As Honorable as Edward, as Loyal as Heathcliff

The Herald publishes Jeannete Winterson's views and fears about the future of libraries:

Libraries will fail the current generation of children by stocking DVDs and books such as The Da Vinci Code rather than literary classics, leading author Jeanette Winterson said yesterday.
The author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, speaking in Edinburgh at an event to celebrate the 25th birthday of the publication of her most famous book, said she is worried about future young readers, who, unlike her when she was growing up in Accrington, Lancashire, may not have access to literary classics such as Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.
Winterson said that as a child her one escape from her oppressive home life was to go to her local library.
Yesterday she said she would “start at A and read Jane Austen and move to B and read the Brontes and go on from there”. (...)
“If you start taking books off shelves then you are only going to find what you are looking for, which does not help those who do not know what they are looking for.” (Phil Miller)

We couldn't agree more with that last statement.

Catholic Womanhood is very worried women won't be able to telling the truth from the romantic fictions:

It’s no secret that women love romantic books. It’s also no secret that we tend to fall madly in love with characters in some of our favorite books. Characters like Mr. Darcy, Heathcliff, Mr. Rochester, Rhett Butler, and others appeal to women in ways that the men in their lives sometimes cannot. (...)
I would venture to say that Jane Austen, Margaret Mitchell, Charlotte Bronte, and other writers provided women with these heroes not for the sake of leading us into an unattainable dream-world, but to encourage us to find men with similarly virtuous qualities. Every woman should seek to find a man as generous and kind as Mr. Darcy, as noble and honorable as Edward, as loyal as Heathcliff, and the list goes on. (Courtney Morrison)

As noble and honorable as Edward?... erm... as loyal as Heathcliff? double erm...

Literary Minded - a Crikey blog - reviews the fifth issue of Harvest Magazine. Talking about Davina Bell's essay To my Generation of Precious Snowflakes:

Defending young writers against American writer Ted Genoway’s critique of their ‘navel-gazing’ tendencies, Bell sympathetically observes that more than any other generation, we’ve been exposed to a litany of global injustices, without experiencing them directly. (...)
Or even if we are, a lack of direct experience of things known isn’t an adequate explanation; after all, Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights despite leading a reclusive life. (Raili Simojoki)

Grants to teaching Wuthering Heights in the Stuttgart Daily Leader; Peter Bowen in Film in Focus talks about Jane Eyre 1934 and last, but not least, Illuminara has published the third part of her Jane Eyre film: Jane Eyre 3: Mystery at Marsh-End. Kafka på jobbet compares Agnes Grey and Simon Gärdenfors's comic Simons 120 dagar (!) (in Swedish); iconzicons posts a LJ header of Jane Eyre 2006; Oldbitey is suffering an acute case of Jane Eyre obsession; The Central New Jersey JASNA reviews The Brontës Went to Woolworths; RomanZine posts about Wuthering Heights in Portuguese; Les Brontë à Paris translates into French a fragment from Francis A. Leyland's The Brontë Family; La Panxa del Bou is a bit disappointed with his re-reading of Jane Eyre (in Catalan).

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