For Neda

Almost a year after the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan in the Iranian protests after last year's elections, The Guardian devotes an article to her memory and to the release of the documentary For Neda. In this documentary we find out that one of Neda's favourite books was no other than Wuthering Heights (around 21 minutes into the film):

She was fiercely independent and a voracious reader whose favourite novel was Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. (Saeed Kamali Dehghan and Matthew Taylor)

The London Free Press (Canada) reviews Emma Donoghue's book Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature:

In Inseparable, Donoghue peels back the pages of a literary canon which has treated love between women both seriously and with a jaundiced eye. She casts back to the work of Chaucer and Shakespeare and follows story lines from such icons as Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hardy, Balzac, Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Bowen and frames her look at women in love with women, with such intriguing chapter headings as Travesties, Rivals, Monsters and Detection. (Nancy Schiefer)

Erica Wagner uses Jane Eyre to make a point about the act of reading in The Times:

Readers work with writers to produce a text that belongs to that reader and that reader alone. We may all agree that Jane Eyre is small and plain: “I felt it a misfortune that I was so little, so pale, and had features so irregular and so marked,” she tells us. But your little and pale will not be my little and pale; and will not be anything you’ll ever see on screen.

And Harold Evans's column in the Financial Times contains a Brontë reference:

It was delightful to have her home consorting merrily with her older brother George, when they both had college breaks, but I was tired of the tight female complicity with her mother who was always whisking her off to secret girls’ weekends for a visit to the Brontë’s House in Haworth or gallivanting to the literary festival in Jaipur (where they stole an extra three days trolling flea markets).

The Irish Times reviews the memoirs of Jackie Kay, Red Dust Road and quotes the author:

Red Dust Road raises some interesting issues. The prose, however, is often a little on the Oprah side. No matter how much her parents love her, Kay writes, “there is still a windy place right at the core of my heart. The windy place is like Wuthering Heights, out on open moors, rugged and wild and free and lonely”. (Molly McCloskey)

The Kansas City Literature Examiner reviews Deanna Raybourn's The Dead Travel Fast:

I didn’t flat out hate ‘The Dead Travel Fast’, but it was more of a romance than I was expecting. The count comes across a little like Mr. Rochester from ‘Jane Eyre’. (Lisa Westerfield)

And the LA Books Examiner does the same with Brenda Knight's Women Who Love Books Too Much:

Brenda Knight discusses famous literary families such as the Bronte sisters - Maria, Elizabeth, Emily, Anne, and Charlotte. Brenda Knight tells us the story of the Bronte sisters' difficult childhood and deprivation in a boarding school, and their relatively early death. The Bronte's story is a compelling one, as readers of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre would expect. (Laura Frazin Steele)

El Diario Montañés (Spain) reviews Richard Eyre's film The Other Man:

Si esto fuese 'Venganza' Banderas la hubiese palmado en la primera secuencia, pero no, Eyre mima su golpe de efecto, en el reverso amable de los 'Abismos de pasión' brontë/buñuelianos y acolchando el culo con una estética televisiva que sólo mejora cuando entran en plano los títulos de crédito. (Josu Eguren) (Google translation)

La Razón (Spain) interviews author Santiago Posteguillo:

-¿Por qué el lector prefiere el último fenómeno editorial –voluminoso– y obvia, por citar, «Guerra y paz»?
-Hoy día se hacen grandes novelas, pero también las hay en la literatura universal. Es una pena que éstas últimas no sean best sellers. Autores como Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Flaubert, Rilke, Homero y Plauto deberían seguirlo siendo. Cuando releo Charlotte Brontë o Wilde comprendo la distancia que nos separa. (Google translation)

Le Figaro reviews the French translation of Anjana Appachana's Incantations:

Il en est ainsi de l'héroïne de la première nouvelle découvrant les désillusions du mariage à mesure que les repas qu'elle prépare pour sa belle famille se passent. Quelques pages plus loin, c'est une fillette de 12 ans qui se prive de sa lecture préférée, Jane Eyre , se persuadant qu'ainsi sa grande sœur tout juste mariée ne sera plus victime de violence au sein de son nouveau foyer. (Françoise Dargent) (Google translation)

The Basler Zeitung (Switzerland) reviews the extraordinary Red Riding trilogy:

Und klar, hätten die Gebrüder Grimm Yorkshire gekannt, sie hätten das Rotkäppchen in dem düsteren Landstrich angesiedelt, in dieser von Mooren zerfressenen Gegend, aus der die Brontë-Schwestern stammen und wo sie ihre düster romantischen Inspirationen zu «Wuthering Heights» und «Jane Eyre» gefunden haben. (Simone Meier) (Google translation)

And Jayne Paterson remembering her casting as Jane Eyre in the Toronto production of Gordon & Caird's musical in The Globe and Mail. Wuthering Heights is discussed in Het Brugs leesgezelschap (in Dutch) and Morfeusz&gin's Blog (in Polish). Austenesque Reviews posts about the 2002 DVD documentary Brontë Country. La mano invisible sells an original 1947 playbill of the Spanish screening of Jane Eyre 1944 and Wuthering Heights 1939. The Squeee uploads her own reading of Jane Eyre's first chapter. On the Russian LJ community feministki there is a post about the Brontës with lots of pictures (some of them a bitrandom). Les Brontës à Paris (in French) describes the first impressions of Charlotte and Emily in Brussels.

Finally, Coffinmaker is blogging his/her reading of Wuthering Heights in SparkLife. For now, just chapter one has been discussed.

Categories: Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights