writer Diana Athill. Both mention her connection to Wide Sargasso Sea:

The film touched on her widely acclaimed editing skills (and her pivotal role in the success of both Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea), though Athill the woman rather than Athill the literary visionary was the primary point of interest. (Sarah Dempster in the Guardian)

During her publishing career she worked with VS Naipaul – "really quite awful" – as well as Jean Rhys, whom she helped write Wide Sargasso Sea.
"She needed a great deal of looking after," remarks Diana. (Sian Brewis in the Leicester Mercury)

All Headline News reviews One Day by David Nicholls:

Nicholls’ characterizations are excellent in bringing to life a pair that initially seems incredibly similar to Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw in “Love Story,” though the literary titles that keep popping up — particularly “Wuthering Heights” — would have you think that there are some drastic plot twists to be had. (Andy Bockelman)

And speaking of Wuthering Heights, Tim Smith from the Baltimore Sun is

glad to see that Herrmann's neglected "Wuthering Heights" will get a production next season from Minnesota Opera in observance of his centennial.

Further information on this future revival can be found here.

The Scorecard Review picks '7 Books that Should be Adapted into Movies'. Number 7 is...

7. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Recap: In a world where fact and fiction blend, literally, the oddly named Thursday Next works in the literary crimes division of the Special Operations Network. It’s 1985 and Jane Eyre has been kidnapped from her titular novel. It’s up to Next to catch a dangerous criminal before literature is changed forever.
Reason: The first in a series, The Eyre Affair is incredibly imaginative and could be a fun summer movie. Famous literary figures like Eyre and her Mr. Rochester share the pages with Fforde’s serious minded gumshoes. I’d love to see Rob Reiner take a stab at it, he was excellent at mixing comedy and fantasy in The Princess Bride. Any Hollywood actress would be lucky to get the role of Next, who’s British and in her mid-thirties, but otherwise could be anyone. She’s a tough, no-nonsense kind of woman who could be played by anyone from Angelina Jolie to Kiera Knightley. Plus, if it’s successful, you have at least four sequels written plus more on the horizon. Harry Potter will be over by next year and the Twilight series soon after. This could be a great new fantasy series for Hollywood to exploit! (Megan Lehar)

We are not against a screen adaptation of this wonderful series (or any of Jasper Fforde's books really) but if it's ever done please, PLEASE, don't cast Angelina Jolie as Thursday Next. Seriously.

Another article on hyperemesis gravidarum today, this time from ABC News.

Jane Eyre author Charlotte Bronte died at age 38 along with her unborn child after excessive vomiting and "sensations of perpetual nausea and ever-recurring faintness." (Susan Donaldson James)

The Times reports that during actress Jean Simmons's memorial service another actress, Hayley Mills, read Farewell by Anne Brontë.

And the time has finally come for the Twilight round. It's actually quite short today.

Alt Film Guide:

I fully understand what Meyer was trying to convey by having Bella realize the depth of her feelings for Jacob and I got the Wuthering Heights parallels as well. All the same, I found it mind-boggling that an author would choose to ruin her narrator-protagonist by turning her into a wishy-washy, easily manipulated bouncing doll.
The chief problem is that Eclipse lacks the dark, borderline-psychotic dramatic intensity found in Emily Brontë‘s Gothic novel; hence, Bella comes across as a befuddled tease instead of a pathological case. As a consequence, she seems unworthy of someone as obsessively devoted as Edward. (Andre Soares)

Flick Filosopher:

I didn’t realize during the first Twilight film, nor its sequel, New Moon, but suddenly it smacked me in the face in Eclipse: Edward Cullen, the putative modern Heathcliff and Mr. Darcy all in one sparkly vampire package, is as much a child as Bella Swan, the blank-canvas human teenager he falls in love with. He’s a century-old immortal, he’s richer than God, and he’s not even bound by the clichés of vampirism to avoid sunlight: he could be doing anything and everything fabulous with his endless, privileged life. Traveling the world. Living like a rock star. Anything. What does he choose to do? Attend high school in the rural Pacific Northwest. Where he met Bella, back in the first film, and fell in love with her, for some unknowable reason, and she with him. (MaryAnn Johanson)

The Literary Look has been to see Wuthering Heights, A Romantic Musical in New York, which she describes as, 'an example of what an adaptation of a wonderful novel should never be, this is Brontë on crack.' My Online Library posts about Jane Eyre. And Flickr user skauthen2 has uploaded a picture of a Wuthering Heights-related mosaic in Aughnavallog, Northern Ireland, in the Drumballyroney area where Patrick Brontë was born and raised.

Categories: Anne Brontë, Books, Brontëana, Charlotte Brontë, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Opera, Patrick Brontë, Poetry, References, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights