Jane Eyre needs to be re-read every couple of years

Yesterday was William Shakespeare's birthday and a couple of websites' celebrations included Brontë mentions. Ben Arogundade wondered in The Huffington Post whether Othello was really black.

The apparent ambiguity that surrounds the lead character's ethnicity makes one wonder if it was a deliberate ploy used by Shakespeare to leave things open to theatrical interpretation. This is the same device used by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights. The reader is rendered unsure whether the character of Heathcliff is actually black, white or Other. Brontë simply describes him as "a Lascar" (an Indian seaman) and a "dark-skinned gipsy," leaving the rest to us to interpret.

The Daily Kos columnist writes,

In the spring of 1965 I was a romantic young person, wandering through England all by myself.  For as long as I could remember, England had beckoned to me across all of my enthusiasms—the William books by Richmal Crompton when I was a child, the novels of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, the poetry of Keats, Shelley, and Rossetti, the lonely and ultimately tragic figure of T. E. Lawrence, and—more recently—the Beatles. So I saved my money and set off across the Atlantic to see “this scepter’d isle,” Perfidious Albion, this blessed plot. (Diana in NoVa)

And of course Shakespeare's birthday is World Book Night. Part of Grazia Daily's celebrations included an interview with Maggie O'Farrell:

Grazia Daily: What’s your favourite ever book? Maggie O’Farrell: That’s really hard! A book that I’ve given to a lot of people is Jane Eyre because it’s one of those books that you can read at different ages. It’s a book that I re-read myself and it takes on different meanings at different stages of your life. I think there are certain books that need to be re-read every couple of years and that’s definitely one of them for me. (Delphine Chui)

Another author interviewed: Jennifer Adams (author, among others, of Little Miss Brontë: Jane Eyre) by Book Equals.

What was the most challenging part of writing transforming the novels? Jennifer Adams: Taking complex and vibrant novels and condensing them down to a few words is almost impossible! I had to figure out a way to retell the stories, while preserving the tone of each book and respecting its narrative. Each one retells itself in a way that works best for it. And Alison’s great illustrations help preserve the feeling of each novel. For example, Alice in Wonderland is told in bright almost psychadelic colors that go with the whimsical otherworldly story in that book, while the color palette of Jane Eyre is somber and very befitting the tone of that book. [...]
What other novels are you planning on transforming? Jennifer Adams: We have some very exciting books in the works that I can’t talk about just yet, but I can say you can look forward to these two awesome titles in the series this fall: “Little Master Stoker: Dracula” and “Little Master Dickens: A Christmas Carol.” We are also going to be launching some plush dolls, tote bags, and buttons with Alison’s fabulous art this summer, so stay tuned! (Sandrine Sahakians)

Coincidentally, Quirky Bookworm is giving away two of these books.

USA Today reviews Margot Livesey's The Flight of Gemma Hardy.

How do you recast a classic? Follow Margot Livesey's lead in The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a riveting retelling of Jane Eyre that puts the familiar feminist heroine in the pre-feminist world of early 1960s Scotland. The result is distinct and even daring — and far from derivative.
It's a tricky prospect, paying (nearly) modern homage to a piece of literature that was done so right the first time, but from the first few pages, Flight soars on its own writerly wings.
Yes, Flight cuts a path through the well-worn elements etched into every high school English student's head: a doubly orphaned girl (abandoned first by her parents' deaths, then by her beloved uncle's), the cruel aunt and Gothic garrets that ostensibly enslave her, the harsh school that further tests her tenacity, the best friend who succumbs to sickness (and thus orphans Gemma yet again), the mysterious Byronic suitor (here Mr. Sinclair, vs. Mr. Rochester) who can only try to control her, the family secrets that threaten to undermine their union.
In the retelling, aspects get a fresh update: For instance, the Rivers sisters, Diana and Mary, with whom Jane takes refuge, are re-envisioned in Flight as Hannah and Pauline, a couple.
But what's striking is how smoothly plot and character meld into a setting shifted 100-plus years into the future — a testament, of course, to the enduring strength of Charlotte Brontë's seminal story.
Flight makes subtler nods to Gemma's literary predecessor. Early on, Gemma's aunt snipes that her sister-in-law, Gemma's mother, was "a plain Jane." Later, when Gemma goes into quasi-hiding from Mr. Sinclair, she adopts the name of Jane's anagrammatical alter ego, Jean. (Olivia Barker)

The American Prospect discusses slavery inspired by Jane Eyre 2011:

A while back, I wasted an evening watching the 2011 film version of Jane Eyre, something that every former lit major should avoid. I loved the novel for its depiction of the vivid, rich inner life of a proud introvert who is passionately engaged in her life despite the fact that she knows it to be outwardly pathetic. The movie, unable to reproduce the character's inner liveliness, reduced the story to a melodramatic and utterly unlikely romance between a poor orphan and an arrogant nobleman. I had wasted marital chits on a movie that I hated as much as my wife knew she would. (Sports movies, here we come. Sigh.)
Watching the movie sent me back to Jean Rhys’s astonishing Wide Sargasso Sea, which I remembered as an imagining of Bertha Rochester’s backstory, asking how, exactly, did the madwoman in the attic get there to begin with? I’ve lately been stripping my bookshelves, getting rid of novels I know I won’t read again, like Rhys’s earlier sharply drawn portraits of women I have no interest in reading about: alcoholics waiting for some man to save them and getting dumped over and over. But Wide Sargasso Sea will remain with me. I had forgotten—or did I never quite register?—the fact that it’s a keen micro-portrait of what happened to the Dominican Republic after emancipation. (E.J. Graff)

A letter from a reader of the Yorkshire Evening Post has a surprising statement:

I suspect the Brontë family themselves would have supported wind farms.
In the 17th century, the beautiful English landscape was covered by some 90,000 turbines, the ones that remain are regarded as ‘picturesque’ windmills, which have to be conserved. Books have been written about them, which culminated in the foundation of the Yorkshire Windmill Society.
John Appleyard, Firthcliffe Parade, Liversedge

The Times Literary Supplement blog reports that Virginia Woolf's work

has just appeared in the prestigious Pléiade series in France. She is only the ninth woman writer to be granted this accolade, out of 200 Pléiaded writers.
The other eight on the list are: Mme de Sévigné, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Sand (whose house at Nohant Woolf visited on a trip to France in May 1939, “avoiding King George’s Coronation, as [she] had avoided the Jubilee”, in the words of Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee), Colette, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Yourcenar and Marguerite Duras. (Adrian Tahourdin)

LitBrick has a Jane Eyre-related comic strip. very funny even if a tad surrealist. This is my bookcase discusses Villette. Capturing Caely and D'ale vietii si d'ale mortii (in Romanian) post about Wuthering Heights. And Kate Bush News reports that her Wuthering Heights is back on Australia's Top 40 (at 39).