The Sad Brontës and the Happy Threesome

The Independent reviews among others Michèle Roberts's Mud. Stories of Sex and Love:

That sense of saving wit as a light that shows the way through dark places of the heart also informs Mud, Michèle Roberts's new "stories of love and sex" (Virago, £13.99). Here, a series of twists allows legendary lovers from literature and history – Tristan and Isolde, Jane Eyre's Mr (and the first Mrs) Rochester, Emma Bovary, Colette – to tell a story from the other side of myth in the manner of Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife. The darkness here comes in the depiction of an affinity between the glamorous heroines of fable and the exploitation of urban waifs – girls adrift in the city, trafficked women – today: sisters under, and in, the skin.
With striking zest, Roberts grapples with a masculine tradition of libertine fiction that can still shock, stun and even move. (Boyd Tonkin)

Children's best-sellers are (mostly) criticised by Philip Womack in The Telegraph. There's a Brontë reference used as a kind of rite of passage marking transitions between groups of age:

The vast majority of children (and by “children”, I mean anybody in those prepubescent years who has yet to make the leap to Jane Eyre and Great Expectations) have the literary sensibility of a dead snail and will read any old rubbish.

At the Wilton Bulletin they don't think the Brontë sisters were funny enough:

No chance at all that Stieg Larssen [sic] was a kidder. Robert Frost? Notoriously dark. T.S. Eliot? A little on the dull side, so the personal anecdotes tell us, and Ezra Pound toward the end of his life was a very sad, mad man. How about Jane Austen or the Brontës? Don’t make me laugh. (Joanna Ecke)

You'd never expect a Brontë reference in a polyamory article. Until now:

While [Lindsey] Doe begins the workshop clutching a copy of Vicki Vantoch's The Threesome Handbook to her chest as if it were a favorite Bronte novel, she favors therapeutic speak as much as dirty talk. (Jason Cohen in Missoula Independent)

The Philadelphia Literature Examiner talks about the differences between Jane Eyre and Becky Sharp, 'two girls graduating'. You're History! reviews (4 out of 5 stars) Juliet Gael's Romancing Miss Brontë, a book which is also being read by Girls With Books. HD Wai Learning Blog and Sharin' Stuff (in Spanish) post about Jane Eyre. There's also a couple of brief posts about two Jane Eyre versions: The CinemaScope Cat (1970) and Broken Mystic (1996). 52 Books in 1 Year reviews The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Categories: Fiction, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall