It needs to be done because it's something to aspire to

Peter Conrad discusses in The Observer the interest and validity of new adaptations of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. It's a long, interesting article from which we only quote a few paragraphs, mostly related to the new versions, but Peter Conrad shares some exciting views on previous versions of both novels. Read it.

They are doing it, I'd suggest, because it needs to be done. Certain books – by the Brontës and by Jane Austen and Dickens – are indispensable to us and accompany us through life. When we first read them, they prospectively sketch our quest to discover who we are and our struggle to impose ourselves on the world; in later decades, they remain as markers of our progress or testaments to our disillusionment. In Jane Eyre, a disadvantaged girl prevails by force of will and by the intensity of an uncompromising imagination.(...)
Wuthering Heights warns that the outcome may not be so fortunate: the past with its ghost or demons is inescapable. (...)
Whenever we reread a favourite book, we bring to it an updated self and look back at it from a changed world. Film adaptations serve the same purpose of reappraisal: in retelling a story they revalue it in relation to the different reality we now inhabit. Fidelity to a classic is no virtue. (...)
Fukunaga in his turn makes it clear that Jane Eyre is about a woman whose desires demand gratification, not a spinster reconciled to solitude. Living incognito in a moorland hut in the winter, Jane – played by Mia Wasikowska, last seen in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland – hears someone bang urgently at the door. She opens it, sees the Rochester of Michael Fassbender and lunges at him with almost lustful eagerness, feasting on his face as she kisses him. Then her vision clears and she realises, in a lurching anticlimax, that her visitor is the pious St John (wimpish Jamie Bell), whose love for her is merely brotherly. Wasikowska's Jane announces that she wishes she could actually behold what she imagines. Film grants that wish and makes us privy to the shadow play of erotic impulse – "What throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through," as Brontë put it when criticising Jane Austen as a prude – behind Wasikowska's plain, demure face. (...)
Wuthering Heights has always been irresistible to film-makers, though it too has proved hard to handle. The problem is the book's impassioned wildness. (...) In her new Wuthering Heights, Andrea Arnold seems determined to do it differently and more authentically. Heathcliff, an outsider and outcast, is stigmatised as a dark-skinned gipsy and Arnold initially tried to find a Romany actor for the role. Warned off by the clannish community, she auditioned young men whose ethnic background was Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Middle Eastern, before eventually deciding on an unknown black actor from Leeds called James Howson. Arnold's choice makes another of the novel's covert subplots visible: Heathcliff is a stray picked up on the streets of Liverpool, a port frequented by slave traders. More than mild horror can be expected this time around, since the film expects to capitalise on the adolescent infatuation with vampires incited by the bloodsucking romances of Stephenie Meyer. According to the producer Robert Bernstein: "The Twilight factor is extremely helpful to Wuthering Heights."

Tim Robey in The Telegraph has also something to say about Andrea Arnold's film:

The coming months will bring a slew of high-profile literary adaptations to our screens, including new versions of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights[.] (...)
Four out of those five are by female novelists – though Emily Brontë might have been taken aback, not only by a black Heathcliff, but by how faithful the new film, with its rumoured 18 certificate, is to the more lurid elements of her tale.

Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre is still very much alive in the US media:
The Mercury:

Faced with the task of turning out yet another adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's page-turner, filmmaker Cary Fukunaga has chosen to drain the gothic-ness out of the famously windswept tale. That means that Thornfield Hall, the dank mansion where Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska) begins her romance with bad boy boss Rochester (Michael Fassbender), is less creepy than desolate. The film is watchable, aided by terrific turns from Wasikowska, Fassbender and Judi Dench, but it should have been wilder, darker and more dangerous.  (Amy Longsdorf)

The TMR Zoo:

With this new release director Cary Fukunaga takes the story darker than it has gone before. The images of Jane’s childhood are disturbing to say the least. The child is the victim of abuse, scorn and ridicule. You will find yourself enraged with her tormentors; the film seems to instill passion into the viewer. (Bruce Owens)

And Punch Drunk Critics and Book Eater.

Rolling Stone interviews the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Flea, the bassist, is a born-again Brontëite:

“Music saved me – and books,” Flea says, “Reading Kurt Vonnegut at 13, that was the shit that raised me, gave me a sense of ethics, what’s right in the world.” Flea is now an avid book collector. He owns a British first-edition printing of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which he bought in London in 2004 for, he sheepishly admits, “a large amount of money.” I didn’t read it until my late thirties,” he says of the novel, “but it touched me – the resilience Jane maintains when faced with situations where everyone loses their dignity and kindness. She is put through fucking hell. She’s abandoned, treated like shit. And she never strays from what she loves.” Give her a guitar, I suggest, and it could be the story of his band. “I relate to it,” Flea confesses. I didn’t always keep my dignity and stay true, be kind and stuff.” Still, he says, “It’s something to aspire to.” (Via Stadium Arcadium)

Amen to that.

Entertainment Weekly compares both Fright Night movies (1985 and 2011) and mentions a Brontë reference in the latest one:

It’s funny that Amy spends one scene reading Wuthering Heights, the same book that Bella reads in Twilight, because there’s enough chastity-belt repression in both movies to make Emily Brontë blush. Even when Jerry turns Amy, he doesn’t bite her. He just gives her a kiss.  (Melissa Maerz)

From time to time an article about excessive morning sickness in pregnancy (aka hyperemesis gravidarum) surfaces and mentions Charlotte Brontë's probablebcause of death. In The Telegraph (Australia):

English novelist Charlotte Brontë is thought to have died from dehydration and malnourishment, caused by hyperemesis. (Andrea Tullen)

The theatre company Northern Broadsides which in a few weeks will premiere Blake Morrison's We Are Three Sisters has an unusual petition in the Halifax Courier:

Blake Morrison, whose play We Are Three Sisters opens in Halifax next month, has written a scene which requires an ornament to be broken.
And – as the production will be staged 76 times during its run – that’s a lot of chintz to be smashed! (...)
“If you happen to have a Victorian-style ornament that is unwanted, unloved and not valuable then Northern Broadsides will happily put it out of its misery – it can go out in a blaze of glory under the bright lights of the stage... well, sort of candlelit lights of the stage in this case.
“If you find anything in the back cupboard, under the stairs, from the depth of your garage or garden shed, please drop it in at Dean Clough reception.”

The author Julie Salamon writes in the New York Times:

No surprise that my favorite childhood novel was “Jane Eyre” (with secrecy at its core, the “ghost” stashed conveniently in the attic) or that the title of my first book was “White Lies.” Transparency became my watchword, journalism my profession.

The Sun Journal has an intriguing reference:

In time, Monhegan — at about 10 miles from the mainland, one of Maine's most remote islands — emerged from the storm, its august, fog-shrouded cliffs making it appear larger than its 1 square mile, and looking as though it had been discharged from a chapter of "Wuthering Heights." (Beth Herman)

As much as we think we cannot imagine anything more different from the Yorkshire moors than the Maine islands. But if you think that the previous mention was kind of weird, the following is even weirder. As read on 3News (New Zealand) sports section:

We seemed to have found Andrew Mehrtens without having to select Andrew Mehrtens. [Aaron] Cruden went back to home to the Wuthering Heights of Turbos rugby, a project for seasons ahead. (Michael Oliver)

We don't have a clue of what it is about.

The List, a blog from Radio Times, posts about the many faces of Heathcliff through different adaptations of Wuthering Heights;  Red Jane in the Attic has visited the Parsonage; Belle's Bookshelf (and Haunting Serenade) has a "Pash, Pick, Pass" on Wuthering Heights; Bookaholic World has a giveaway of copies of Miss Brontë by Juliet Gael in Portuguese.


Finally a nice contest going on The Fox Is Black (found via Phoenix New Times) asks you to design a new cover for Jane Eyre:

Here’s what I’d like to see. Something that doesn’t look anything like what you see in the examples above. I want you to come up with something that’s new and contemporary, something that will grab the attention of a person walking by but that still stays true to the spirit of the book. Don’t do anything retro, a Penguin throwback or anything of the sort. I want to see new, fresh ideas. The winner of this month’s Re-Covered Books contest will win $100 to Amazon. (...)
All entries are due September 1st, 2011 by Midnight, PST.

Categories: Books, In the News, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Theatre, Wuthering Heights