Fosca Mason

The Observer insists on the Bertha Mason analogies in this review of the current Donmar Warehouse production of Stephen Sondheim's Passion:

Roger makes the smallness of her frame and the purity of her voice into an assault and into an appeal. She creeps on like Jane Eyre, in a long mud-coloured dress, with her hair looped back and downcast eyes. She unleashes a few eldritch shrieks and falls to the ground writhing, as if she were Bertha Mason in the attic. She clings to the man she adores as if she were an infant, and fixes him with a carnivorous smile which seems to eat her own tiny face. She's like a voodoo doll. Yet she suddenly lights up and becomes ethereal. (Susannah Clapp)

The Weekly Standard (October 4, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 03) reviews Jude Morgan's Charlotte and Emily (aka The Taste of Sorrow):

What were you thinking, Miss Brontë? (For subscribers only) (Stephanie Green)

The York Press reviews Sarah Freeman's Brontë in Love. BrontëBlog's review will be published in a few days:

The most tragic story Charlotte never told was her own, says the catchline on the cover. Yorkshire journalist Sarah Freeman seeks to set that right, by lifting the lid on the real Charlotte Brontë.
When Charlotte died in 1855, her friend and fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote a biography of her that sought to tell the world what a gifted writer it had lost.
And so the book did. But, according to Freeman, it also, in true Victorian style, sought to suppress details of Charlotte’s love life, portraying her in an idealised way as the poor, repressed daughter of a cleric. (...)
The book is written in a slightly breathless, women’s magazine style. But any lovers of the Brontë sisters will find it gripping nonetheless for the glimpses it offers of the real Charlotte Brontë.

The Scotsman reviews Susan Hill's The Small Hand:

For bookseller Adam Snow is indeed in the grip of a haunting: a small, unseen, ghostly child has gripped his hand as he stands outside a derelict Edwardian house. The physical nature of such ethereal encounters terrify us: think of Cathy Earnshaw's ghost in Wuthering Heights, not just tapping at the window pane, but having her ghostly hand dragged across broken glass until it bleeds. (Lesley MacDowell)

Shinie Antony's column on DNA (India) has a couple of weird Brontë references:

If you are a wife, there is no forgetting your strife. The Heathcliff husband is brooding because you burnt his eggs. Harry Potters are trophy hubbies, always out on exciting adventures while you wash the dishes. And when he is back, all wondrous at his own heroic stunts, you put away his cape carefully in the cupboard. (...)
First off, you need a compartmentalised bag you can pick anything out of in a jiffy unless you are with a man who goes for ditsy. In goes the Brontë book you can wave around in public to look cerebral. And the big black sari, which is the desi equivalent of the little black dress. Suits every body type, fat or not.

In The Boston Herald, David Inman answers the question of a reader who asks about Helen Burns in Jane Eyre 1944:

Q: I recently watched one of my favorite old movies, the 1944 version of “Jane Eyre” with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. Something keeps bugging me about the identity of an actress in the first part of the movie. There is a young girl who befriends Jane. It looks like a beautiful, young Elizabeth Taylor, but her name is not listed in the credits. Am I mistaken?

A: That’s Taylor, all right. She wasn’t credited because the role is so small and it was only her third film - she also was uncredited in her next film, “The White Cliffs of Dover.” The film after that was “National Velvet,” which made her a star.

On the blogosphere. Posts about Wuthering Heights: Blablabla Aleatório (in Portuguese) and Booklover's Haven; about Jane Eyre: Savidge Reads, There's No Time! (plus Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair); Le Stanze di Alba reviews the Italian translation of Elizabeth Newark's Jane Eyre's Daughter. thomasenqvist uploaded a video of the Brontë bridge. Green-eyed mystic continues posting fragments of Charlotte Brontë's letters. Finally Reading, Writing, Working, Playing takes a look at the 1980 stamp sheet with the Brontë sisters among others.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Sequels, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights