Extraordinary trio of literary talent

The Yorkshire Post interviews Blake Morrison, author of the upcoming theatre play We Are Three Sisters (opening in Halifax next September 9):

Back in the 1960s, even living as close to Haworth as he did, Morrison doesn’t remember any kind of fuss about the Brontës. “Obviously, they’d lived not far away, but I don’t remember either my parents or anyone at the Grammar School making anything of the Brontë connection, the fact that we had this extraordinary trio of literary talent on our doorstep.”
Morrison caught up with Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Villette and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall some years later, and has explored these celebrated tales with scores of MA students on the courses he has taught at Goldsmiths University of London. He had to swot up on the lives, works, loves and letters of the Brontë family many years ago when the composer Howard Goodall approached him to write the book of a stage musical of Wuthering Heights.
“Howard did the songs and Leicester Haymarket (theatre) were keen to produce the show. But the boss left and moved on, policy changed and the new management didn’t want it. I reprinted one ballad I’d written for it, and still have the songs Howard composed. It was disappointing, but there haven’t been many projects that haven’t eventually come to fruition.”
It clearly galls Morrison, although he is too darned nice to say it outright, that of several proposed shows of Wuthering Heights that were doing the rounds at that time, the one that did get produced starred Cliff Richard as Heathcliff. “Cliff Richard! I remember it getting lousy reviews…”
Blake Morrison says there’s a general feeling around that anyone who has a go at staging Wuthering Heights will encounter a default bad attitude from critics. “There’s always been a mocking, sneering thing around them (the Brontës) – which you can only have, I believe, if you don’t understand their novels or their lives.”
Well, undeterred by that, and at the suggestion of a theatre critic friend 10 years ago, Morrison had a go at a play which would examine the lives and aspirations of the Brontë sisters, using the template of Chekhov’s comedic portrait of Russian social disintegration Three Sisters, published in 1900.
“I went away and read the Chekhov and Juliet Barker’s Lives of the Brontës and took lots of notes. We know that Chekhov had read about the Brontës, probably in Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte, and their story was clearly an influence on his play.
“I went through all the parallels and characters… Olga, Masha and Irina in his piece even have a troubled, destructive brother. Chekhov has a doctor and teacher in his play and so does mine.
“There are many similarities, but there are also differences between the two, and the more I worked on it, the further I moved away from the original, so as to avoid misrepresentation of the lives being explored.”
The piece was put aside for a good few years while Morrison worked on poetry, libretti and novels, then a nudge came from Barrie Rutter at Northern Broadsides. The writer had worked with the Halifax-based company on five previous adaptations, and Rutter was keen to see We Are Three Sisters off the shelf and on the stage. So 18 months ago Morrison took up the story again, and rehearsals are now underway for a nationwide tour, with the premiere in Halifax next month.
But why not simply write an original play based on the famous family?
“Many people will think that’s what it is,” says the writer. “But those who know their Chekhov will see the likeness. Using the Chekhov as a template for another, very big, story helps to somehow contain it. It restricts you as a writer and helps you to focus.
“I think there are two or three ways in which it sheds new light on the Brontë story. For a start the grimness of the Brontës’ lives has been exaggerated. There were tragedies, but that didn’t mean they were miserable all the time. There’s a kind of resilience there and a determination to support themselves by writing.
“Also, there’s an impish humour in Charlotte’s letters from time to time that overturns a stereotypical view. I use the humour in the Chekhov to help show that.
“Before the Reverend Nicholls and Charlotte’s marriage there’s no evidence of love interest in the Brontë sisters’ lives, but we know from their work how interested they were in thinking about women, love and marriage. Again, these are subjects helpfully explored in the Chekhov.”
The other thing, says Morrison, is that Haworth is often portrayed as a remote spot where the family were trapped leading narrow lives, when in fact they did travel. And yes, they even heard Paganini play in Keighley. Winters may have been long and brutal, but we know from the nature of their writing that these women’s imagination was limitless.
Morrison thinks some diehard Brontë fans may bristle that he has played with chronology in order to make theatrical sense of his fictional story. However, he feels he has done his best to honour the Brontës by creating real, plausible, sympathetic characters.

The Sun has an 'exclusive' clip of Jane Eyre 2011. The scene where Judi Dench advises Jane Eyre about being too close to Mr Rochester:

Jane Eyre has been the subject of numerous feature films but Dame Judi [Dench] was convinced that the 2011 version had a fresh approach.
She said: "This story has been done many times, but I felt that Cary had quite different, dark ideas about it, ones which I hope will excite people to read the book.
"The novel is quite ambiguous as to who knows what in Thornfield — does Mrs Fairfax know the specifics of the secret of the house? There's this very romantic mystery to the story." (Alison Maloney)

The Muskogee Phoenix reviews The Twelfth Enchantment by David Liss:

Combining Regency Era history with early Gothic-style literature, Liss has penned an easy-flowing novel of polite society, modernization, Gothic horror, and romance rivaling the likes of Jane Austin and the Bronte sisters. (Melony Carey)

Steve Mariotti doesn't know very much about the Brontës when he says in the Huffington Post:

These Maine cottages have incredible private libraries. Right now I am reading the first edition of Edith Wharton's The Mill on the Floss. Many here are of English descent and know their Victorian and Gothic literature well. You have to be up on Jane Austen and on the ball with the Brontë sisters. 

Epicurious has liked the first issue of the magazine Kinfolk:

You'll also find a simple breakfast menu for two, a Summer playlist, tips for creating organic table settings, a tribute to cloth napkins, a Q&A with a florist, and quotes from the likes of Henry David Thoreau, M.F.K. Fisher, Charlotte Brontë, and Winnie the Pooh. (Lauren Salkeld)

The Moment (Nigeria) tells us how Dr. Mercy Ette discovered Jane Eyre:

Here she shares memories of how Jane Eyre, a novel by Charlotte Brontë, moved her to tears when she read it shortly after she arrived at the Union Secondary School, Ibiaku, Akwa Ibom State. Many years after her first encounter with the book, she still gets emotional when she talks about it.
‘One of the most memorable books that I have read is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. I read it in my first week in secondary school. It left such an impression on me that I have not read it again since then. The story moved me so much that I could not stop crying. (...)
Back to Jane Eyre, I think what I found so interesting about it was Jane’s experience at different points in her life. The book is a personal narrative that starts off with Jane Eyre, a 10-year-old orphan, living with her late uncle’s family. Her uncle’s dying wish was that she would be brought up by his wife, but her aunt did not like her. She and her three children abused Jane emotionally and physically. They treated her like a servant.
One day, Jane was locked up in the room where her uncle had died. She panicked when she saw visions of him. Her agony overwhelmed me, and I just could not stop crying. (...)
The book remains memorable for me because the story resonated with me. When I was growing up, I also lived with some family members who did not treat me well. One of my cousins used to beat me whenever he had an opportunity. He threatened to kill me if I ever talked about the abuse. Years later, I asked him: ‘Do you remember how much you abused me when I was a child?’ He apologised and said that it was just a childish thing. When I read Jane Eyre, the story brought back that feeling of being abandoned, rejected and abused.
I was also touched by Jane’s moral courage when she chose to walk away from someone she loved because he was already married. Although that did not mean much to me as a young girl, I thought she was brave.(...)
Although I read it a long time ago, I think that Jane Eyre is one of the most memorable books that I have read.

Some New Zealand news outlets comment on the acceptance of Twilight in the NCEA New Zealand exams:
Auckland Now:

Or you could draw the obvious parallels (which Meyer flags in the book) between Twilight and Wuthering Heights. By the by, Twilight has prompted lots of kids to read Wuthering Heights - sales of the classic are through the roof, thanks to its new Twilight-inspired cover. (Catherine Woulfe)

The Stuff:

Another essay, written in an English exam on making connections between texts, compares the theme of unconditional love in the Twilight book to that in Wuthering Heights, the movie Titanic and Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet.

The authors of those essays presumably wouldn't have problems answering this quiz about the Twilight series published in The Guardian:

In Twilight, what book does Bella read in order to make sense of her feelings for Edward?     
Pride and Prejudice  /    Frankenstein  /   Wuthering Heights  /   Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. (Sarah Simmonds)

The Rocky Mountain Collegian asks a terrible question...with an even more terrible answer:

But what do the talentless, frizzy-haired, Charlotte Brontë-loving girls of the world have?
Pole fitness. Oh yeahhh. (Morgan Mayo)

The Reedsburg Times Press gives voice to a teenager with a dream:

Authors are my heroes. The stories of the books I read offer an escape, a chance to slow down and rest for a while. I am not foolish enough to believe that if I complete a book it would ever be published, and if it is somehow miraculously published, I would not expect it to become famous or even that popular. But a girl can dream. As for now, I feel like escaping with Jane Eyre for an hour or two. (Sam Foss)

Unbound, 3 Guys 1 Movie, Zerogenous, Total Film and Commentary Track review Jane Eyre 2011;  Learnin' Curve has uploaded a picture of North Lees Hall; Abigail's Ateliers has designed new (Brontë) gowns and posts some nice pictures wearing them on the moors.


Categories: Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Theatre

Read More

Free Trade Feelings

Two scholar new books with Brontë-related content:

“Affective Worlds”
Writing, Feeling and Nineteenth-Century Literature
John Hughes
Sussex Academic Press
Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-84519-442-0
June 2011

This book offers an original approach to a number of nineteenth-century authors in terms of what are seen as the constitutive affective dynamics of their work. Pursuing theoretically and philosophically informed close readings, John Hughes emphasizes issues of the embodied mind in literary texts, and explores the inventive and discriminating powers of thought – as well as the projections of identity and relatedness – staged and expressed by imaginative writing in the ‘long nineteenth-century’. Within each chapter a writer is seen as investigating the physical or emotional determinants of mind, as well as the social conditions of subjectification, through the figurative, dramatic and subjective means of their art.
… The individual author chapters examine a singular, exemplary, instance of how acts of mind, and moments of self-awareness, are generated from emotional or physical response: musical experience in Blake; the recreational activity of walking in Wordsworth; fantasies of resentment in Poe; moments or modes of cross-gender, feminine, identification in Tennyson; bodily sensation, and self-separation, in Charlotte Brontë; eye contact and looking in Hardy. In each case, the exampled texts from these authors and poets display an affective or physical inspiration. Hughes draws on themes of ethical subjectivity in the work of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze to provide essential reading for all those involved in nineteenth-century literature.

The chapter on Charlotte Brontë is “I Love”, “I Hate”, “I Suffer”’: Feeling, Subjectivity, and Form in Charlotte Brontë’s Fiction.

Romances of Free Trade
British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century
Ayse Celikkol
OUP USA
304 pages | 235x156mm
978-0-19-976900-1 | Hardback | 11 August 2011
Romances of Free Trade offers a new account of the cultural work of romance in nineteenth-century Britain. Çelikkol argues that novelists and playwrights employed this genre to represent a radically new historical formation: the emergence of the global free-market economy. In previous centuries, the British state had pursued an economic policy that privileged domestic goods over foreign ones. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, liberal economists maintained that commodity traffic across national borders should move outside the purview of the state, and their position gained increasing support. Amid economic transformation, Britons pondered the effects of vertiginous circulation. Would patriotic attachment to the homeland dissolve along with the preference for domestic goods? What would be the fate of the nation and the empire if commerce were uncontrollable? The literary genre of romance, characterized by protagonists who drift in lawless spaces, played a privileged role in addressing such pressing questions. From the figure of the smuggler to episodic plot structure, romance elements in fiction and drama narrated sprawling global markets and the fluidity of capital. Exploring works by Walter Scott, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and their lesser-known contemporaries, this book historicizes globalization as it traces the sense of dissolving borders and the perceived decline of national sovereignty back into the nineteenth century.

The chapter on Charlotte Brontë is 6. Mutuality, Marriage, and Charlotte Brontë's Free Traders.

Categories: Books, Scholar

Read More

"Even now, Jane is pretty ahead of her time"

FemPop talks about the TV series Game of Thrones but the reviewer begins the article with a confession:

Ten years ago I was a freshman in college and taking courses about feminism and writing terrible Buffy spoofs and learning that Anne was my favorite Brontë. I was also reading a lot because high school was over and I suddenly had a wealth of free time.

Two books (besides my beloved The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) really struck me that first year. Gone With the Wind which may feature one of the best female anti-heroines ever, and Game of Thrones. (Alex Cranz)

The Ross-shire Journal offers 2x1 tickets for Jane Eyre 2011:

ONE of the most eagerly anticipated new period dramas, a couple of fine romances and a cutting-edge comedy are amongst the September 2-for-1 ticket deals being offered by the Ross-shire Journal in conjunction with Eden Court cinemas. (...)
The following week is a must for fans of the costume drama with the latest reworking of the Charlotte Brontë classic, Jane Eyre. Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender are supported by Judi Dench in Cary Fukunaga’s re-telling of the tale.

And The Telegraph offers to UK residents tickets for the Haddon Hall screening of the film (more information in previous posts):

It is the second time that Haddon Hall has been used as the set for the Charlotte Brontë's novel having appeared in the 2006 version with Toby Stephens and Ruth Wilson.
Film makers returned to the house last year for the latest adaptiation which stars Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender and Jamie Bell.
This Sunday Volkswagen’s See Film Differently is hosting a one-off gala screening the movie at Haddon Hall on Sunday September 4th.
It will give Brontë fans the chance to watch one of the year’s most highly anticipated British films before its general release in cinemas across the UK on Friday, 9th September.
The screening is designed to provide film fans with a unique behind the scenes insight. (...)
The Telegraph has five pairs of tickets to give away.(...)
Those who win tickets will enjoy a pre-screening private viewing of Haddon Hall and Gardens and complimentary cinema style food, followed by an exhibition of original stills from the film.
More information.

Best for film also has 2 pairs of tickets for the event.

IndieWire's The Playlist questions Focus Features Jane Eyre's March premiere:

There’s an inherent bias against anything that doesn’t hit in the fall, regardless of quality: while there’s no way of proving it, we’d bet good money that, had Focus held “Jane Eyre” for the fall, it could have been a contender. Instead, it’s destined for ‘‘most overlooked’ lists, but little beyond that. (Oliver Lyttelton)

The Atlantic considers that Wuthering Heights 2011 may have a chance in the Oscars:

Among the other titles that could generate enough buzz at this fall's major festivals to enter an Oscar race or two: Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights[.]  (Benjamin Mercer)

The Scotsman interviews Mia Wasikowska:

She first read Charlotte Brontë's gothic classic after retreating to her family's home in Canberra, following a year abroad filming Alice and doing other work. "It was the first time I didn't have to go back to school," she says, "so I was at a loss to know what to do with myself."
Instead of simply marking time until the next job, she immersed herself in a pile of canonical literature, including 1984, Animal Farm, To Kill A Mocking Bird and Jane Eyre. "I was in awe of Jane and amazed by her," she says of Brontë's headstrong heroine. "She's such a cool character."
Despite a life blotted by emotional and psychological cruelty, Jane isn't cowed by her "tale of woe", as her employer and future husband, Edward Fairfax Rochester (played by Michael Fassbender in the film), puts it. She chafes against the restrictions placed on her by her status, gender and age, and refuses to believe that people aren't created equal. "Even now, she's pretty ahead of her time," Wasikowska says. "She's got a really strong sense of who she is and she doesn't compromise herself for anybody; and everything that she has become is because of what she has made herself as an individual. She hasn't let certain things in her life damage or weaken her." (Stephen Applebaum)

Wasikowska contacted her agent to ask if anybody was working on a film of the novel.

The Hornell Evening Tribune summarises one of the main challenges of educacion these days:

Students are now reading more, Calkins said, but in “bits and pieces” with texting and Twitter. The educational challenge is to transform “that interest (in reading) to curiosity about Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jack London’s To Build a Fire,” he said. (Al Bruce)

Anne Michaud describes a Jane Eyre moment in Newsday:

Back at home, still chipper about our power loss, my daughter set up a game of Clue. Afterward, we read until the light faded. I had a charming Jane Eyre moment, transported into the 19th century in my imagination as I carried a candle to the basement to feed the cats. Did Jane also scoop kitty litter by candlelight?

It seems that the opening auditions of X-Factor also had a Brontë moment. In Northampton Chronicle & Echo:

People wheeled in for the public to have a good laugh at, like poor Ellen, 47, singing a toe-curling version of What A Feeling or bespectacled mum Ellen, who in her spare time really does think she can do Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. (Richard Edmondson)

RyePatch describes the aftermath of the Hurricane Irene with Brontë humour:

Now that Hurricane Irene has moved on, I'm starting to assess the damage to my Rye Brook home, which is mostly confined to the playroom. There's a broken window. A gusty, romantic breeze keeps ripping around. And the carpeting, soaked, is as covered with grass, dirt and heather as The North Yorkshire Moors. So I better start cleaning up. Either that, or get a girl in here and start performing scenes from "Wuthering Heights." (Peter Gerstenzang)

The Jewish Daily Forward talks about Carmela Ciuraru's Nom de Plume:

Romain Gary chose that name to escape a Russian Yiddish one, and the Brontë sisters wrote as the Bell brothers so that their work would be read, not as women’s, but on its own terms. (Allison Gaudet Yarrow)

Bookish interviews Lena Coakley:

What genres do you like to read in your free time?
LC: Oh, YA fantasy is definitely my first love, but right now I’m also trying to read the literary classics I haven’t gotten to yet. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of the Brontë sisters. Wuthering Heights is definitely the strangest, most perplexing novel I’ve read in a long time. I love it, but I don’t think I’ll ever understand it.

Asylum takes a look at Angra's cover of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights;  Yahoo! Contributor Network posts a review of the Jane Eyre 2011 Blu-ray; The Sheila Variations discusses Mia Wasikowska's performance; Bridget's books, booksblog (in Italian) and Quelques pages (in French) review the original novel; Pensamentos de Uma Batata Transgênica (in Portuguese) reviews The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 1996; bored and crafty is working on a "miniature Wuthering Heights-inspired swing-under-a-tree scene"; Desde la conejera (in Spanish) is reading Wuthering Heights and has seen Jane Eyre 2011.

Categories: Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wuthering Heights

Read More

More auditions and more talks

1. Auditions in Exeter, Devon:

Writer's Block – Theatre to Inspire; would like to invite you to open auditions in this exciting opportunity to join our company for our production of Wuthering Heights (a new adaptation by April De Angelis from the novel by Emily Brontë), a passionate and spellbinding tale of forbidden love and revenge.

Auditions will be held on Tue 30th and Wed 31st August at University of Exeter Mary Harris Memorial Chapel (Prince Of Wales Road, Exeter, Devon, EX4 4PX), starting promptly at 7pm, the session will run until 9pm.You need only attend one of the audition dates listed above and we would be grateful if you could please email us at writersblocktti@yahoo.co.uk and confirm if you plan to attend, providing your full name and a contact telephone number but if you don't get this opportunity then please do just turn up. If you are travelling to audition by car, please park in one of the designated car parks on campus or where there is road parking, check signs for any parking restrictions.

More information
2. A discussion in Parish, New York

The Parish Public Library Book Club 
"Jane Eyre" by English Author Charlotte Bronte, published in 1847.
The next Book Club will meet at the Parish Public Library on August 31st at 7:00pm.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Theatre, Wuthering Heights

Read More

Rochester, Byronic and Bipolar

The Telegraph interviews Michael Fassbender the week before Jane Eyre 2011 opens in the UK (September 9):

Halfway through filming Jane Eyre last spring, temperamental weather was causing delays and exacerbating myriad niggling production problems.
'Everyone was exhausted,’ the film’s director, Cary Fukunaga, says, 'and there was a dip in morale.’
One evening, his lead actor, Michael Fassbender, invited Fukunaga, Mia Wasikowska (who plays Jane Eyre) and the producer Alison Owen for supper, where he cooked and served a splendid dish of lamb.
'We all just sat around and enjoyed one of the small, perfect things in life, a good meal,’ Fukunaga says. 'And I remembered exactly why you make movies: it’s not just about the project, but about the process, and I think one thing that makes Michael special is his ability to stop and pause for a second.’(...)
Certainly Fukunaga had only Fassbender in mind when it came to casting Jane Eyre, his performance in Hunger having made a deep impression.
'I hadn’t seen that sort of fierceness in an actor in a long time,’ Fukunaga says. 'There was an intelligence, an intensity and a masculinity that is very difficult to find in a leading man.’
For Fassbender, Jane Eyre is a book that he grew up with; his mother and older sister are 'massive fans’ and he says rather touchingly that he wanted to be in the film 'for them, really, to see what they would make of my Rochester’.(...)
It is indicative of Fassbender’s demented work schedule that when we meet he hasn’t yet seen Jane Eyre.  (...)
There have been 18 previous films of Jane Eyre, and while this one is not groundbreaking, it is heartfelt, beautifully filmed and acted, and undeniably moving. Fukunaga mines all the gothic elements of the novel, combining the bleak beauty of the surrounding moors with the darkly awe-inspiring setting of Thornfield Hall to provide the perfect backdrop for the intense romance between Rochester and Jane Eyre.
Fassbender’s Rochester and Wasikowska’s Jane are the perfect foil for each other; her grave features come alive in his presence, while his black moods are lifted into a teasing playfulness. She is a fiercely independent young woman who disregards convention and status, while he hates the society he is forced to be part of. 'These characters are real equals to each other,’ Fassbender says. 'He’s very untrusting of the world and Jane actually melts away his defences.’
Wasikowska originally trained as a dancer, and consequently brings to the role 'a beautiful physicality and a discipline that comes with that profession,’ Fassbender says. 'People are going to see she’s the perfect Jane.’ (...)
Because Fukunaga is American, Fassbender says, 'he hadn’t grown up with the book, and this meant he brought a fresh eye, he wasn’t as reverent and he has the confidence to make bold decisions. He’s a real academic, he does his research and he knows how to frame a shot so beautifully.’
Moira Buffini wrote the script, and turned the structure of the novel on its head. The film begins with Jane’s frantic escape from Thornfield, after discovering the appalling reality of Rochester’s marriage to Bertha, hidden away for so many years in an attic. Taken in by the Rivers family, her miserable childhood is shown through flashbacks, until she lands the job of governess to Rochester’s ward, Adele. At Thornfield she is taken under the wing of Mrs Fairfax (a scene-stealing performance from Judi Dench), and quietly, gratefully lives for several months before the whirlwind arrival of Rochester.
Fassbender’s Rochester is a tormented soul, constantly on the move, either outside in the grounds or on his horse, his moods switching in a moment; one minute playing the piano, the next shouting and storming out into the garden with his shotgun, firing indiscriminately. 'I almost thought of him as bipolar,’ Fassbender says.
He wanted to show Rochester as 'a Byronic hero, somebody who is carrying the past with him. I wanted that attic room on his shoulders all the time. I wanted to show somebody who had a lot of guards and defences and tricks. I had this feeling that he had been to some very decadent places in his life, and his guilt and bitterness and his lost youth is there in flashes. It’s through Jane that he becomes healed, so I wanted to show a sick person in some respect, and by the end he’s found a peace and a reconciliation.’
Fukunaga is keen to point out the playfulness that Fassbender brings to the character. 'Michael can be tortured and still be intelligent and communicate through his eyes and his emotions all the stress of the life Rochester’s lived,’ he says, 'but also still have that sense of humour, which is key to their attraction to each other.’ (Vicki Read)

The Australian box office of the film is given on Sky News Australia:

Jane Eyre held steady in eighth position:
8. Jane Eyre - $342,607 (Universal)

Holly Cara Price continues reviewing the reality Project Runway for The Huffington Post (do you remember this?):

Heidi tells Anthony that if had been up to her he would have gone home, but Danielle [Everine] is the one dismissed this week for her oh-so-boring, one note look. Back to reading Emily Brontë on the window seat, my dear; gosh, I wish you had been made of stronger stuff!

Good Education gives tips to improve classes:

Bored students in English class might just give classics like Jane Eyre a second chance if they could doodle the drama going down between Jane, Mr. Rochester, and the unknown figure in the attic. Given all the benefits, let's bring drawing—and doodling—back to class. (Liz Dwyer)

The Riverdale Press reports how the Irene hurricane has affected Villa Charlotte Brontë:

Not far from there, homes that comprise the Villa Charlotte Bronte were evacuated for about an hour, starting at around 10 a.m. this morning, shortly after the cliffside behind the building collapsed and sent soil barreling down onto the Metro-North train tracks below.
Blanche Baker Magill, one of the residents evacuated, said the Department of Buildings determined that it was safe for residents to return home.

"There were these three floating concrete slabs, not attached to the foundation, that slid down the hill onto Metro-North, and Metro-North is there working on it now,” Ms. Baker Magill said. "The good news is villa charlotte bronte has survived an earthquake and a hurricane. It was built in 1928 so it’s impressive.”

Debbie Jacob in the Trinidad & Tobago Guardian lists her favourite novels:

Wide Sargasso Sea—The prequel to Jane Eyre, written by Dominican writer Jean Rhys, gives the first Mrs Rochester her Caribbean voice. This is one of the most popular and important novels to come out of the Caribbean.

The Democrat and Chronicle asks readers of the Rochester area about are their favourite books and not surprisingly Jane Eyre is one of them:

10. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847). (Catherine Roberts)

flick feast reviews Fright Night (2011) and mentions the Wuthering Heights reference we reported some days ago:

Other opportunities for cleverness are skipped: in early exchanges Charley’s improbably foxy girlfriend (the pretty but, er, bloodless Imogen Poot (sic)) picks up a copy of Wuthering heights from his bedside table and flips through it wantonly. They discuss it briefly (him: it’s boring. Her: oh, no: it’s quite sexy). Cue an extended riff about Wuthering Heights, right? Farrell as Heathcliff (you could even get in some knowing digs about Colin Firth)? Wrong. Wuthering Heights is tossed aside and gets no further mention. (Olly Buxton)

flick filosopher recovers the trailer of Jane Eyre 1944; a local sophomore who is reading Jane Eyre this summer on Wauwatosa Now; chucle1532 and Silence's Blog (in Romanian) review Jane Eyre 2011; 1001 coiffures (in French) posts a tutorial on Charlotte Gainsbourg's hairstyle in Jane Eyre 1996; Seitenansichten (in German) reviews Wuthering Heights.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights

Read More

Jane speaking Spanish

Spanish Janes. A new edition of Jane Eyre:

Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
03/06/2011
ISBN: 978-84-670-3696-1
Espasa Calpe (Austral Ediciones Especiales)

It seems that the translation is still the 1943 one of Juan G. de Luaces which, as is documented (*), was slightly altered to fit the moral codes of the Franco regime.

(*)ORTEGA SÁENZ, Marta (2008) «The Role and Functon of the Translator in post-Civil War Spain: Juan G. de Luaces», en PEGENAUTE, L.; DECESARIS, J.; TRICÁS, M. y BERNAL, E. [eds.] Actas del III Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Ibérica de Estudios de Traducción e Interpretación. La traducción del futuro: mediación lingüística y cultural en el siglo XXI. Barcelona 22-24 de marzo de 2007. Barcelona: PPU. Vol. n.º 1, pp. 283-294. ISBN 978-84-477-1026-3.)

And an abridged audiobook version addressed to Spanish speakers in the US. The description is peculiar, as it reveals most of the 'inconsistent' story:

Jane Eyre - An Abridged Version (Spanish Edition)
Charlotte Bronte (Author), Moshe Ukkle (Translator)
Read by Yadira Sánchez.
YOYO USA Inc (March 15, 2011)
An inconsistent love story: The three Brontë sisters, Jane, Charlotte and Emmy published almost simultaneously, in the middle of the 19th century, three novels, that are already classics of English literature. Probably the most popular has been "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte, because of its great dramatic moments and its breathtaking development. This story of the governess in love with a man who is married to a mad woman, and its development, has captivated the heart of readers who have been faithful to a work that is considered to be fundamental in English literature of this century. Yadira Sanchez makes a passionate reading of this master novel.

Categories: Audio-Radio, Jane Eyre, Translations

Read More

Very promising

The Telegraph announces that on today's BBC One Britain's Hidden Heritage  (7:00 PM) they will take a tour on Norton Conyers:

This series which uncovers Britain’s lesser-known heritage stories comes to a close tonight. Boughton House in Northamptonshire – a stately home known as the “English Versailles” – is one of the subjects and Paul Martin goes digging through its contents, which include a collection of Van Dyck paintings. Elsewhere Ann Widdecombe follows the footsteps of Charles II as he escaped from Worcester and Clare Balding tours Norton Conyers, a Jacobean home thought to be the inspiration for Rochester House in Jane Eyre. 

One of the other inspirations for Thornfield Hall is North Lees Hall in Derbyshire. The Times talks about this year's edition of the Heritage Open Days (HOD, 8-11 September):

Mr Rochester’s house in Derbyshire North Lees Hall, in Charlotte Brontë’s beloved Hathersage, is credited asthe real-life Thornfield Hall, homeof Mr Rochester, Jane Eyre and the madwoman in the attic. Fortunately, this Elizabethan tower house didn’t get torched. North Lees is a holiday home for most of the year, but paying guests are turfed out during HOD, allowing you to snoop. There will be 30-minute talks on the building’s history, too. Details: ept 8-11; booking for Thursday and Friday tours essential; 0845 090 0194 9 (Gary Cansell)

Wales on Sunday comments on the role of Gary Barlow in the current X-Factor:

Coming under fire from Gary is like having doilies thrown at you by a consumptive Emily Brontë. (Nathan Bevan)

The Telegraph talks about the Venice Film Festival selection, including Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights:

English director Andrea Arnold, a favourite at Cannes, takes her radical Wuthering Heights to Venice. She has reportedly made Emily Brontë’s classic youthful and passionate, and chosen an intriguing new star as Cathy – the striking Kaya Scodelario from television’s Skins. (David Gritten)

The Observer takes a look at the British Autumn 2011 arts calendar:
September:

9 Theatre: We are Three Sisters Blake Morrison's play is inspired by the parallels between Chekhov's Three Sisters and the Brontës. The Northern Broadsides show premieres at the Viaduct theatre in Halifax, then tours.

November:

11 Film: Wuthering Heights Having won a Bafta last year for Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold takes on Emily Brontë's 1847 novel, with Kaya Scodelario as Cathy and young black actor James Howson as Heathcliff.

The Times concentrates on the autumn film season:

Sept 16  Jane Eyre Cary Fukunaga’s atmospheric version pits the wan but steely Mia Wasikowska (Tim Burton’s Alice) against the electric Michael Fassbender in a handsome and satisfying version that makes the landscape as much of a star as the excellent leads.
Nov 4 Wuthering Heights The director Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank) can be relied on to find a fresh take on this old warhorse of a story. She has cast an amateur as her Heathcliff and Kaya Scodelario, from Skins, as Cathy, and updates its plot of doomed love across the social divide to the present. Very promising.(Helen Hawkins and Jonathan Dean)

Christopher Fowler writes in The Independent about Charles Dickens but slips in this comment that BrontëBlog endorses:

Great writers tend to have their leading works repeatedly cherry-picked, until we remember only those that become more familiar with each generation, and have to suffer through the 43rd television version of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, say, while Shirley and Villette are sidelined.

The Philippine Star interviews the author Samantha Sotto:

Top Ten Fave Book: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
 Heathcliff, the first man I loved and hated at the same time. I enjoy characters that you can’t put into a box. (Girlie Rodis)

The Times is not very convinced with the whole book-with-soundtracks thing; enchanted (in Portuguese) reviews Jane Eyre 2011; a film for what The Weekly Squeeze has high expectations;  Jenny Coe posts a Top Withens picture on flickr.

Categories: Brontëana, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Theatre, Wuthering Heights

Read More

Tracy Dockray Illustrates Wuthering Heights

Harper Design has published a new edition of Wuthering Heights with illustrations by Tracy Dockray:

Wuthering Heights
By Emily Brontë
ISBN: 9780062008114
ISBN10: 0062008110
Imprint: Harper Design
On Sale: 8/30/2011

One of the most beloved novels of all time, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights gets a bold and beautiful new treatment in this luminous illustrated edition from Harper Design. The gothic classic’s unabridged text is accentuated throughout by captivating watercolor artwork from acclaimed illustrator Tracy Dockray, achieving new currency for fans of literary masterworks like Jane Eyre and Bleak House, modern dark romances like Twilight, and illustrated classics such as Christian Lacroix and the Tale of Sleeping Beauty and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Wuthering Heights is one of the world's greatest tales of unrequited love, captivating readers with its intense passion and drama since its publication in 1847. In this special collector's edition, the powerful, complex bond between Heathcliff and Catherine that unfolds in the wild, romantic landscape of the Yorkshire moors is beautifully presented in illustrated form for the first time.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Illustrations, Wuthering Heights

Read More

Brontë mania is here to stay

Two articles in The Times salute the forthcoming Brontë season in British cinemas. Hannah Betts repeats some of the usual late feminist criticism of Jane Eyre (the castration of Rochester, etc...) and adds some boutades à la Tanya Gold, trying to convert Charlotte Brontë into a single militant:

A new celluloid Jane Eyre will shortly be upon us, and in it a Hollywood hottie will be given the requisite make-under/Jane-over. It is a guise that Victoria Wood described in her skit on the Haworth industry, Brontëburgers. Charlotte Brontë, she noted, was no looker, but these days she’d have sported some blusher and a perm. Unlikely, one feels. William Thackeray’s daughter, Anne, recalled a dinner at which Currer Bell frustrated the family’s “wild excitement” by Janian mumbling to the governess, provoking a guest to observe that it was the dullest evening she had ever spent and causing her father to do a runner to his club.
Brontë reserved her passion for her writing. Despite Jane’s “Reader, I married him”, the novel constitutes a spinster manifesto. Ms Eyre is a plain, poor, independent, bolshily articulate career girl – reserved yet hotly neurotic – with a pronounced streak of S&M. Proposed to by the man of her dreams, she fears the loss of name and identity and detests feeling kept and dressed up like a doll. She rejects his rival because the sex wouldghastly, and marries Rochester only once he has been emasculated and she holds the financial clout. Reader, I crippled him. It remains the most radical text a child will read. Unless, of course, they get hold of Villette, in which the hero is obliged to go missing at sea so that the heroine is not compromised by wedlock. Our poster spinster did finally get hitched, dying of shame less than a year later.

And Valerie Grove interviews Blake Morrison and gives a solid article about the Brontës now and then:

The square grey stone parsonage alongside the grim slabs of gravestones, the wild and windswept moorland beyond: here the Rev Patrick Brontë brought his doomed family to live in 1820. Today visitors flock in their thousands to see the Brontë sisters’ tiny shoes and the thumb-sized books that they wrote as children, in microscopic script. Despite its remoteness, Haworth Parsonage is second only to Stratford-upon-Avon among literary shrines. For a century and a half the Brontë story has held the world in thrall. It fits into an ancient English narrative tradition: three sisters living with their lone father (woodcutter or monarch) is a is a staple theme of folklore, from Beauty and the Beast to King Lear. The three surviving Brontë sisters would ceaselessly walk around the dining-room table, or sit talking, drawing, secretly writing novels and poetry. The errant brother, Branwell, their “chief genius”, adds a dash of dangerous testosterone to their legend. Collectively they possessed what we most admire in Victorian literary giants: thwarted romance, tragic loss and early deaths. Beneath the apparently repressed and isolated spinsterhood, sidelined into working as governesses, they seethed with fury — and in their writing they voiced it. And what was shocking in 1847 is still exciting in 2011. This autumn there are two major big-screen adaptations — Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre and Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights — and a new biographical Brontë play by Blake Morrison. It’s time to brace yourselves for a new wave of Brontë mania. [...].
Now the novelist Blake Morrison has loosely adapted Chekhov’s Three Sisters into a Brontë play, We Are Three Sisters. The evening before we met, Morrison had taken a walk from Haworth Parsonage up to Top Withens (a seven-mile round trip), the ruined farmhouse still regarded as the prototype of Wuthering Heights. He grew up not far away, in Skipton, “so any literary influence that was in the air came from Haworth”. He once wrote a Wuthering Heights musical with Howard Goodall, scuppered only by Tim Rice’s Heathcliff, starring Cliff Richard. But Morrison’s favourite Brontë novel is Jane Eyre: “Emily fans say she’s more passionate and innovative than Charlotte, but I find Wuthering Heights structurally a bit of a mess.” He started noting parallels between Chekhov’s Three Sisters and the Brontës ten years ago. Chekhov had certainly read about the Brontës (in the Gaskell biography) soon before he wrote Three Sisters; they even have a troubled and self-destructive brother in common. Morrison found links in the sisters’ frustration and longing to be elsewhere and humour in their bantering dialogue, and “liked the idea of letting a bit of light in”. Playwright’s licence allows him liberties, but anyone toying with the Brontë story has to face the fiercely protective Brontë Society. At a read-through of Morrison's play at Howarth (sic) Parsonage one member queried the line “Branwell’s been screwing money out of Father for years” (a quotation from Charlotte) and another queried the word “automaton” as anachronistic — but it is there, in Jane Eyre. Morrison wanted to show that they were not really three intellectually isolated spinsters from the sticks: they had a cultural life in Haworth, a busy town with a good lending library, “and they went to hear Paganini in Halifax”. Their father — “the hypochondriac whose health they were always fretting over, who outlived them all” — was not the stern, eccentric patriarch usually portrayed. “He had his foibles, but he was an active citizen, supporting education and health in Howarth (sic). He was interested in his daughters’ lives and eventually proud of Charlotte.” Morrison includes the scene in which Charlotte reveals to her astonished father that she has published a book. All Patrick’s aspirations had centred on Branwell, though he educated the three daughters himself after the eldest two died. “It mattered to him that they read poetry and could play the piano. But he was a man of his time: he expected women to be useful around the house and didn’t necessarily want them to marry. He was outraged when his curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, presumed to propose to Charlotte.” Another well-documented episode is Charlotte and Anne’s visit to their publisher in London, determined to scotch a rumour that Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (the sisters’ pen names) were all one male author. This was the moment that Charlotte explained: “We are three sisters.” And the play’s dialogue reflects many thoughts revealed in the sisters’ novels — about women’s lives and expectations, marriage and men — all highly relevant today. “Our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’,” as Charlotte put it. Had she dropped her masculine pen name, Currer Bell, she feared that she would lose with it her strength and courage and would ever after “shrink from writing the plain truth”. [...]
The Fish Tank director Andrea Arnold has cast James Howson, an unknown young black actor from Leeds, as Heathcliff, inspiring not so much a buzz as a roar of expectation. Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre opens next week. It is a stunningly good film, faithfully scripted by Moira Buffini, inevitably melodramatic but firmly rooted in northern earth, aided by the plainspoken Yorkshirewoman Judi Dench’s strong performance as the homespun Mrs Fairfax. Rochester (Michael Fassbender) has the ideal combination of good looks and brooding menace, and the Polish-Australian Mia Wasikowska, 21, is a Jane behind whose enigmatic stillness beats a vivid inner life. I think we may have found at last the perfect Jane Eyre. “The Brontës’ works possess an enduring appeal,” says Morrison. “But the lives of the Brontës are at least as fascinating as the books, and both are as the books, and both are endlessly open to new interpretation.” Brontë mania is here to stay.

The Times also asks some other opinions:

Jeanette Winterson on Wuthering Heights
I read Wuthering Heights when I was 16. I did not read it as a love story; I thought it was a loss story. Heathcliff loses Cathy. Cathy loses Heathcliff. Edgar Linton loses Cathy, their daughter, his life and home. Hindley loses Wuthering Heights. His son Hareton is dispossessed. Heathcliff’s revenge on everyone, including himself, is matched only by Cathy’s death wish. Heathcliff is a foundling. As an adopted child myself, I understood his humiliations, his ardour and his capacity to injure. I also learnt that property is power. Whatever Emily Brontë was doing, it was not the sentimental interpretation of this novel: “All for love and the world well lost.” Cathy is a woman and can’t own property in her own right, therefore she can’t rescue Heathcliff unless she marries Edgar (but Heathcliff has already misunderstood and disappeared). Heathcliff himself starts with nothing, so can’t marry Cathy. His gradual gain of every house, horse and heirloom of the Earnshaws and the Lintons is his revenge and his ruin. What’s love got to do with it? (All right, quite a lot, but this is not a love story.)

John Sutherland on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Anne Brontë was the youngest of a clutch of siblings for whom writing fiction came as naturally as breathing. She followed her two sisters into the genteel spinster’s hell of governessing. Unwisely, she secured her brother Branwell a tutor’s position with her own employers, the Robinsons. He was dismissed from that post for “proceedings ... bad beyond expression”, namely misconduct with Mrs Robinson. Branwell fell into a “spiral of despair”. He died in 1848 of drink and other complications, aged only 31. Anne memorialises him as Arthur Huntingdon in the The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Descriptions of drunkenness are common enough in literature. What is particularly powerful in The Tenant is the close description of the alcoholic death. [...] The novel was published three months before Branwell’s death. Anne may have hoped that plain-speaking, even through one of her characters, would effect a cure. [...] Not the horror, but the accuracy, is what strikes the reader. Anne survived her brother by only a few months, dying decently, aged 29, of the other family complaint, consumption. Antibiotics would have saved her; AA might have saved him. Thank god for the 20th century.

Joyce Carol Oates on Jane Eyre
“I resisted all the way” — these defiant words of the child Jane, at the start of chapter 2 of Jane Eyre, were quite a surprise for me when I first read this novel as a girl of 13 or 14. [...] My first love had been the more tumultuous Wuthering Heights, and so it had been a challenge for me to see in Jane Eyre the less spectacular, but perhaps more enduring, qualities of female resis the less spectacular, but perhaps more enduring, qualities of female resistance and self-reliance — in the articulate “plain” Jane, qualities of of forthrightness and stubborn irony largely missing in more feminine heroines. The great enduring appeal of Jane Eyre for contemporary readers is Jane’s voice. University students with whom I’ve read the novel are struck by what seems to them the modernity of Jane’s speech — her tone of rebellion, her distrust of her elders and of conventional morality, her expressions of fear, dismay, helplessness, rage. [...]
What are we to make, as contemporary readers and film viewers, of Brontë’s pitilessly harsh portrait of Rochester’s rejected lawfully wed wife, Bertha, a syphilitic madwoman kept captive in an attic room in Rochester’s house? If only, we think, Jane would feel pity for Bertha, and a tug of sisterly solicitude. But to expect this is, perhaps, to expect too much of a novel already quite subversive in its time, and wonderfully alive in our own.

Simon Armitage
Emily B: a new poem
Too much rain in the blood.
Too much cloud in the lungs
One summer in ten a dry wind rushes the moor.
[...]

John Burnside on Apostasy by Charlotte Brontë
In his study of how we play, Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse distinguishes between ‘the theatrical’ and ‘the dramatic’, suggesting that theatrical play conforms to a known script, enacted for a given audience, while the dramatic discards predetermined roles and launches into a game that makes “all scripts useless”. “Dramatically,” he says, “one chooses to be a mother; theatrically, one takes on the role of mother.”
It’s a distinction that might apply to Charlotte and Emily Brontë: for me, it seems that Emily takes on the lover’s role, while Charlotte chooses, and so, affirms it, something we see in her deeply moving poem ‘Apostasy’, which tells the tale of a dying woman who rejects the ministrations of a “solemn Priest” in order to concentrate on memories of her lost husband, Walter, for whose love she “sold her earthly truth”. [...]

Also in The Times there is an interview with Mia Wasikowska:

Jane Eyre, already released in the USA, to an outpouring of superlatives from the critics. “Radiant spirit blossoms in barren land,” gushes The New York Times. “Wasikowska beautifully captures Jane’s watchful, mature intelligence and wounded spirit,” concurs USA Today. “She embodies Jane's most endearing qualities but not for a moment the moist poignance that many of the umpteen previous versions have inflicted on her,” sighs The Wall Street Journal. (Helena De Bertodano)

The Italian press is having a good time describing (without any real knowledge) Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights which will be presented at the upcoming Biennale:

Sex and violence: Non mancherà poi anche un nuovo originalissimo adattamento di Cime tempestose di Andrea Arnold, con un Heatcliff (sic) versione nera e con un particolare concentrato di sesso e violenza. (Alice Zampa in Best Movie)

More sex and violence and... pop: Il 6 settembre sarà poi la volta della versione pop di «Cime tempestose» di Andrea Arnold, dove violenza e sesso abbondano in ogni scena e per la prima volta il protagonista Heatcliff (sic again) sarà nero. (Il Tempo)

Wuthering Pulp: Sono tratti invece da celebri romanzi Cime tempestose di Andrea Arnold, versione pulp del capolavoro di Emily Brontë[.] (Erica Premoli in Milanodabere)

With all that sex Heathcliff had to be renamed, of course.

And as Jane Eyre 2011 opens in Russia next September 1st, several Russian magazines/websites present the film: Glamour, Коммерсантъ, Lostfilm, Woman proposes a poll with fifteen previous Jane Eyre couples, Film.ru, Газета.Ru, Grazia Magazine (with an interview with Mia Wasikowska)...

The Stage interviews Blake Morrison about his upcoming theatre play, We Are Three Sisters:

“I’m trying to get away from the image of the Brontes as rather gloomy and depressed,” says Morrison. “Basing my play on Chekhov gave me plenty of opportunities for humour.” His We Are Three Sisters is based on Juliet Barker’s The Brontes, her huge biography, but he readily admits to using dramatic licence, inventing peripheral characters and telescoping events.
Yet this has had a positive response from what could have been his most critical audience - members of the Bronte Society. “We had a read-through at Haworth in the chapel,” says Morrison. “Juliet Barker and members of the Bronte Society were there and the feedback was okay. I was expecting trouble but people were quite receptive to it, and one man actually said that it was very powerful, better than most other versions of their lives, such as the Shared Experience Bronte.” (...) (Alekz Sierz)

Novel Ideas: Modern Musings on the Long Nineteenth Century in its Virtually Victorian section reviews Jane Eyre 2011:

Arguably the most intriguing characteristic of the new Jane Eyre is that the film’s contemporary stylings still yield a commendably accurate period drama. A large part of the production’s success stems from its acknowledgement of the inevitability of “historical reciprocity”: the notion that modern perspectives will manifest in some form in any assessment, interpretation, or reinvention of the past (or its literature, for that matter). (...)
True to Charlotte Brontë’s original tone, mood, and vision but with a unique contemporary verve, Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre deserves a place of honor in the growing pantheon of nineteenth-century-literature film adaptations. (Emily K. Cody)

We really like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (and Alfred Hitchock's Rebecca, by the way) but we are not sure about what The Daily Advance says:

Rebecca, 1940 - This gothic tale won a Best Picture Oscar, the only Hitchcock film ever to do so. And its story of an unnamed young woman’s return to the haunting Manderley estate outdoes Jane Eyre. (Shirrel Roades)

The Selby Times presents the upcoming edition of the Brontë Mountain Bike Challenge:

Selby area mountain bike enthusiasts are encouraged to take on one of three routes on the Bronte Mountain Bike Challenge in aid of Sue Ryder – Holme Hall on September 18.
The event takes place within the stunning and challenging landscape of ‘Brontë Country’ in the south Pennines, named after the famous literary family who lived in 19th century Haworth and who between them penned classics such as Wuthering Heights and Jayne (sic) Eyre. The three routes are named after the three most famous Brontë sisters. Charlotte is the 31 mile challenge route, Emily is the 21 mile intermediate route and Anne the 11 mile family/beginner route.

Clash Music interviews Jacks Goldstein, singer of Fixers:

What are you reading at the moment?
I'm reading some George Oppen and Bertolt Brecht.
I am also in the middle of Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami.
I want to read Wuthering Heights after too. (Robin Murray)

The Dallas Morning News reviews A Small Hotel by Robert Olen Butler:

Some of literature’s greatest plots would have been ruined by modern technology. Take Romeo and Juliet — if those lovesick teenagers had been able to text each other, there would have been no mix-ups over who was dead and who wasn’t. And what if Jane Eyre could have gone online... (Jenny Shank)

MyNorthwest defends the role of libraries today and slips this reference to Rory Gilmore(?).

You might even discover your child is a savant when they want to bring home Charlotte Brontë at the ripe age of 8. (Alissa Kleven)

Reading in Public posts about Jane Eyre and The Most Illustrious Order of the Bookworms suggests a few books you may want to read if you like Jane Eyre. Feeding the paper ghosts has made a collage inspired by The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Paperblog (Italy) and Filmweb (Poland, with some curious blunders) review Jane Eyre 2011. Meloleggo (also in Italian) reviews the original novel.

Diario de Sevilla (Spain) devotes an article to Bernard Herrmann's one hundredth anniversary:

En Jane Eyre dará rienda suelta a su sensibilidad romántica y a su confesada pasión anglófila (musical y literaria) para crear una atmósfera de misterio gótico que será otra de sus señas de identidad, tanto en el cine (óigase la hermosa y triste música para El fantasma y la señora Muir) como en la radio, la televisión (The twilight zone) o la sala de concierto, para la que compondría la ópera Wuthering Highs, la cantata Moby Dick, una sinfonía y varios conciertos, suites, ballets y piezas de cámara. (Manuel J. Lombardo) (Translation)

El Litoral (Argentina) reviews The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis:

De esta manera comenzará a desplegarse un clima de tensión e intriga sexual en los pasillos y las periferias del castillo, mientras el joven veinteañero irá despachando, una a una, las principales novelas de la literatura inglesa de los siglos XVIII y XIX (Clarissa, Tom Jones, Orgullo y prejuicio, Emma, Cumbres borrascosas, Jane Eyre, Casa Desolada, Middemarch y muchos otros clásicos) y se mantiene al tanto, gracias a la noticia que le hace llegar por correspondencia su hermano Nicholas, de los desmanes sexuales cometidos por su promiscua hermana menor Violet. (Fabricio Welschen) (Translation)

Rue89 (France) loves Little House on the Prairie (both series and novels):

Alors que sa mère s'évertuait à lui répéter qu'une « femme bien élevée n'attire jamais l'attention sur elle », Laura Ingalls Wilder a finalement captivé l'attention de milliers de lecteurs, et de nombreux critiques la placent en tête des héroïnes littéraires aux côtés de Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë et Colette. (Fanny André) (Translation)

Categories: In the News, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Theatre, Wuthering Heights

Read More

Jane in miniature

This article in the New York Times led us to discover Literature in Miniature:

No book lover can possibly resist LiteratureinMiniature.co.uk. This site prints high-quality books in one-twelfth scale (a standard size for miniatures). Page after page, they recreate text and illustrations. Some followers of the site build entire libraries. Volumes for sale include “The Canterbury Tales,” “Gulliver’s Travels,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “Jane Eyre” and “Mrs. Beeton’s Household Management.” A book called “Old Country Cookery” contains recipes like Casserole of Partridge, Vinegar Cake and Jugged Hare. (J. Courtney Sullivan)

This is their Jane Eyre:

Jane Eyre was written in 1847. This story is said to be somewhat autobiographical as Charlotte Brontë worked as a governess herself. Illustrated with tiny pen and ink drawings.
Size: 0.8" x 0.62 x 26 pages.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Weirdo

Read More

The Old School Room, saved?

Good news from Haworth. The threat to the Old School Room (more information in previous posts) seems to be overcome, at least for now. Keighley News informs:

An historic Haworth building which was at risk of being sold off to developers has won a reprieve.
Campaigners have been working to save the Old School Room, which is the only building in Haworth to have been designed and constructed by the Rev Patrick Brontë, father of the famous sisters.
The Church Street property is owned by Haworth Parish Church, but it is in urgent need of restoration. Dry rot was discovered in the building’s roof space in June.
A committee called Brontë Spirit has been investigating how to drum up support for the expensive project.
It has been estimated that nearly £1 million is needed to repair and refurbish the roof.
On Monday, a spokesman for the group said: “Following a series of crisis meetings between the church’s parochial council and Brontë Spirit, it was decided last week that enough potential support had been received for the restoration project to continue for the time being.
“At a meeting last Wednesday it was agreed that archaeologist Dr Angela Redmond, one of the current directors of Brontë Spirit, would lead the project, that the planned application for charitable status would continue and that discussions with two organisations are to be explored.”
Dr Redmond, who had been employed by Brontë Spirit when an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund was being advanced in 2008, said: “We believe that the building has a future with a role in the community and that’s something we’ll be exploring in the next few weeks.
“We were concerned that the lack of funds and support were threatening the project. But we’ve been encouraged by our initial discussions with organisations and individuals who want the Old School Room to be restored and remain true to Patrick Brontë’s vision of having a building available for public good.
“We don’t want to say publicly which organisations have been in touch with us because negotiations are at a delicate stage. No doubt if those discussions are successful it will be possible to make appropriate announcements later.”
The Rev Peter Mayo Smith, the priest in charge at Haworth Parish Church, said: “We’re exploring every avenue and, although we recognise that these are not easy economic times, we believe that it could be possible to secure enough grants to enable us to restore and develop the building as a community asset.
“None of us really wanted to sell the building but we have been in real danger of having to take that drastic step. Fortunately, we have been able to step back from that brink.” (Miran Rahman)

MacLeans explains why Emily Brontë will never be so popular as Jane Austen, and why that's a good thing according to the author:

I’ve read Wuthering Heights so many times that it no longer exists as a wholly absorbing fiction for me; it’s more like a memory. Emily Brontë’s first and only novel, an indecorous riot of emotion and event conducted across the windswept Yorkshire moors, occupies a pivotal moment in the history of literature that’s worth remembering.
Brontë, a writer both raw and refined, is as rough on reader expectation as her characters are on each other. With Wuthering Heights, she turns the romance novel—a genre exemplified, albeit in a comic vein, by that other vicar’s daughter Jane Austen—upside down and grinds its cheerful conventions into the muddy heath with the heel of her little black boot.
Austen and Brontë not only divide the English countryside—Austen’s prose is set mainly among the favourably placed pastures of the English gentry, while Brontë’s havoc plays out in howling northern desolation—they divide readers of 19th century literature. Their novels truly reflect boundaries of temperament.
I don’t feel the same mix of affection and admiration for Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, or even my favourite of Austen’s six novels, that lonely heart’s love dream, Persuasion. Brontë’s frontal assault on civility has all but ruined the Austen oeuvre for me. The charms of Pemberley are utterly lost once you’ve attended the lusty dogfight that is Wuthering Heights.
Ironically Brontë’s singular talent as a writer guarantees that she’ll never achieve the same measure of popular success as Jane Austen. More than 160 years after it was published, Wuthering Heights still resists successful adaptation for film or TV.  That hasn’t stopped people from trying, however. (READ MORE) (Flannery Dean)

The Lancaster Guardian is also awaiting eagerly the premiere of Blake Morrison's We Are Three Sisters:

Familiar faces from television will be shining fresh light on the story of the Brontë sisters in a new play at The Dukes this autumn.
Sophia Di Martino – Polly Emmerson in TV’s Casualty – and Warton-based Becky Hindley, who played teacher-turned-stalker Charlotte Hoyle in Coronation Street, will appear in the Northern Broadsides production of We Are Three Sisters from September 27 to October 1. (...)
We Are Three Sisters is written by Skipton-born Blake Morrison who has five plays to his credit but is best known for his two family memoirs and a study of the Jamie Bulger case. 

The Wall Street Journal reviews the biography of the historian Herbert Butterfield: The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield by Michael Bentley:

Mr. Bentley also conveys a vivid sense of the man beyond his writings. Butterfield's rise from a working-class upbringing in Oxenhope, Yorkshire, to Cambridge University and a high-flying academic career involved more than the traditional tale of a provincial boy made good. Oxenhope lies in a particularly remote part of Yorkshire, made famous by Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights." The bleak landscape matched a paucity of opportunity and a desolate home life for Butterfield, whose parents lived in a constant state of tension.  (William Anthony Hay)

On the Chicago Tribune's RedEye we read an example of dirty talk which we found particularly engaging:

When making requests in bed, there's something to be said about taking a direct approach, much like your last sentence. It's candid, succinct and even involves a touch of profanity, which we all know is one of the major trappings of hotness, right? Otherwise, dirty talk would sound more like a Brontë novel: "Beg pardon, madam. It would give me great pleasure to wuther your heights." (Anna Pulley)

The Sydney Morning Herald presents the upcoming exhibition Beauty from Nature: the art of the Scott sisters in the Australian Museum:

They were the Brontë sisters of the botanical world. Now their illustrations have taken flight. The paintings by the two Scott sisters [Helena and Harriet] are exquisite, in both artistic delicacy and scientific authenticity. (Steve Meacham)

The same newspaper interviews the Australian Senator, Barnaby Jones:

He finds fiction ''frustrating'' but recently read Wuthering Heights.
Did he like it? ''I couldn't stop crying. I was hopeless,'' he says.
It's impossible to know if he's joking or not. (Jacqueline Maley)

Time Out Chicago reviews the film Brighton Rock by Rowan Joffe: 

Rowan Joffe’s update steals from various films without ever synthesizing its own tone. Transplanted to the ’60s and full of sharp-looking mods riding bikes and rioting, the new Brighton Rock is heavily indebted to 1979’s Quadrophenia. Elsewhere—as when Pinkie holds Rose over a cliff, then embraces her—Joffe appears to be making a gloss on Wuthering Heights. (Vadim Rizov)

The Boston Globe interviews Stevie Nicks about her latest release Dreams which includes a song devoted to Wide Sargasso Sea:

She spreads her patented brand of mystical glitter on everything from the emotional ode to our troops “Soldier’s Angel,’’ featuring Mac compatriot Lindsey Buckingham on guitar and vocals, to the expansive rocker “Wide Sargasso Sea.’’ (Sarah Rodman)

We are a bit late reporting this special pre-screening of Jane Eyre 2011 at Haddon Hall, organised by Volkswagen’s See Film Different:

On Sunday 4th September, in conjunction with Universal Pictures, we’ll be bringing this timeless romantic drama to life with an exclusive pre-release gala screening at one of the film’s key locations - the fortified medieval manor of Haddon Hall. It's one of the oldest manor houses in England, which you'll recognise as Thornfield House in the film.
Along with comfy seating and a great screen, ticket winners can look forward to a private viewing of Haddon Hall and the impressive manor grounds. While we can’t promise strange noises from the attic, we can promise traditional English refreshments compliments of Tudor Kitchens. Guests will also have the opportunity to enjoy a post-screening photography exhibition of original film stills.
Winners will need to ensure they can get to Haddon Hall in Bakewell, Derbyshire on Sunday 4th September. Doors will open at 5.15pm and the event should finish at 10.00pm.
Ticket applications close at midday on Friday 26th August. Entrants will be informed if they have been successful the same day and will be required to confirm attendance by Wednesday 31st August.

Matlock Mercury had also some free tickets.

The Age summarises what is the state of the art in unBrontëiteness:

Two 19th-century British novelists, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë. Just this week my beloved dragged me along to see the movie Jane Eyre, which is based on a book by Charlotte who everyone confuses with Emily which is a name that sounds like Emma which is a book by Jane Austen who I always get mixed up with Jane Eyre which was the movie... (Danny Katz)

 The Charleston Post-Courier has an article about the wonders of reading:

I'm one of those strange souls who enjoy rereading a treasured book. The changes in my life over time give new insight to old reads, especially classics such as "To Kill a Mockingbird," "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," "Heidi" or "Jane Eyre." (Robin Stearns-Lee)

Do you think that the print-on-demand thingies will survive the rise of ebooks? An article in The Salt Lake City Tribune discusses other uses of this kind of machines. Not this one, though:

A customer with a hankering for Jane Eyre, for instance, or A History of Daggett County from the University of Utah’s special collections, downloads a digital file from the Web and in about 15 minutes, Espresso [Book Machine] prints, binds and trims a fresh copy. Cost: $10. (Glen Warchol)

The Saint loves ebooks:

Instead of buying or ordering books like Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby, and several others, I could have downloaded them all for free and still had the convenience of carrying them around with me like a normal book. (Tabitha Davidson)

PopMatters talks about and with the group The Jezabels:

Leader singer Hayley Mary says, “I was always obsessed with that whole Brontë-esque gothic melodramatic thing Kate Bush did… I love the performance aspect of people like Freddie Mercury, David Bowie and Cyndi Lauper.”

Philipa Ashley interviews Rowan Coleman:

If you were cast away on a desert island and could take one book, movie and album, what would they be?
Oh, hard questions….The book would be Jane Eyre, but absolutely most favourite book.

A new bookclub which will read Jane Eyre in ABCnewspapers; Escape review Wuthering Heights 2009.

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

Read More