Awards for Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights

Today's the day when the council decides on whether they will close down and sell off Red House. The die is cast. But we would like to thank each and every one of the 154 people who at this moment have taken the time to sign the petition, which we forwarded yesterday to the council in the hopes that they will bear it in mind, together with the rest of the hundreds of letter and emails we know they have received.

Onto something else.Several sites report today the London Evening Standard Film Awards winners. Jane Eyre 2011 and Wuthering Heights 2011 are both winners in different categories:

BEST ACTOR
Michael Fassbender, for Shame and Jane Eyre Three years ago, we were tempted to give Michael Fassbender the Best Actor award for his wrenching turn in Hunger. But we're glad we waited. Shame, another collaboration with director Steve McQueen, is a graphic, graceful film which allows the 34-year-old Fassbender - as hermetically sealed Wall Street sex-addict Brandon - a dizzying amount of scope.
Like Mad Men's Don Draper, Brandon is secretly in free fall. And that plunge accelerates when his clingy sister, Sissy, comes to town. At one point, Brandon watches Sissy sing - or, rather, keen - New York, New York and a tear runs down his cheek. The song is heartbreaking but we know Brandon is hearing - and seeing - something else. Fassbender's expression draws us into that invisible, inaudible place.
He's just as compelling as a beleaguered Rochester, in Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre. Love and lust. This guy's got all the bases covered.  (Charlotte O'Sullivan)
LONDON FILM MUSEUM AWARD FOR TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT
Robbie Ryan for his cinematography on Wuthering Heights His sensational photography allowed the Yorkshire moors to become a formidable character in Andrea Arnold's radical take on Wuthering Heights. Robbie Ryan plunged into the mud and mist with a handheld camera, luxuriating in the appalling weather. The result is a palette of rusty orange bracken, grey crags and wind-whipped sage grasses. The expected panoramas are clipped by shooting in the boxy 4:3 aspect, forcing the elements in upon the characters.
Indoors, Ryan often shot in candlelight, almost making a reel of Old Master portraits. While the dialogue was sparse, the shafts of sunlight or dust motes spoke volumes, and Arnold's decision to focus closely on insects or plants meant moths and black beetles roamed the screen like immense monsters. Irish-born Ryan is equally up to shooting urban claustrophobia, and was the cinematographer on Arnold's previous films, Red Road and Fish Tank. His style has been compared to Emmanuel Lubezki, Terrence Malick's director of photography. (Kate Muir)

John Sutherland is a bit tired of the Dickens celebrations. Not the best way probably to promote his own Dickens Dictionary in The Guardian:

So, yes, give Dickens a round of applause on his 200th birthday. But let's not forget the others. They're just as good – or better.
My 10 Victorian novels that are as good as, or better than, anything Dickens wrote:
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell

HitFix In Contention is glad about it:

I'm also delighted to see yet another of my Top 10 films from last year, "Wuthering Heights," rewarded for Robbie Ryan's staggering cinematography -- over a formidable field of technical nominees that also included "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" production designer Maria Djurkovic and the remarkable sound design of "Kevin." (Guy Lodge)

Margot Livesey's The Flight of Gemma Hardy continues being reviewed. From The Dartmouth:

Like most Charlotte Bronte lovers, I was more than skeptical when I first heard about Margot Livesey’s latest novel, a modern retelling of “Jane Eyre” that was released this month. In writing “The Flight of Gemma Hardy,” Livesey took an enormous risk, creating a modern-day adaptation of one of the must beloved Victorian classics. [...]
Overall, however, Livesey’s novel was far from a trashy rehashing of the untouchable, timeless classic. Unlike many hokey adaptations of great classics, “The Flight of Gemma Hardy” is strikingly smart. Her references to other 19th-century authors, including Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, show the range of her literary influences. [...]
The true strength of “The Flight of Gemma Hardy” lies in the fact that Livesey does not attempt to recreate or outshine “Jane Eyre,” but rather uses its plotlines to craft a beautiful story of her own. Livesey’s affinity for her homeland seeps through in her vivid depictions of the Scottish coast, paralleling Brontë’s own proclivity for the English moors, and Livesey’s love of Brontë’s classic is evident in her careful treatment of its characters and plot. (Shannon Draucker)

WBUR shares the beginning of the novel and tells about Margot Livesey's inspiration:

Author Margot Livesey read Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” when she was a nine-year-old in Scotland and identified strongly with the orphan Jane.
Like Jane Eyre, Livesey went to boarding school at a young age and felt like an outsider: She was poorer than most of her classmates and she was the target of bullies. Now Livesey pays tribute to Jane Eyre, but also incorporates some of her own history in her book “The Flight of Gemma Hardy.” [...]
Livesey tells us that at first, she was appalled at the idea of writing another version of Brontë’s book, but then she realized that the story of the orphan appeals to a universal audience.  Livesey not only wanted to pay tribute to Brontë’s work but also to meditate on how women’s lives have changed (and not changed) since Brontë was writing.

Michael Gilmour discusses Anne Brontë's Religious Imagination in The Huffington Post:

Anne is that other Brontë, easily and often overlooked next to her better-known sisters Charlotte and Emily, the authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights respectively. For readers interested in the intersections of theology, the Bible, and creative writing, however, Anne Brontë's two novels, poetry, and correspondence offer a wealth of fascinating material, as these few notes on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (published in 1848, under the name Acton Bell) attempt to illustrate.
Soon after her marriage to Arthur Huntingdon, the protagonist Helen writes in her diary about a quarrel with her new husband: "Arthur had told me the whole story of his intrigue with Lady F- ... It was some consolation to find that, in this instance, the lady had been more to blame than he; for he was very young at the time, and she had decidedly made the first advances, if what he said was true." This lack of precision about the woman's full name is intriguing. Withholding the name suggests broad applicability, as if the character is a type, not limited to any particular situation. Indeed, this is something important to Brontë who explains that her purpose in writing The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is to warn readers against certain behaviours. It follows that this nameless woman serves as a model of infamy, a paradigm of villainy whose particular location in time and space is of secondary importance. She is a classic femme fatale. (Read more)

A reader of The Telegraph  writes in praise of The Whitby Bookshop:

They love having visitors and the resident cat will come and sit on your knee! They enjoy doing events, I have made mini books there with children, attended talks by female crime writers, historians, all sorts, and it is where GP Taylor had his first signing for his self-published book Shadowmancer. Waiting in line for him to sign a copy for my children, then chatting with him, gave me the impetus to self-publish my own book Talli's Secret, about the Brontës, Dyspraxia, and bereavement. This book was listed for Whitbread and got me to a Gala Evening at the O2 where I met Feargal Sharkey, Lembit OPik and a Bond film maker who might- one day- make it into a film! And all because of my lovely favourite book shop, Whitby Book Shop- feet away from where Dickens stayed at the White Horse and Griffin. (Julie Noble)

Surrender to the Void and Les filles folles post about Jane Eyre 2011 and Wuthering Heights 2011 respectively.