Who wants to be a Brontëite?

SBS Television tells us a bit more about the reception of Jane Eyre 2011 in Australia as part of the Sydney Film Festival:

Among the programming coups were Tabloid (a new Errol Morris documentary is always an event) and the new Jane Eyre, which turned out to be a triumph – as bleakly Gothic and windswept as required, with Mia Wasikowska a magnetically intense and properly young-looking Jane, and Michael Fassbender suitably glowering as Rochester. Having Wasikowska as a guest was a plus. (Lynden Barber)

A reader of the Abilene News-Reporter recommends the film to those who don't want to 'to cover your eyes and ears' while seeing a movie.

As far as we know, the newest and 'suitably glowering' Rochester, didn't encounter the same troubles as his predecessor Orson Welles who, according to the Guardian's Tanya Gold,

When he made Jane Eyre he was so fat he had to wear a corset.

Apart from having the forthcoming Wuthering Heights film to look forward to, we might as well end up looking forward to a Wuthering Heights video game, as Metro reports that,

There are currently talks between developers and Sony to adapt other classic novels such as Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.
[Simon] Meek [from Tern Digital] added: 'We don't want to touch the beauty of reading. This is not trying to do away with books. We know what books look like on screen, in the theatre, in print, so how do they look on gaming platforms? That's never been done before.'

That might make it a bit more appealing to all those students struggling with it, such as those described by The New York Times's The 6th Floor as

the kind of person, though, who preferred the “Wuthering Heights” Cliffs Notes to the all-night reading experience before the exam (Matt Bai)

The Kirkland Reporter suggests reading Wuthering Heights as a 'fun way to improve your teen’s SAT score during summer'. Which brings us to more summer reading lists as those mentioned by the MerrimackPatch or this 'un-suggestion' from a summer reading list seen on Business Insider:

Ham on Rye by Bukowski. I happen to think this is the greatest American novel ever written. Not sure why it’s not taught in high school literature classes while meanwhile the un-aborted Brontë Sisters/Jane Austen (aren’t they all the same creature?) continue to bore generation after generation of people out of reading. (James Altucher)

Entertainment Online's The Awful Truth would seem to agree:

Well, that's definitely not literature you'd get from boring old Charlotte Brontë! (Ted Casablanca)

Fortunately - we think - that is a snarky comment after quoting the Pulitzer-deserving prose of Khloé Kardashian.

Well, on to other books now. Carmela Ciuraru, author of Nom de Plume, has written an article on pseudonyms for The Huffington Post and also has her book reviewed by The Millions.

Ciuraru chooses, curating 18 of these pseudonymous authors in 16 tidy sketches that shed light on the many and various motivations for pseudonymous writing. The book is a good exhibit across space, time, and material, combining the old standards (Blair/Orwell, Brontë/Bell) with some less well-known names (Sheldon/Tiptree, Pessoa/Campos et al.). Ciuraru sifted through biographies and autobiographies and published works, and here she synthesizes her research nicely. She has a gift for organizing and presenting information and an ear for the money quote from a novel or letter. (Lydia Kiesling)

The JC reviews Natasha Solomons's The Novel In The Viola and mentions its Jane Eyre influences:

The novel is full of references to romantic fiction, especially Jane Eyre: a passionate young woman who against all odds finds love and happiness in a forbidding country house.
But this has none of Brontë's beautiful writing and is indeed closer to "chick lit". (David Herman)

Rebecca Walker's words on her mother Alice Walker continue causing reactions. She is quoted by Dagblog as stating,

I was 16 when I found a now-famous poem she wrote comparing me to various calamities that struck and impeded the lives of other women writers. Virginia Woolf was mentally ill and the Brontës died prematurely. My mother had me - a 'delightful distraction', but a calamity nevertheless. I found that a huge shock and very upsetting. (Orion)

The Fuquay-Varina Independent suggests travelling by books. One of the suggested reads/journeys is Wide Sargasso Sea:

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (The Caribbean)
In a prequel to Jane Eyre, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway lives in Dominica and Jamaica in the 1830s before she travels to England, becomes Mrs. Rochester and goes mad.

Coincidentally, Music OMH reviews Stevie Nicks's album In Your Dreams and mentions her Wide Sargasso Sea-inspired song:

Combined with the second track, the Landslide-esque For What It’s Worth, it makes up a perfect duo to draw you in to the album. On some of what follows (My Heart, Italian Summer, Wide Sargasso Sea) the poetics of her anguished heart can get quite repetitive within the lyrics, and the music arrangements can be so laid back as to be barely there. In these moments it’s a good job Nicks’ voice is the main instrument here; to imagine the majority of these songs working for literally anybody else is hard. (Farah Ishaq)

And now for a question that could have made millionaires (well, send them on their way to becoming so) of hundreds of Brontëites/Austenites. Bloomfield Life reports:

Bloomfield resident Monika Pollick, 48, made it to the fifth question on ABC's "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" June 17 before picking an incorrect answer. She walked away with $1,000. [...]
Question Five, under the category "Woman of Words," was as follows: Which of the following is the title of an annual journal issued by the Jane Austen Society of North America? A: Eyre Letter; B: The Middlemarch; C: Persuasions; or D: Wuthering Writes.
Pollick guessed Eyre Letter but the answer was Persuasions. (Jeff Frankel)

Well - duh!

Now for a couple of alerts. The Ottawa Morning reviews the play Every Story Ever Told, on stage until June 25th as part of the Ottawa Fringe Festival.

Written and performed by Ryan Gladstone from Vancouver. This fellow is quite amazing, He is part stand up comic, part mime, part professor of comparative literature, popular culture, of theories of Narrativity, and he is also a very smooth actor. He did hilarious capsules of War and Peace, Great Expectations, Cinderella, Carmen, Greek classics, Tales of the Arabian Nights, the Brontë sisters, and really horrible authentic versions of Grims fairy tales. (Alvina Ruprecht)

And an alert for later today, at 8 pm local time, the Classical Minnesota Public Radio will look

at some of the films of 1939: Gone With the Wind, Stagecoach, Wuthering Heights, Of Mice and Men, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and The Wizard of Oz. (Marianne Combs)

Click here for further info.

A Reader's Nook posts about Jane Eyre and A Book Blog. Period. reviews April Lindner's Jane.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, References, Software, Theatre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights