Middle-class writers and Omar Little, a Brontë hero

First of all, for more on the good news about Red House, see this post.

Yesterday marked Charles Dickens's 200th birthday and a several sites mentioned the Brontës in their articles. The Guardian listed different opinions on Bleak House:

In short, Esther is prissy and meek; hardly an up-to-date feminist role model. She is also a pain. But don't take it from me, take it from Charlotte Brontë – who said she intensely disliked Esther for being so consistently "the cheerful woman and nobly forgetful of self". [...]
Furthermore, as Charlotte Brontë (who knew a thing or two about unreliable narrators) must have understood, there's more to Esther than simple good nature. As the book progresses she reveals a dark, angry wit. (Sam Jordison)

The Telegraph and Argus reminisces about Dickens's two-night stay in Bradford in December 1854:

Here’s an intriguing thought. Did Bradford’s most notable novelist of the time, Charlotte Bronte, come down from Howarth [SIC!] to attend either of the two Dickens readings at St George’s Hall?
Probably not. The recently-married author of Jane Eyre and Vilette [sic] was pregnant and seriously ill from a chill she had caught while out walking on the moors.
She was to die the following March, not yet 40. (Jim Greenhalf)

(Incidentally, the same newspaper lists today's local attractions, including Brontë country, in another article).

The American looks at Dickens's origins:

Most English novelists before Dickens had come from the gentry, such as Jane Austen, or the learned classes, such as the Brontë sisters, whose father was a clergyman. Like all good novelists, they wrote about the world they knew. But Dickens had known a different world growing up. It was a world that would imbue him with a deep interest in social reform, an interest that perfectly melded with the reformist instincts of the rising Victorian age. (John Steele Gordon)

On Red Pepper, Terry Eagleton also looks at his origins and states quite a different thing:

Dickens was born into that most contradictory of all social groups, the lower middle class. So, in fact, were most of the great 19th century novelists, from the Brontë sisters to George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.

The BBC News looks into why Dickens is buried in Westminster Abbey:

"There hadn't been a literary celebrity buried in Westminster Abbey since Dr Johnson at the end of the 18th Century."
He said the Romantic poets had either been too louche, like Byron, or too provincial, like Wordsworth, while the Brontë sisters were not seen as eminent enough, Thackeray had already gone to Kensal Green Cemetery, and Stanley had wanted a big name.
"Dickens was the most famous man of his time," Prof Sanders said.

And LJWorld 'remembers the Dickensian aspect of the "The Wire" on Charles Dickens' 200th birthday':

DeLyria and Robinson describe the characters that make “The Wire,” with detailed looks at “slimy” Scott Templeton, Omar Little, “a Brontë hero,” “bourgeois merchant” Stringer Bell and Detective Jimmy McNulty, “used and exploited by corrupt social systems.” (Alex Parker)

Coincidentally, the Daily Mail has an article covering Schools Minister Nick Gibb's opinion on the state of schools in the UK:

Schools Minister Nick Gibb said ‘shadows of Charles Dickens’s world’ persisted in the country’s poorest areas despite major social advances. [...]
Out of more than 300,000 who took the country’s most popular paper last year, just 1,236 read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, 285 read Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd and 187 read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. (Laura Clark)

Collider interviewed Andrea Arnold at Sundance.

How long was this project bubbling up inside you?  How long had you known that this was something that you wanted to tackle? Arnold:  It had a sort of strange beginning really because I never ever in a million years thought I would do an adaption.  In fact, I was very against them.  I have always felt that the form was so different and that a book is such a very different thing to a film, and I have always believed in original screenplays.  For the cinema you should be thinking in images and you should be thinking in a different way really to a book.  So I never ever imagined that I would do an adaptation.  But I got an email out of the blue saying if I would be interested in doing it.  It has been a book that I have been really fascinated with and I just made a very instinctive decision to go with it even though it was in lots of ways something that I would not normally do.  A lot of people were actually surprised that I did because I was in the middle of writing something else that was an original screenplay and it was my own thing.  I was actually in the middle of doing that when I got offered this.  I don’t know, it was a mad instinctive decision.
Is this something that you have known for a long time?  Was this something that you read a long time ago that connected you to another part in your life? Arnold:  Well, when I read this book I was probably in my early 20s or late teens, and that is a very kind of particular time.  So I think you’re right – it probably was some sort of connection to that part of my life.  But also I really have had a lot of nature and that sort of visceral thing in my films and I felt that this was a film in which I could really explore that.  I was going to be spending a couple of months on the moors, which is one of the main reasons why I wanted to do it. [laughs] I mean, there were lots of reasons.  The thing is that I always think that even though those things seem like simple reasons for doing things actually have a lot of deep meaning in the reasons why you do things. I don’t think you can question your instinct; you should always trust it.  My instinct has usually been pretty good in the past.  I often will make a sort of rash decision like that and leap in without really thinking what the journey might bring. [...]
Often times you’ll have the script and then you get on set and due to whatever myriad of reasons things change such as locations or actors.  How much was it between what you originally wrote and what I saw on the screen yesterday?Arnold:  I would say that it is quite close.  I think the essence of what I had written…I tried to write something that was very visceral.  The first thing I wrote was an outline that had words in it that made me feel each thing and made me feel each scene in a sort of visceral way, and then I sort of turned that into a script.  I think the essence of that is in the film.  I wouldn’t say…it is funny because I think the second bit where they are older I felt very pushed around by the book.  It was one of those things where the story becomes so sort of not exactly intricate but it has its own life, and it doesn’t really matter what you do it with it.  It kind of pushes you back and it definitely has its own life.  I definitely felt pushed around by the story in the adult part of it.  The first part of it I think is more me where I let myself roam a bit in my mind.  I read in the book that they shared a bedroom and I thought, “Wow.  That is interesting for two young teens to be sharing a bed in the bedroom.  That is a very sensual thing, especially when they have this connection.”  So I wanted to see them in that room and in the bed, especially with the wind and the rain outside and this kind of bed that she has, which is like a little room in itself.  I think in that bit I allowed myself…I was able to put more of myself into it and let my imagination go a little bit.  But the second bit where they are adults – I was definitely more of a slave to the book, the story, and what needed to come out.
Watching the film, for me at least as an audience member, the beginning is very you.  There is following people from behind and it is very free flowing.  The aesthetic feels a little different than when they are older. Arnold:  I completely agree with you.  The first part really is more me.  The second part, as I said, I just felt more restricted because of the story having to be a certain way.  I do wonder if that is little bit partly to do with me rushing the script and not really allowing myself the room to let those things kind of grow and sort of…
Do you think it also has to do with the fact that you’re focusing on two young kids and two young teens?  If you talk to young teens like that they have a different existence and they see the world differently.  Everything is just different.  When you are older everything is structured and you understand how life can beat you down.  It is sort of that way in the movie. Arnold:  It’s true.  Also, Cathy’s life is more ordered.  She can’t…they aren’t roaming.  They don’t have that time.  I’m sure most of us remember being a kid and you have all of this endless time where two weeks before Christmas feels like ten years.  I used to go to bed to try and go to sleep to try and make it go faster. [laughs] (Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub)

The interview is available on audio format too.

The Telegraph carries an article on British films seen at Sundance this year:

Despair set in that evening while watching the desecration of one of Britain’s finest stories, Wuthering Heights. Director Andrea Arnold shot this quintessentially landscape tale in 1980s-TV-sized 4 x 3 proportions, explaining at the screening that this was “to show more sky.” In fact, this framing just blacked out the sides of the screen, dulling the impact of the desolate Yorkshire dales where her crew filmed. Arnold, who told the audience that “the jet-lag’s made me a little doo-lally”, chose two black actors to play Heathcliff on the grounds that “Emily Brontë makes five references to him not being white”. That could have been an interesting twist, had the untrained, apparently undirected actors playing her romantic lead not spoken in a 21st century dialect: “Oh, Caffy, per-lease…”
As distraught as Heathcliff on discovering the death of his beloved, I headed to Main Street to a concert by Manchester-born bard David Gray. . . (Sebastian Doggart)

More reviews of Margot Livesey's The Flight of Gemma Hardy - not very good ones today though. The Washington Post:

The key was emphasizing Jane’s righteous fury and the plot’s outrageous melodrama. Those same elements must have appealed to Margot Livesey when she first read the novel at the age of 9 while sitting in a room that looked over the Scottish moors. (What 9-year-old doesn’t like a good Bil­dungs­roman?) In a brief preface to “The Flight of Gemma Hardy,” the writer notes that her childhood bore an eerie resemblance to Jane’s: She was poor and lonely. She was sent to an all-girls school where the other students bullied her. She prayed nightly for the place to burn down.
Now, approaching 60, with six novels behind her, Livesey has recast Bronte’s novel in the mid-20th century. She claims that “The Flight of Gemma Hardy” is “neither my autobiography nor a retelling of ‘Jane Eyre,’ ” but that’s a little like saying Mr. Rochester is not a married man. In fact, large swaths of “Gemma Hardy” track “Jane Eyre” closely. “Small and plain” as she may be, that original girl is a tough act to follow. [...]
Readers who find Bronte’s style too thick and florid will appreciate Livesey’s smooth and lucid prose. She’s a fine storyteller who can maintain the antique flavor of her tale with far simpler sentences and an updated vocabulary.
But like a production of “Twelfth Night” where all the characters are played as cowboys or Prohibition-era gangsters, “Gemma Hardy” left me wondering why “Jane Eyre” needs to be resettled in the late 1950s. Livesey makes little of the contrast between the two tales or even the contrast between the two eras. Indeed, Gemma’s life in these small, remote towns seems so much closer to the early 19th century than the mid-20th that I was always startled when an automobile intruded on the scene. Livesey says that she wanted Gemma to “come of age just slightly before the rising tide of feminism — the pill, equal pay, discrimination,” but why modernize a young woman’s struggle and omit the fundamental revolutions of life for modern women?
The larger problem, though, is that Gemma is a plainer plain Jane. She rails and she rages, but she never attains the volcanic fury of her predecessor, which, after all, is what makes Jane so hypnotic. Writing anonymously on the Yorkshire moors, Bronte appeals directly to our sense of victimization, our smothered superiority. Why are we not loved? Why don’t people recognize us for who we really are? How long must we endure this “ever-torturing pain”? These are the broiling adolescent questions that “Jane Eyre” gives voice to in such full-throated cries. The novel allows us to luxuriate in our wounded sense of others’ unreasonable disregard for how wonderful we really are. And that same tone of emotional extravagance is reflected in the marvelously gothic plot of “Jane Eyre” that finally bursts into flames and consumes everything.
By modulating all those elements of Brontë’s classic, Livesey has produced a novel that’s far more reasonable, but what more withering thing could someone say about a well-written story? The thunderstorm romance that crashes through “Jane Eyre” is about as disruptive in these pages as a passing cloud. The sizzling eroticism of the 1847 novel makes the tepidness of this modern book’s sexuality all the more baffling.
We want to see “passion in every lineament,” but dangerous Mr. Rochester has become neutered Mr. Sinclair — sometimes aloof, but hardly threatening. (No need to bother Timothy Dalton; we can use Hugh Grant for the film version.) As Mr. Sinclair jokes with Gemma, “It’s not as if I have another wife.” Yes, poor Bertha hasn’t just been removed to the attic; she’s been evicted from the story entirely, replaced by a clotted plot complication that produces barely enough heat to keep the book moving, let alone burn down the mansion. (If you want a different view on “Jane Eyre,” go back to Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea” — it still smolders.) (Ron Charles)

And The Harvard Crimson:

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery—or so the saying goes. Yet the line between inspiration and sheer duplication is a thin one, and crossing over can be all too subtle. Charlotte Brontë’s classic “Jane Eyre” tells the story of a young orphan girl who is sent to a boarding school by her abusive relatives and later falls in love with the guardian of the girl she takes care of. After the man betrays her trust, she runs away, finds family, and eventually ends up living happily ever after with newfound riches and a repentant lover. Funnily enough, “The Flight of Gemma Hardy” tells that same exact story.
Author Margot Livesey wrote her latest novel in homage to “Jane Eyre.” Her adaptation of the well-known Victorian novel, however, fails to add enough modern spark and vivacity to the old story; the end result is noticeably lacking in originality. Although the writing is impressive, the story moving, and the characters heartwarming, the blatant replication of such a revolutionary piece of literature creates the unshakeable notion that “The Flight of Gemma Hardy” is simply an uninspired counterfeit of the original. [...]
Though the story is set more than 100 years after “Jane Eyre,” Livesey includes timeless themes in her story that were also present in Brontë’s novel. There is a great emphasis on Gemma’s increasing separation from her religion. After she is asked if she believes in God, Gemma replies, “I don’t know. I used to because of my uncle, but since he died I’ve met plenty of people who claim to be good Christians and wouldn’t cross the road to help a starving child. If that’s what it means to believe in God, then I’d rather not.” Although thematic messages like this are important, it seems like a choice of convenience, not of narrative necessity, to include moral dilemmas identical to those present in the original. The end result is a plethora of issues like class structure, feminism, and the search for self that are left mostly unexplored. Prominent themes like these from “Jane Eyre” appear obligatory in “The Flight of Gemma Hardy,” and Livesey’s lack of committment to her themes creates a novel nowhere near as poignant as the original.
But this underwhelming facsimile of a classic novel does not disappoint completely. If viewed merely as a homage to the original, it is clearly a poor silhouette of “Jane Eyre,” but if read as a stand-alone novel, the uninspired nature of the book fades into the background, and the liveliness of the characters shines through due to the descriptive emotional territory Livesey creates. Reliving the experiences of Jane and Rochester through Gemma and Sinclair—one aspect of the original work that receives full exploration—feels natural and touching. For a book with such a broad timeline, Livesey paces the story well—an important skill. She does not rush through the early years to establish Gemma as a likeable, independent, and loving young woman, and so Gemma’s transformation from a plain, quiet young girl to a confident, intelligent young lady is believable. (Charlotte M. Kreger)

The Independent wonders who is behind the pseudonym Philip Carter, author of the thriller Altar of Bones:

Carter returns us to the conundrum of contemporary literary anonymity; is it an authentic desire, a dissembling marketing trick, or a bit of both? In Carter's case, the author is not exactly taking deep cover – his website describes him as an "anonymous bestselling international author". This handily points out past credentials and provides a tantalising clue to readers. In 19th-century terms, it would be like Charlotte Brontë's publisher describing the real identity behind Currer Bell as "a Northern writer whose gender might surprise you" on the publication of Jane Eyre. (Arifa Akbar)

Toronto.com reviews the music album Something by Chairlift:

All over-intellectualization aside, in any case, this is a terrific record. Opener “Sidewalk Safari” preens like a better version of La Roux and sucks you in accordingly, but when a clickety-slick nod to the opening beats of Michael Sembello’s Flashdance-soundtrack hit “Maniac” gives way to full, flowing, Brontë-esque Kate Bush romantic fancy a few minutes later on the breathtaking “I Belong In Your Arms,” you know you’re in for something a little deeper and more ambitious than mere ‘80s-night karaoke. (Ben Rayner)

Abigail's Ateliers speculates on what Emily Brontë's 'lost novel' would have been like. Doorway in the Tree writes briefly about Wuthering Heights.