"Reader, I Married Him" Victorious Economy

Valentine's day allusions are all over the web:

The 10 best love stories
On the eve of Valentine's Day, a selection of the best fictional romances:
Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
All the best love stories involve at least one obstacle. But Jane Eyre’s love for Mr Rochester seems fated not to be. The man is taciturn. He is, at one stage, her boss. He seems to be entirely smitten with another woman. He keeps a savagely mad wife in the attic. What’s more, Jane does not appear, superficially, to be a strong candidate for romance - a plain governess with no obvious sex appeal. No wonder nobody ever forgets the victorious economy of the line: “Reader, I married him” (Kate Kellaway in The Guardian)

Top 10 romance novels of all time
Wuthering Heights
First published in 1847, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights ranks high on the list of major works of English literature. A brooding tale of passion and revenge set in the Yorkshire moors, the novel has inspired no fewer than four film versions in modern times. Early critics did not like the work, citing its excess of passion and its coarseness. A second edition was published in 1850, two years after the author's death. Sympathetically prefaced by her sister Charlotte, it met with greater success, and the novel has continued to grow in stature ever since.
Jane Eyre
Who doesn't love a rags to riches story? Yes, the plot is improbable and the prose can get weighty at times, but the love of a rich man for a poor girl is classic, just classic. And the end, when she's, well, not rich but definitely comfortable, and he's destitute and blind and she still loves him - makes even cynical little me a little snuffly. I never read Jane Eyre until I was well into my thirties. I'm sorry I waited so long. If you've never read this book, or haven't read it in a while, you might want to grab a copy and snuggle down in your favorite chair for a while.
(Ruchira Singh and Kanika Mehta on IBN)

Choosing the most romantic novels of all time is an impossible task. One woman’s Wuthering Heights is another woman’s Twilight (hey, they both feature creepy obsessives capable of great violence; one’s just a little more . . . sparkly). (...)
There are a few great literary romances, however, on which, hopefully, we can all agree: (...)

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte: A poor orphan. A brooding older man. A terrible secret. Jane Eyre has every element a romantic needs — and it’s got a great prequel from Jean Rhys with Wide Sargasso Sea. (Connie Ogle in Miami Herald)

And the Express Tribune (India) interviews Pakistani TV host Mathira:

“My ideal Valentine’s Day would be me and the guy I like, in a nice, quiet, candle-lit room. Sweet music would be playing on the stereo and we’d have some homemade dinner, maybe two scrambled eggs.” Very do-able.
Less do-able is being the Heathcliff that Mathira has in her mind as her ideal guy. Despite her tough veneer, Mathira wants a husband who is assertive and her notions of being subservient to her husband are fairly typical — fine by me, I’m a fairly typical Pakistani guy myself. (Hassan Choudary)

And also Books in the Spotlight.

The Times carries an article about Imogen Poots, Blanche Ingram in Jane Eyre 2001:

Poots is also required to sing (of rosebuds rather than fleshpots) in her role as Blanche Ingram in the forthcoming film version of Jane Eyre, where she and Michael Fassbender's Mr Rochester perform operetta duets, and again struggled, at times, to keep a straight face. “At least Michael and I will always have a duet up our sleeves if we need if we need it,” she laughs. “And you never know, And She Never Told Her Love could become a classic.”  (...)
[N]ot to mention her charming tendency to blush like a peony at any opportunity. The more the director of Jane Eyre, Cary Fukunaga, asked her about her pink face on their first meeting (she had been filming Bouquet of Barbed Wire outdoors), the redder she went with self-consciousness. “I’m sure he wasn’t thinking it was charming. He was probably thinking, ‘Bloody hell, what’s wrong with this girl’s face?’”
(...) You can’t help thinking that playing Blanche Ingram was a blissful escape from what directors too often from what directors too often demand of their peachy-skinned, ambitious young actresses. (Lesley White)

Fashtionetc describes the Prabal Gurung Fall 2011 collection like this:

If visions of a romantic liaison set on British moors came to mind when Prabal Gurung’s show walked, you wouldn’t be off the mark. He told Style.com the inspiration was romance with “a slightly savage, streetwise edge.” Heathcliff and Catherine for a modern, cynical world; a match made in heaven. (Amina Akhtar)

And the New York Post says:

It was like an emo version of Wuthering Heights and the downtown girls will all be swooning. (Serena French)

On 24-7 we read about the release of  Darlene Cypser's The Crack in the Lens:

The Crack in the Lens is set in the wild and lovely countryside of Yorkshire, England, the same country made famous by James Herriot's books and movies, and classic novels such as Wuthering Heights and The Secret Garden.

The Daily Mail makes the following comment about the Premier League Chairman, Sir Dave Richards

The former FA chairman Lord Triesman took a scalpel to the reputation of ‘Sir’ Dave Richards at a Select Committee hearing last week.
Later, when the insults had been explained to him, the Premier League chairman was affronted.
‘I speak my mind,’ he said, ‘and being a Yorkshireman I might not be as eloquent as some, but I say it as I see it.’
Sadly tongue-tied, the Yorkies: Alan Bennett, Roy Hattersley, William Hague, all those gobby Brontë sisters. No, try again, our Dave. And this time, try harder. (Patrick Collins)

The New Jersey Star-Ledger discusses some sexist and antiquated state laws like this one:

Another law targeted in the bill says a woman forfeits her property rights to her husband if she’s been "ravished, consent to the ravisher" — unless the husband forgives her and allows her to live with him. "That almost sounds like a paragraph out of Jane Eyre," said [Sen. Loretta] Weinberg. (Matt Friedman)

HeyUGuys, The Bookish Kind, split reel and Flicks and Bits discuss the upcoming Jane Eyre 2011; The Lost Entwife and Sevde'nin Günlüğü (in Turkish) review Jane Eyre; Karie's B.I.G. Project loves Wuthering Heights 1939; Look What Danny Made prefers Wuthering Heights 2009; Soy Chai Bookshelf doesn't seem very thrilled about Sarah Gray's Wuthering Bites; Les Soeurs Brontë (in French) posts about Su Blackwell's Remnants exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights