Middle Class Brontës

Let's begin with the good news that the Charlotte Brontë letter auctioned yesterday at Sotheby's has been sold to the Brontë Society and will be going home again after so many years. The Wuthering Heights first edition was sold to a private collector who payed 241,250 GBP, almost three times the estimate prize.

National Post (Canada) suggests some road trips:

The English countryside. If you’ve ever wondered where the Brontë sisters grew up, or where William Worsworth, or Agatha Christie wrote and lived and entertained, the answers can be found all over England. How nice that these literary mainstays had the sense to live in places like Lake District, Devon, Sussex, and Yorkshire, all of which are beautiful places to visit – many most easily accessibly by car. (Angela Hickman)

Terence Blacker writes in The Independent about the lack of English novels about middle-class women:

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. In our great national melting pot, one section of society is being systematically excluded from what we read or see on our screens. "There is this notion that the lives of the comfortably-off middle class don't merit being treated seriously and with compassion," the novelist and screenwriter William Nicholson has said. A publisher had once rejected his work with the brutal words, "I will not publish books about women who drive 4x4s."

It is all very heart-rending, and the air is already thick with cries of well-bred outrage. What about the Brontës? Or George Eliot? Iris Murdoch? Ian McEwan? Elizabeth Bennet "would definitely be driving a Volvo XC90 today," the novelist Jojo Moyes has written.

Huntington News reviews Nom de Plume:

You'll be entertained and enlighted by the author's mini biographies of authors like Patricia Highsmith (the "Ripley" novels, "Strangers on a Train"); the Brontë sisters; Mark Twain; a couple of lady "Georges" (Sand and Eliot); O Henry and many more. (David M.Kinchen)

The Philippine Daily Enquirer mentions the Brontës in an article about love for literature (or not):

Maybe I had a case of literature overload. For more than half a century I read and breathed literature. The first 10 years as a student were the best when I curled up with the immortal English novels: “Jane Eyre,” “Vanity Fair,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Pride and Prejudice,” the whole lot of Charles Dickens. (Asuncion David Maramba)

The Huffington Post reviews the film Life, Above All by Oliver Schmitz:

Chanda and Esther are "little women," for the 21st Century, and carry this film the way iconic, classic Hollywood actresses did in film adaptations of 19th-Century novels by Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, and Charlotte Brontë -- studies of prejudice, poverty, and orphan abuse from another century. (Penelope Andrew)

On Bloodclaim we read how The Masters of Thornfield ("The sequel to Master Of Thornfield. ('An S/X story. developed initially from the plot of the novel Jane Eyre') by naughty_fae has been nominated to a White Knight (given by Xander Harris fanfiction) in the unfinished category.

Billy (in Italian), Another side of the life (in German), Meu Mundo de Livros (in Portuguese) and hannah joy post about Wuthering Heights; Andover Public Library Blog, Melissa's Booklover Musings and Koleksi novelku (in Indonesian) write about Jane Eyre; Ellinky (in Czech) posts about Rochester; The Sleepless Reader posts the second half of the review of Juliet Barker's The Brontës; El Blog de Finbar (in Spanish) continues its Yorkshire chronicles with a (highly) imaginative revisitation of the Brontës; Cindy's Book Club briefly mentions Daphne du Maurier's The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë; The Broke and the Bookish reviews Louise Rennison's Withering Tights; Stubbs Family History posts about the history of Moorseats Hall, Hathersage (thought to be Moor House in Jane Eyre).

Categories: Biography, Books, Jane Eyre, References, Wuthering Heights