Wuthering, Wuthering, Wuthering Heights

Let's begin this newsround with an art exhibition. As announced by the Dayton Daily News:

The Dayton Society of Painters and Sculptors is showing off its new members. Twenty-one of them are presenting their works at the High Street Gallery. There are 44 works total, divided between the rooms on the first floor: large green room, small green room, purple room, pink room and hallway. (...)
Bridgette Bogle (...)  is showing water-soluble oils on canvas. “Wuthering, Wuthering, Wuthering Heights” is an explosion of warm and cool colors in a large-scale abstract. (Pamela Dillon)

More information on the author's website.

The Knoxville News Sentinel interviews Sara J. Henry, author of Learning to Swim:

Writers who've influenced you?
Growing up I devoured my mother's Mary Stewart suspense novels and my father's John D. MacDonald Travis McGee books, so I'd say those were my two primary influences, with Charlotte Brontë and Charlotte Armstrong added into the mix. For the last year, my critique partner has been writer Reed Farrel Coleman, who has helped me trim away some of my worst writing excesses. (Susan Alexander)

The Calgary Herald gives some details of the story:

In a gripping opening chapter, while crossing Lake Champlain, Troy Chance, a freelance writer named after a character in a Ngaio Marsh mystery, sees a bundle tossed into the water from another ferry. Believing it to be a child, Troy, who has been living a life of little risk and minimal commitment, takes a huge leap. She dives into the lake and into the child's life.
Troy's plunge pulls her into the murky depths of a kidnapping, and, for awhile, she plays Jane Eyre to the boy and his dad. The book sinks into melodrama in places, but the pacing is swift and Troy is a likable, convincing heroine. (Carole E. Barrowman)

The Observer reviews Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar:

By the laws of this myth, Nuri's father and Mona marry. Nuri is sent away to boarding school in Yorkshire, in part, he believes, as an acknowledgement of competitive lust for his father's new wife. Matar is deft at evoking the bloodless emotional landscape of "Daleswick" and its contrasts with the pulse of life in Cairo. Nuri receives what he hopes are symbolic gifts from his stepmother by mail: exotic pyjamas, a directive to read Wuthering Heights. (Tim Adams)

Another book with Brontë references is The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman which is reviewed by The Independent:

Jess's love triangle could be compared to the ménage à trois in Freedom, only Goodman's literary memory runs deeper than 2010. She calls upon an entire library of 18th- and 19th-century fiction to craft her tale. Emily and Jess are dead ringers for Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility. In the opening chapters, hardly a page goes by without a reference to Wuthering Heights or Henry James. (James Kidd)

Stephen Brennan is the subject of an article in The Times. He talks about his recent performance as Rochester in the Dublin Gate production of Jane Eyre with Andrea Corr:

A role he was less sure he could still pull off was that of Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, which he was offered around the time Jamie was born. He took it anyway, playing opposite sometime pop singer Andrea Corr at the Gate theatre for almost three months. It was a part he had performed eight years earlier, and concedes that, having turned 55 by the time the play reached the stage, he was probably too old for a reprisal. “I saw some pre-production photographs of me and Andrea at the casino in Marino, and I just thought I looked like her father — or her grandfather,” he says. He decided to wear a long brown wig that brought a certain rock ballad-belter to mind. “I saw a documentary on Meat Loaf and he does this number, Paradise by the Dashboard Light. It’s about this couple and they drive out in their Chevy and get it on. It’s kind of a younger person’s song. Twenty years on, he’s still singing it and people are going, ‘It looks a bit pervy, that old guy and that young one singing a duet’. At one stage he decides, ‘I’ll get a wig and I’ll look like I used to’. He puts on this wig and he’s laughing his head off in the mirror, saying, ‘Jesus, that’s how I used to look 20 years ago’. I had exactly the same experience” Brennan laughs. His reprisal of the role, and the level of media attention Corr helped attract to the play, cemented the notion of Brennan as a Gate actor. (...)
 He thinks it’s fine to bring in the occasional star to front shows. While Corr is a celebrity, Brennan insists she wasn’t needed to sell the Gate’s Christmas show. He and Bradfield, who played Eyre to his Rochester in 2003, sold out a run of almost equal length. (Eithne Shortall)

Newsday reviews The Radleys by Matt Haig:

The Radley parents swear by a volume called "The Abstainer's Handbook," which teaches them how to be good assimilationists — get rid of that Miles Davis record and substitute Sting or Phil Collins. Goodbye "Wuthering Heights," hello "When the Last Sparrow Sings." And there's certainly no place in the house for vampire porn like "Vein Man," (which, like "Sparrow," is fictitious). (Ed Siegel)

The Boston Globe interviews the economist Ronald Ferguson and quotes him as saying:

I never developed a habit of reading novels, though I did have one really good English teacher who taught us how to deconstruct a novel and understand it. We read Shakespeare, “Moby-Dick,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Animal Farm.” (Amanda Katz)

The Columbia Daily Tribune suggests some reads:

If the phrase “British fiction” conjures up visions of the Brontë sisters wandering the windswept moors or a top-hatted Charles Dickens in 19th-century London, you are overdue for a literary hop across the pond to explore contemporary writing from the United Kingdom.

Kleurrijk continues her exploration of Mary Taylor on the Brontë Sisters; Inelegance Superabundance talks about Jane Eyre 1997; El blog de Ananula (in Spanish) does the same with Jane Eyre 2006; Les Soeurs Brontë posts a very interesting post (as usual) about the Brontës and their writing (literally) (in French); Marios Adventures is reading Jane Eyre.
EDIT:
An alert from the Perth Writers Festival:

DEXTER ISLAND DESIRES (BOOK CLUB EVENT)
Do you have a favourite book that has stood the test of time? We’ve asked three of our Festival guests – Toni Jordan, Sophie Gee and Brenda Walker – to share their dog-eared favourites and what makes them so special. Bring your book club and join the discussion. Chair: Angela Meyer. 

One of the choices by Sophie Gee is Jane Eyre.


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