Bloggers on a Jane Eyre mission

IndieWire's The Playlist discusses how soon is too soon to start picking candidates for the Oscars giving fans of Jane Eyre 2011 a mission along the way:

The only chance that a March release like “Jane Eyre” has is if Oscar bloggers keep bringing it up across the year. (Oliver Lyttelton)

So now you know what to do.

Associated Press - via Forbes - celebrates 25 years of the PBS Masterpiece series being led by Rebecca Eaton.

Research found the series had a fusty, veddy-proper image in some eyes, while the word "Theatre" in its title felt old-fashioned, even off-putting. The mixed bag of programs from week to week also struck some viewers as confusing.
"You might watch Jane Tennison one week and Jane Austen the next week, and then Jane Eyre," Eaton recalls. (Frazier Moore)

Carmela Ciuraru's Nom de Plume is featured by USA Today which highlights several names mentioned in it, such as the Brontës/Bells:

Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell (real names: Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë). "We did not like to declare ourselves women," Charlotte later wrote about assuming masculine names, because "we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice." (Bob Minzesheimer)

The Wall Street Journal reviews the book as well while the Wall Street Jounal's Speakeasy takes a look at writing families:

There are several other sibling-writer examples out there, though apart from the four Ephron sisters and the three Brontës, they seem to mostly come in pairs – David and Amy Sedaris, Dominick and John Gregory Dunne, Geoffrey and Tobias Wolff for instance – which likely speaks to the wisdom handed down through most large families regarding acceptable ways one can earn a living. (Tod Goldberg)

The Daily Mail tries to track the reading progression to romance novels, but we don't really agree with it:

When Justine Elizabeth was a little girl, her mother would read her fairy tales.
Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White — Justine would listen to them all and go to bed dreaming of a world where she was a princess and Prince Charming would take her away to a magic palace.
As she got older, her reading moved on to Wuthering Heights, Pride And Prejudice and Romeo And Juliet. They didn’t always have happy endings, but there was always passionate, explosive love.
Now a 24-year-old advertising executive living in London, Justine still loves getting under the covers with anything from Jackie Collins to Cecilia Ahern, Mills & Boon to the Twilight books. (Marianne Power)

Well, we must say reading Wuthering Heights doesn't take you automatically to Mills&Boon, etc.

The Sheffield Telegraph mentions just how influential artist John Martin was on the young Brontës while Town Topics discusses the literary influences of Kate Bush:

What sets Kate apart, among many other things, is that, to my knowledge, she’s the first singer songwriter in the so-called pop world to make her debut by channeling a classic of English literature. She accomplishes this in her song from 1978, “Wuthering Heights,” by becoming, in effect, one of the most fascinating female characters in the canon, Cathy Earnshaw. Bush and Brontë were both born on July 30, by the way, Emily in 1818, Kate in 1958, so a feeling of kinship on the singer’s part is all but inevitable.
You might think Emily Brontë would turn over in her grave to hear this audacious 19-year-old girl, born Catherine (and called Cathy while growing up), dare to reduce her novel to a Top 40 song (the best selling single in England for four weeks). More likely, Emily would admire her birthmate’s achievement in bringing the mythic essence of the book to life in music, most boldly and passionately in the chilling moment when “wuthering wuthering Wuthering Heights” soars into “Heathcliffe [sic], it’s me, Cathy, come home/I’m so cold, let me in your window.” (Stuart Mitchner)

As we said at the beginning of this post, bloggers now seem to have a mission and both Unabashedly Becky and Votaries of Horror (albeit not very enthusiastically) post about Jane Eyre 2011. A Successful Reader writes about the original novel. And Gratis et Amore posts about Wuthering Heights in Catalan.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, References, Wuthering Heights