A Lovely Moderate Beginning

Emma Donoghue writes in the Guardian about her experiences in her native Ireland and the year she spent in New York when she was nine years old:

Calling round to my best friend, whose two older sisters were best friends with my older sisters: the social rituals felt as hand-me-down as the clothes I was always inheriting. Don't get me wrong, I was happy and I'm grateful for it to this day, but the fact is that the books I read as a child – Little Women, say, or Jane Eyre – loom as vividly in my memory as anything that ever actually happened to me.
Until New York. That first September day in Manhattan was a slap in the face.

Another Irish writer in the Guardian, Claire Keegan, talks about her teenage days and lukewarmly quotes from Jane Eyre:

Keegan, who was born in 1968, was herself brought up in a large family on a farm in County Wicklow. "There wouldn't have been too many books in the house," she says, laughing. "Maybe a few lying about in an upstairs press [cupboard], and few Mills & Boons that an aunt used to bring around. I remember my mother used to talk about Jane Eyre, though. At college, I read it twice just to see if I had missed anything. The ending was so disappointing, a Mills & Boon ending to a tragic situation. I always remember the opening sentence, though. 'There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.' That's a lovely moderate beginning. There's room for the story to move up and out from there." (Sean O'Hagan)

Some days ago we complained about the lack of research in an article which mentioned the Lake District, this other article from the Lexington Harald-Leader is much better:

The Lake District was to Wordsworth and fellow poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey what the Yorkshire moors were to the Brontë sisters and the rural landscape of Dorset was to Thomas Hardy: a geographic muse for their creative expression. (Patti Nickell)

The Sunday Times (Sri Lanka) reviews Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair; The Press Gallery, Jacob Bender Has a Blog! and subjective language discuss Jane Eyre; Random Rambling by Jaclyn doesn't very much like Wuthering Heights; Gigi loves Paris posts about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 1996; Green-Eyed Mystic has been posting several fragments from letters by Charlotte Brontë (and others). Poetictouchannel uploaded to YouTube Emily Brontë's poem Come, Walk With Me read by Eve Karpfe and finally, two Flickr additions: maestria with a drawing called Wind in "Wuthering Heights style" and Beautiful Britain with a Top Withins picture.

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