Jane Eyre's Barmecide supper and other news

The Independent takes a look - with a magnifying glass, we expect - at the young Brontës' writings now on display at the British Library as part of the exhibition Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as you know it.

They might be known for their gothic romances, but the Brontë sisters also created some of the earliest examples of science fiction. When Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell were as young as 10, they wrote stories set in detailed, imaginary worlds. Now these little-known fantasy stories are being exhibited in the British Library's first sci-fi exhibition.
As with the best of childhood make-believe, the siblings became obsessed with their imaginary world, drawing maps and creating lives for their characters while featuring themselves as the gods of their world. Written on to scraps of paper and stitched together to create booklets, the works are like the early fanzines created by science-fiction fans of the 1930s. It might be wise to bring a magnifying glass, so minuscule is the handwriting. It was intended to represent the writing of the toy soldiers hailing from the countries the Brontë children created.
"They're difficult to get a grip on because they're written in very tiny handwriting – they were really for distribution among themselves," explains guest curator Andy Sawyer, director of science-fiction studies at the University of Liverpool. "The Brontës' manuscript books are one of the first examples of fan fiction, using favourite characters and settings in the same way as science fiction and fantasy fans now play in the detailed imaginary universes of Star Trek or Harry Potter. While the sense of fantasy is strong, there are teasing examples of what might be called the beginnings of science fiction."
Strange as some of the stories are, they also point to the sisters' future as authors. Charlotte carried on writing them into her 20s. "It was a way of developing their own skills as writers," says Sawyer. "It's not just childhood rubbish. Some are very melodramatic, but there's a lot of very good stuff – you can tell with some of the stories that they are going to be great writers." (Elisa Bray)

The Independent also reviews Daphne du Maurier's The Doll: Short Stories mentioning her influences:

Du Maurier is often discussed as quintessentially English, suggesting a certain parochialism in her work. But the writer was educated in Paris and, with her French ancestry, always alive to European writing. The tone of cynicism, themes of metamorphosis and doubleness, and narratives of class and sexual violence, all seem to derive as much from her wide reading of French and Russian figures such as Chekhov and Maupassant as from the English-language writers she admired – Emily and Charlotte Brontë, and her adored Katherine Mansfield. (Helen Taylor)

Speaking of women writers, the Naipaul controversy is still being commented upon, this time by the Sydney Morning Herald, which makes quite a blurry point though:

Think of the 19th century. All right, there might not be women to parallel Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or, a bit differently, Dickens, but think of the power and range of writing between the savagery and exalted dream of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and the truly dazzlingly breadth and maturity of a novel such as George Eliot's Middlemarch. (Peter Craven)

NewsTime (South Africa) begins an article on on-screen food with a reference to Jane Eyre:

After she and Helen Burns have been treated to a “cup of tea”, a “thin morsel of toast”, and slices of “a good-sized seed-cake” by the gracious, compassionate Miss Temple (a character unaccountably omitted from Cary Fukunaga’s latest film-version), Jane Eyre rejoices that she will not have to “prepare in imagination the Barmecide supper of hot roast potatoes or white bread and new milk, with which I was wont to amuse my inward cravings”. How easily are Lowood waifs’ “inward cravings” satisfied! Unstarving multitudes of the viewing public of our century sit down to wallow imaginatively in an endless array of Barmecide banquets, courtesy of the small screen. We do not even have to do our own imagining... (Digby Ricci)

And the Belper News mentions the Peak District and Derbyshire's appearances in recent films, such as Fukunaga's Jane Eyre, of course.

The Irish Times reports that this year's English Leaving Certificate featured a question on Wuthering Heights although the students themselves might be more interested in the popular music influences of this and other literary texts, which are disccused by the Guardian today.

The Baton Rouge Advocate features a local development director who enjoys reading 'classics like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre'.

Beccaelizabeth discusses the 'community of women' aspect of Jane Eyre and Marandarussell posts about Jane Eyre 2011.

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Juvenilia, Wuthering Heights