Reader, she sputtered

The Star takes us on a nice walk in Brontë Country. Here are a few excerpts:

Another sort of dread haunts today’s literary pilgrim: what if Haworth is a Brontëesque theme park? Reader, fear not. The steep, cobbled main street is lined with shops and lace-curtained houses. A few establishments borrow names from the books, but you’ll find a place the Brontës would definitely recognize. [...]
Rather than linger over Yorkshire tea and scones, Bronte fans hike the path—13 kilometres round trip—to Top Withens, a ruin that, legend has it, inspired the house in Wuthering Heights. The reclusive Emily’s novel captures the haunted strangeness of her beloved moors. Our group followed a knowledgeable guide whose interests veered toward the geological: disused coal mines, the mid-Pennines (where we were standing), Bronze Age burial sites, the delta that existed here 300 million years ago.
“Did you get lost on the moors?” asks a Toronto friend. How did she know? “It’s because you lose the horizon,” she laughed. Fifteen of us reached the stone ruin with its dramatic fir—the sole tree for miles. Dragging ourselves from the romantic hilltop, we notice we are ten hikers short. Someone (I’ll name no names, Sean) has taken charge and, like moorland sheep, we’ve followed him over fields of heather under a vast and moody sky.
Not to worry: Brontë Waterfall is well-signed (in English and Japanese) and a joyful group reunion there ensues. A torrent rushes down the hillside; the chair-shaped rock where the sisters liked to sit perches above the water. Charlotte and her husband walked here from the parsonage on a November afternoon in 1854. She loved it. (Nancy Wigston) (Read full article)

Our only objection is that somewhere in her article, the journalist writes,

Although Rev. Patrick Brontë’s church needs repair (donations welcome), . . .

Actually, the only thing standing left from Patrick Brontë's church is the church tower. The rest was demolished.

And thanks to Sandy Lender for alerting us to this article from Word & Film: To Eyre Is Human: Classic Jane Eyre in Five Looks.

As Jane Eyre prepares for yet another bow, we’ve reexamined the many interpretations of this feisty heroine who’ve come before, with four of the most-noteworthy collected below.
Silent Jane
“The total and somewhat dreary silence” is how Eyre describes Lowood Institution, the charity school she arrives at after fleeing her evil Aunt Sarah at Gateshead. It’s also what I expected to find reviewing several silent films fashioned from Brontë’s book, but such is not the case as these films are able to blow out much of Brontë’s imagery into stunning visuals. Lucasta Miller, writing in The Guardian, points out these silents make “the most of the wild-eyed madwoman” in the attic, while not always keeping their eye on plot. A 1914 version concludes with the cliffhanger of a blind Mr. Rochester stumbling toward a precipice. The best of the bunch is a 1915 Travers Vale version that truncates the plot to three reels and takes some liberty with the text, but captures Eyre with the wide-eyed Louise Vale, who died shortly after the film’s release.
Undead Jane
“Life appears to me too short,” Helen Burns counsels Eyre at Lowood. One can only imagine her trying to apply this advice to zombies that roam the Caribbean sugar plantation in Val Lewton’s 1943 horror film “I Walked With a Zombie” by director Jacques Tourneur, both following up their successful “Cat People” pairing the year before. This film is probably one of the more outré takes on Eyre — including everything from Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” to Sherri Browning Erwin’s mashup Jane Slayre, which has the heroine battle both Bertha Rochester and vampires — but it is also one of the most successful. In the film, a Canadian nurse falls for plantation owner Paul Holland while she tries to figure out what to do with his cationic wife, Jessica. Before the final credits roll, there’s animal sacrifice, voodoo dolls, and secret island rituals in a plot that manages to track Jane Eyre pretty miraculously.
Upper G.I. Jane
Eyre recalls her childhood’s ever-present threat of being packed off to the poorhouse as “a vague sing-song in my ear,” but could the put-upon Eyre have ever imagined a full-blown, Broadway musical of her travail? Composer-lyricist Paul Gordon sure could and, along with book writer and co-director John Caird, he opened the “Jane Eyre” musical on December 10, 2001, at the Brooks Atkinson Theater where it played thirty-six previews and 209 performances. With musical numbers like “The Icy Lane” and “The Death of Mrs. Reed,” the common complaint was that events flew by lickety-split making the musical feel more like a movie trailer. Still, it wound up with a few Tony nominations, even if friend of the show Alanis Morissette had to buy up a 150K block of tickets just so it would still be on the boards at Tony time. It didn’t win, but it’s definitely slouching toward a reappraisal.
All-Star Jane
With this many fine adaptations, it’s tempting to compile an all-star cast in one’s head, the fantasy football approach to one of literature’s most-beloved heroines. But to quote Eyre herself, “To attack the first is not to assail the last.” That said, most of my all-star picks came from the BBC’s 2006 miniseries. This would include almost all below-the-line talent as this production’s design is letter perfect. Sandy Welch’s adaptation doesn’t need to be compressed into a feature length, but roams free over four parts. After much thrashing, this production’s Jane, brought to life flawlessly by relatively unknown Ruth Wilson, would lead my all-star “Eyre.” Higher profile actors from Joan Fontaine to Samantha Morton have played this part, but none better than Wilson. Supplementing some of her supporting cast, however, I’d grab Elizabeth Taylor’s Helen Burns from Robert Stevenson’s 1943 production. I’d also pull Fiona Shaw’s Mrs. Reed and Joan Plowright’s Mrs. Fairfax from Zeffirelli’s 1996 version. I might even steal his Claudio Capponi and Alessio Vlad’s score. And finally, because heavy material needs a fresh open, I’d let SCTV’s Andrea Martin kick off the proceedings with her 1982 Emmy-nominated turn as Jane Eyrehead, a character with origins “so low, you’d have to limbo under her family tree.” (Tony Phillips)

As it is known the new Jane Eyre will open next March 11. According to Screenhead:

The movie will be released in New York and Los Angeles by Focus Features on Friday, March 11, 2011; and in additional cities on Friday, March 18 and Friday, March 25.

Precisely one of those who contributed towards creating one of the evergrowing list of Jane Eyre is hair stylist Martin Samuel, who is interviewed by The Telegraph:

Do you have a favourite genre of film to work in?
I've loved the period films I've done, like Jane Eyre, Little Buddha, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Period hairstyles are very challenging, there's more to get your teeth into. (Leah Hyslop)

The Jane Eyre he helped create was the one embodied by Charlotte Gainsbourg in 1996. And speaking of that film, a good many websites such as Alt Film Guide, AFP, Sky Movies, Digital Spy, The Buenos Aires Herald, TheCelebrityCafe, The Vancouver Sun, The Times, etc. mourn the untimely death of Maria Schneider and mention her role as Bertha Mason in it.

Sebastian Faulks controversial 'reading' of Jane Eyre is still being commented on. NPR's Blog of the Nation doesn't agree with it either:

He's got a new book, Faulks on Fiction: Great British Characters and the Secret Life of the Novel, which I haven't read, but has been excerpted in the Daily Telegraph extensively. Just reading the subtitle of the book makes me close my eyes and shiver in delight. But when I read the second excerpt published by the Daily Telegraph, all about Vanity Fair's Becky Sharp, I must admit: reader, I sputtered. [...]
I still love Faulks, and, for the record, I love Becky Sharp and many, many Victorian femme fatales as well. But, to ignore Jane Eyre's essential independence and even rebelliousness, especially in comparison to the Becky Sharps of that world, is to perpetuate that boring, yet tenacious good girl/bad girl stereotype. Sure, bad girls are exciting and defiant and make their own rules — and so do good girls. (Barrie Hardymon)

The book is also reviewed by The Independent:

Faulks's selection nods to this mighty counter-tradition and its landmarks: in Wuthering Heights or Money, in Gormenghast or Nineteen Eighty-Four. (Boyd Tonkin)

Mark Brown comments on yesterday's debate about arts funding in the House of Lords and quotes from Joan Bakewell's speech in the Guardian:

My grandfather, an iron turner in a Salford factory, died at the age of 33 and my father was sent to Chetham's Hospital, then an orphanage for poor boys in Manchester and now a world-famous music school. Chetham's had, and still has, one of the finest 17th-century libraries in the country. My father grew up loving books. The importance of libraries in the life of a child should not be underestimated. He left school at 13 to work in a foundry and enjoyed a career in engineering. My mother, the daughter of a cooper in a Manchester brewery, also left school at 13. Many years into their marriage they made up for the lost years by studying at the Workers' Educational Association. I am the child of their aspirations. I grew up in the 40s and 50s, enjoying a grammar school and university education without fees and without debt. My life is a testament to social mobility. My arrival in this House is surely its crowning glory.
This, then, is the life that has turned to the arts to understand the world about me. From reading that encompassed Jane Eyre and Mrs Gaskell's novels about industrial Lancashire, visits to Manchester City Art Gallery and concerts by the Hallé Orchestra, I have continued to find nourishment in the sensitivities of those who create and perform works of art. I believe profoundly that the arts are more than the entertainment that awaits us at the end of the working day—a light relief from the real business of living. I believe the arts to be a core essential in shaping and sustaining our human values.

The New York Times looks into the origins of the idiom 'If Worst Comes to Worst’:

The earliest version of the idiom is in the form “if the worst come to the worst,” complete with definite articles and a subjunctive form of the verb come. In his 1596 pamphlet “Have With You to Saffron-Walden,” Thomas Nashe compared death by drowning to death by burning: “If the worst come to the worst, a good swimmer may do much.” Since then, the same turn of phrase has shown up in the work of John Dryden, Henry Fielding, Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë. (Ben Zimmer)

LiveMint on cricket umpires:

Occasionally portly, always courteous, they look like English vicars who have stepped off the pages of a Jane Austen or Emily Brontë novel. Umpires, they are called, and the question I put before you is: Are they in danger of becoming obsolete? (Shoba Narayan)

Portly and courteous doesn't sound at all like a vicar Emily Brontë would include in a novel, though.

The Sleepless Reader is reading Villette and posts about the Brontës' Brussels. Losing It reviews Wuthering Heights. Good Feed wonders whether Jane Eyre is a book for men too (yes, we say!). And finally My Urbex posts some pictures taken at Thornton Old Church Cemetery.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Brussels, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights