'Do for Brontë what ABBA did for mistaken paternity in Grecian isles'

The Yorkshire Evening Post advances a few more details about the Leeds International Film Festival (3-20 November) and reminds its readers that

Festival bosses revealed last month that director Andrea Arnold’s new screen adaptation of classic Emily Brontë novel Wuthering Heights had been picked for their opening gala. (Paul Robinson)

While Variety announces yet one more festival where the film will also be screened similarly: the 22nd Stockholm International Film Festival (9-20 November).

A strong lineup of British contenders includes "Shame" by Steve McQueen, Paddy Considine's "Tyrannosaur," "Coriolanus" by Ralph Fiennes and Andrea Arnold's "Wuthering Heights," which will be the fest's centerpiece gala screening. (Adam Dawtrey)

MovieLine has fun thinking up '5 Suggestions for Amazing, 3-D Adaptations of Victorian Novels'.

A Wuthering Heights rock opera
Forget that new version with James Howson as the first ever black Heathcliff; the torrid melodrama of Emily Brontë’s 1847 masterpiece (which was critically panned at the time of its release) deserves a rambunctious musical rejiggering. Writer/composer Bernard J. Taylor tried a stage version in the ’90s, but we simply don’t have enough movie musicals with operatically doomed love and Marxist implications. In musical form, Wuthering Heights could take advantage of a great pop relic: Kate Bush’s ’70s hit “Wuthering Heights.” She should compose all the music for this, of course — and do for Brontë what ABBA did for mistaken paternity in Grecian isles.
Suggested casting: I’m waiting for Amanda Seyfried to reclaim her greatness from Mamma Mia!, so she gets to play Cathy. Lay all your love on her, Heathcliff. (Louis Virtel)

The Village Voice has an article on Bernard Herrmann:

"My feelings and yearnings are those of a composer of the 19th century,” wrote self-identified neo-romantic composer Bernard Herrmann in 1948. “I am completely out of step with the present.”
Herrmann’s heart at the time was with his in-progress opera, based on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, but he made his name—and sealed his immortality—in distinctly modern media. The greatest American-born film composer, Herrmann was just done scoring The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), which accompanied the romance between a widow living on the English seaside and the ghost of a sea captain. The beyond-the-grave affairs of Brontë and Mrs. Muir typify Herrmann’s greatest work, interpreting through music a romantic yearning inextricably linked to or forbidden by death. It’s certainly present in two films irresistibly double-featured in Film Forum’s two-week, 22-film Herrmann retrospective, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), submerged in Herrmann’s voluptuous chromaticism, and Brian De Palma’s Hitch-takeoff Obsession (1976), both among Herrmann’s highest, dizziest achievements. (Nick Pinkerton)

In The Huffington Post, Dave Astor list a few book-related things that shouldn't be blamed on the author:

Hollywoodized book covers. When a novel is turned into a movie, the cover of a new edition can reflect this. That leaves readers with, say, an image of a glamorous actress type on the front of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre -- a wonderful novel with an admirable but decidedly UNGLAMOROUS heroine. Somehow I don't remember Ms. Eyre saying: "Excuse me, Mr. Rochester, while I put on my makeup and hair extensions."

A columnist at The Huntingon News lists what she knows about the writing habits of several authors:

I know that John Steinbeck did much of his writing on a yellow lined notepad with a pencil and eraser; that Charlotte Brontë wrote with a pencil in cramped, tiny handwriting on loose scraps of paper; and that Charles Dickens wrote with a “continuous provision” of ink and quill pens. (Shelly Reuben)

Well, Charlotte Brontë also used ink and quills.

The Millions and Gapers Block Book Club mention the Brontë reference in Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot.

The Times lists trip to Haworth in its 'late deals' section today. And Richard Wilcocks writes on the Brontë Parsonage Blog about the recent Afternoon Tea with Bonnie Greer & the Brontës at the Ilkley Literature Festival:

Bonnie Greer related Emily’s condition to herself and her own writing, mentioning Obama Music and the restlessness of Chicago and explaining that when she wrote her novel Entropy, her dominant thoughts were of synaesthesia. “This is where you smell a word, or see a colour when you read a number...it’s the primitive mind which links everything up... Emily’s state of being was musicality.
All my work is synaesthetically created... Emily heard the music of her environment and it is captured in the words of Wuthering Heights.” Sally McDonald mentioned that the novel had been compared to an overture with a break in the middle.
“The Brontës have been prettified in the movie versions I have seen.... but these are Northern women! And it was appropriate that this man (Heathcliff) was black. Look at history, and Liverpool... this part of the world was tied up with slavery... Wilberforce and Douglass spoke at meetings in Yorkshire where abolitionists predominated... but there was support in the government for a secret deal with the Confederacy... Emily would have heard the abolitionist arguments...she was born in the same year as Frederick Douglass.”
In Jane Eyre I recognize that refusal not to look down when your betters are speaking to you – from my own childhood. It’s in Obama Music.” (Read full post)

Kobieta Sukcesu (in Polish) and Ma se domani (in Italian) review Jane Eyre 2011 while Lily's Notebook (in French) writes about the novel. Flickr user .¢αмoмιℓℓα ≈ ღ has created a Jane Eyre-inspired doll. Sadie-Jean's Book Blog gives a 2.5 /5 to Wuthering Heights (the novel).