Emily, Pop-Culture, Van Morrison and a couple of blunders

Rope of Silicon wonders the same thing that we have asked ourselves since we first found out the US release date of Jane Eyre 2011:

Cary Fukunaga impressed a lot of people with Sin Nombre and his latest brings a Charlotte Brontë's classic to the big screen with talent that includes Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, Jamie Bell, Judi Dench, Sally Hawkins and Imogen Poots. The only problem? The release date. Just like Sin Nombre, Focus is sending Jane Eyre to theaters in March… will the Academy's short term memory be able to remember a 9-month-old film come December? (Brad Brevet)

The Stage mentions the UK Spring tour of Shared Experience's production of Polly Teale's Brontë:

Both theatre companies will continue to produce and tour their own shows, and will co-produce together on chosen projects, beginning with Brontë, which opens at Oxford Playhouse in March before embarking on a UK tour. (Alistair Smith)

The Calgary Herald remarks the following about Edgar Allan Poe's legacy:

Poe's Romantic Era contemporaries -- Emily Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lord Byron and William Wordsworth -- just don't get this sort of pop-culture play. Certainly not to the point in which they're featured as characters in everything from fantasy novels and movies to comic books and theatre productions. (Heath McCoy)

The Toronto Star talks about playwright William Luce and mentions his 1983 piece Currer Bell Esq. (later known as Brontë):

In the years after Amherst made his reputation, he went on to do similar work on Charlotte Brontë, Lillian Hellman and Isak Dinesen, all with great success.
The interesting thing about Luce, however, is that he never set out to do a project on his own steam. (Richard Ouzounian)

The Record describes writer China Mieville as

Tall and buff, he has a shaved head, a row of earrings curving sharply around the edge of his left ear, a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics and a mind that skips easily from Jane Eyre to welfare reform to the joys of bicycling around London. (Sarah Lyall)

Spiked reviews Downton Abbey:

The other key to the success of the period drama is that it is an original work, rather than a remake of a canonical novel, which means that you can reinvent it to suit whatever current mood or prejudice you want without having to grapple with the historical and thematic specificity that writers like Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë aimed for (although TV producers still muck about with Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre anyway, of course). (David Bowden)

Would you like to participate in a book club literary quiz? The Irish Times has more information:

Are you in a book club? Do you know your stuff? How many Bronte sisters had writing careers? Who wrote the original novel Never Let me Go ? Or what is the correct spelling of Niffenegger?

The Forth Worth Star-Telegram talks about e-books and e-readers:

And if you like the classics, such as Jane Eyre and The Scarlet Letter, you're in luck: books that are in the public domain -- published before 1923 -- are free and easily available for every device.

Jason Mendelsohn has a curious (and somewhat outdated) theory about Jane Eyre. Discussing Van Morrison's 1968 album Astral Weeks on Popmatters:

I’d find Broken Heart Lane more enchanting if Van set himself ablaze and popped a wheelie.
Having spent some time entrenched in literary academia, I can appreciate Van’s juxtaposition between the ethereal and the mundane in the same way that I appreciate an author like, say, Charlotte Brontë. Both Van and Brontë do what they do very well, their works are undeniably solid, they both have a strong following (for good reason), and if I had to, I could bust out a ten-page paper on either without blinking. But, and the is the big BUT, they both make me want to gouge out my eyes/cut off my ears due to the excessive amount of moping found in their respective works.
I would have enjoyed Jane Eyre a whole lot more if Jane would have whored it up a little bit and I’d definitely enjoy Astral Weeks more if Van were to act a little more like a rock star and a little less like a love sick puppy. Not to take anything away from these two talented artists, but seriously, suck it up and move on.

Radio Angulo (Cuba) talks about Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but the journalist should reread his Brontës:

En El extraño caso…, Stevenson explora los abismos del alma humana. El autor se plantea hurgar en esa dicotomía que, al parecer, ningún ser humano puede evadir, la de portar cualidades positivas y negativas a la vez. Era un tema que hechizaba a los narradores británicos de entonces. Asoma en obras como Cumbres borrascosas, de Charlotte Brontë [sic], al igual que en La feria de las vanidades, de Thackeray, aunque las piezas donde mejor se vislumbra esta dualidad del alma son Frankenstein, de Mary Shelley, y El retrato de Dorian Gray, de Oscar Wilde. (Manuel García Verdecia) (Microsoft translation)

El Nuevo Herald (Miami) also has trouble locating the Brontës' tombs:

En la Abadía de Westminster ($30 por persona), donde se corona a los reyes de Inglaterra, visitamos las tumbas de Dickens, Lord Byron, Rudyard Kipling, Jane Austen y las hermanas Brontë. (Aida Levitan) (Microsoft translation)

The Chicagoland book club chooses the Brontës as one of their favourite authors in the Chicago Tribune; Región de Murcia Digital (Spain) describes Wuthering Heights 1939 as a "romantic thriller"(???); A Paper Closet posts a downloadable Jane Eyre paper doll; Sasha & The Silverfish and Just nu läser jag ... (in Swedish) review The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; My Reading Corner recommends Jane Eyre.

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