The Brontës' paracosm

Time Out Hong Kong interviews Andrea Arnold, whose take on Wuthering Heights opens on May 17th there.

For most of your film, Heathcliff and Cathy are just kids. Were you most interested in them as youngsters? When I came on board, there was a script that had them changing into adults after about 15 minutes. But I thought their childhood was important in the book, and it makes sense as they’re punching each other and fighting. If they’re 28, it’s ridiculous. I also felt their childhood said a lot about their relationship as adults. For Heathcliff, it’s the time he always wanted to go back to. It’s when he was most happy.
Did you decide very quickly that Heathcliff should be black? Very early on. He’s from Liverpool, and Liverpool was a big slave port at the time. Also when you read his descriptions in the book, it’s clear he’s not white-skinned. I wanted to honour his difference. If I look at descriptions of him in the book, I wonder if he wasn’t a Romany Gypsy? They are originally from Asia and I did start casting in Yorkshire looking for Romany Gypsy lads, and after a while I decided what was important was his difference, and not being so truthful to the book. (Dave Calhoun) (Read more)

Coincidentally, The Music reports that the film will be screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival (6-17 June).

The San Antonio Current begins as follows a review of the movie Girl in Progress by Patricia Riggen:

It's a term every high school freshman English class has covered since teachers started passing out copies of The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. Whether reading Charlotte Brontë's original novel Jane Eyre or watching director Cary Fukunaga's dark and elegant film adaptation from last year, the coming-of-age story has outlined the transition from childhood to adulthood for a countless number of literary and cinematic characters over generations. Adding itself into the already crowded film genre is Girl in Progress, a sort of meta coming-of-age tale that attempts to stand out from the pack by making its lead protagonist self-aware of her own maturation. (Kiko Martínez)

The Kapi-Mana News (New Zealand) reviewer hasn't liked Margot Livesey's The Flight of Gemma Hardy.

There's a fine line between a passionate young woman with a strong sense of right and wrong, and a self-righteous and bad-tempered girl.
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre has the first type of heroine, and Margot Livesey's latest novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy - based on Jane Eyre - has the latter.
When retelling any story - let alone a much- loved classic - the author has to tread carefully between being faithful to the characters and taking creative licence to give an old story new life.
Unfortunately, in this retelling, the author fails. The events of the original book are retold slavishly, yet Livesey's characters are shallow imitations of the vibrant people who live in the pages of Jane Eyre.
The truly odd parts - such as Mr Rochester's secret - have been changed. I can understand the author doing this - some parts of Jane Eyre are nearly unbelievable. But to change a major part of the book, you need to change it to something equally compelling - and Livesey doesn't.
Gemma, the main character, annoyed me. She didn't hold a candle to Jane Eyre. While her time at school was interesting - and a rare attempt from the author to deviate from Brontë's original storyline - after the school section, the story just went downhill. [...]
If I had read this simply as a chick lit book, despite its faults, I might have thought it was OK. It is OK. It's not great, it's not terrible.
But as a retelling of a great classic romance, it fails. (Ruth Farrell)

Another book reviewed: John Iving's In One Person by the Washington Post:

And like Dickens, Irving sets a stage filled with irresistible and sometimes irresistibly bizarre characters.
The first is an “austerely formal” town librarian named Miss Frost with hypnotizing breasts. She becomes one of the inappropriate objects of Billy’s desire and the guide to his literary tastes. Alarmed by the school physician, who claims that homosexual “afflictions” must be treated aggressively, Billy asks Miss Frost if she can recommend “any novels about young people who have . . . dangerous crushes.” She leads him to “Wuthering Heights,” “Jane Eyre,” “Tom Jones” and “Great Expectations,” hardly what the 13-year-old expected, but not as surprising as what she eventually reveals in the basement of the library. (Don’t ask, don’t tell!) (Ron Charles)

Wired's Underwire highlights the importance of fan fiction.

Paracosms are the fantasy worlds that many dreamy, imaginative kids like to invent when they’re young. Some of history’s most creative adults had engaged in “worldplay” as children. The Brontë siblings, in one famous example, concocted paracosms so elaborate that they documented them with meticulous maps, drawings, and hundreds of pages of encyclopedic writing.
It now appears that, like the Brontës, kids who engage in paracosmic play are more likely to be creative as adults. In 2002 researchers Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein conducted an elegant study. They polled recipients of MacArthur genius grants — which reward those who’ve been particularly creative in areas as diverse as law, chemistry, and architecture — to see if they’d created paracosms as children. Amazingly, the MacArthur fellows were twice as likely as “normal” nongeniuses to have done so. Some fields were particularly rife with worldplayers: Fully 46 percent of the recipients polled in the social sciences had created paracosms in their youth. (Clive Thompson)

Shelf Actualization has a Literary Death Match: Jane Eyre vs. Wuthering Heights. Susycottage (in Italian) announces two weeks devoted to the Brontë sisters. Tras la lluvia literaria posts in Spanish about Jane Eyre while I Probably Liked It and Cinema Monogatari write about Jane Eyre 1944 and 2006 respectively. Pareidolias has written a poem about the Brontës in Spanish.