Wuthering Heights is 'all a bit odd'

Dawn Collinson from the Liverpool Echo tells a funny anecdote involving her 10-year-old son and Wuthering Heights:

The first came when he returned from school with a new reading book, Wuthering Heights. Not for him the gentle pursuits of the Famous Five, more the dark passion of Heathcliff and Cathy.
At the weekend, he paused mid-sentence, so I asked if he was stuck on a word.
“No, no,” he insisted. “I just don’t like to say it.”
I thought maybe Emily Brontë had been racier than I remembered. “It’s offensive to the woman on the floor,” he explained.
I glanced over his shoulder where, describing a scene, it referred to “a pointer bitch under the dresser.”
“Did you honestly think there was a mean woman under the table? Just pointing?” I asked him. He nodded. “I did think it was odd, but it’s all a bit odd.”
It was hard to disagree.

The Brisbane Times readers are in the midst of a controvery involving women writers. One of today's letters vindicates them:

Plays by women are less ''theatrically sound'' than those by men, writes Derek Parker (Letters, January 10). Or perhaps, patriarchal value systems have created an unsound, gendered lens through which works of art by women are often dismissed as inferior and irrelevant.
Great female writers from the Brontë sisters to Gwen Harwood and J. K. Rowling have been forced to assume male or gender-neutral pseudonyms in order for their work to be recognised. George Eliot (nee Mary Ann Evans) even found it necessary to write an essay on Silly Novels by Lady Novelists; astutely deriding and separating herself from her gender in order to find acceptance within the boys' club.
I wonder if Eliot would have felt quite at home in the Australian theatre industry. (Thea Gumbert)

Charlotte Brontë and her Jane Eyre are the stars of the blogosphere today. All these sites have posts on them: Novel Insights, Random Numbers, Me. Myself. And Others (in Estonian), Finding Theophilus, Paul Lisicky and finally The Inked Ribbon who has put together what looks like a wardrobe for the 21st-century Jane Eyre. And Can't Find a Bookmark reviews April Lindner's Jane.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights