Critical darling

News outlets such as The Telegraph or Reuters report the results of yesterday's auction at Sotheby's, with special attention to Jane Austen's ring but also mentions of Charlotte Brontë's items which unfortunately didn't make it back to the Brontë Parsonage.

Picture source

That never-ending unexpected connection between the Brontës and fashion has reached Armenia as News.am reports,

The inspiration for this collection (by Varduhi Nazaryan)– the nature, architecture and poetry of Armenia, and the heroine by Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre novel – became the image of the new season in her modesty, intelligence and virtue.

Writer and poet Helen Dunmore is still a Brontëite, as read in The Telegraph:

Many of the writers she admires most – Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Emily Brontë – moved happily between forms. Dunmore added: "Poems can reach places where other literary forms don't go. People remember poems and they can have an extraordinary effect. One of the problems when you are at school is that children have to analyse a poem without time to enjoy it – you need to be bathed in a poem." (Martin Chilton)

According to CTV News, Margaret Atwood is both a Brontëite and a Wattpad fan.

Atwood has credited Wattpad.com for giving writers the freedom to experiment with their craft and help other authors develop their work.
"It's not a new thing; it's an old thing that has come back via the Internet," she said. "The Brontës wrote for one another in their famous little booklets,” Atwood said in press statement issued in June.
“The Edible Woman” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” author also said that she would have “unquestionably” used a site such as Wattpad had existed when she began her writing career. (Constance Droganes)

IGN features Michael Fassbender:

One of Fassbender’s rare career missteps was as a secondary villain opposite Josh Brolin’s hero in the 2010 Western Jonah Hex. After the film was released to fairly terrible reviews, Fassbender shrugged off his involvement in an interview, quipping “Pretty awful, was it? I haven’t seen it myself.” He followed Jonah up with a performance in 2011’s critical darling Jane Eyre, for which he won numerous awards. (Lucy O'Brien)

Oxford American discusses 'unclaimed images'.

Somewhere between the traditional illustration or graphic that occasionally appears in novels are what I’m calling here, for lack of a better phrase, unclaimed images. They are unclaimed in the sense that they don’t necessarily belong to a coherent tradition, such as the tradition of illustrations that accompany the text of a book, such as those in the original Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or Fritz Eichenberg’s woodcuts that accompany the 1943 Random House edition of Jane Eyre, or the many illustrations that have supplemented the various editions of Gulliver’s Travels over the years.
Unclaimed images float somewhere in between formal illustrations and doodles. They are graphic interjections into the text. Unlike traditional drawings, woodcuts, engravings, photographs, and other images, it’s not always clear who the creator is. In some cases, it seems as if the author herself has created them. In others, it may be that the book designer made them. Because they are sometimes unattributed, they function as a sort of mystery—lost images that haunt the text. (Nicholas Rombes)

In The Lider and the Kalkasian there is an article about reading:

Required reading in school included George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 and the social injustice books of the day, and though they impressed me, (some negatively, like James Baldwin; some positively, like Frederick Douglass) I was more impressed with Jane Eyre. I loved the downtrodden female heroine who did the right thing when it was the hardest available choice. (Jeanenee Nooney)

Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden) asks politicians about their summer readings. Lena Ek, Minister of the Environment says:

1. Jonathan Franzens Freedom och Joyce Carol Oates Änkans bok.
2. Jan Mårtensons memoarer Att kyssa ett träd och Viveca Stens I natt är du död.
3. Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre, Klas Eklunds Kina och Graham Greenes Resor med moster Augusta.  (Translate)

La Vanguardia (Spain) talks about adoption and gives a Brontë reference:

Hasta que una nueva realidad social, la adopción, ha generado un tema que aunque ya se trataba en algunos clásicos (de Edipo a Cumbres borrascosas) sólo ahora se convierte en una verdadera corriente. (Laura Freixas) (Translation)

El País (Spain) interviews the writer, historian and scholar Romà Gubern:

¿Qué le pone?
R. Hay novelas románticas que me ponen más. Hasta diré que Cumbres borrascosas me pone más, con esas pasiones desatadas.  (Ferran Bono) (Translation)

moviepilot (Germany) reviews Wuthering Heights 2011 as seen at the FilmFest München:

Weniger komisch ging es danach in Wuthering Heights von Andrea Arnold zu, einer weiteren Verfilmung des gleichnamigen englischen Klassikers von Emily Brontë , in der es um das Findelkind Heathcliff geht, der bei der Familie Earnshaw aufgenommen wird und eine sehr enge Beziehung zu deren Tochter Cathy aufbaut und gegen die widrigen Bedingungen der Natur und des Lebens ankämpfen muss. Ob es eine gute Verfilmung ist, kann ich nicht sagen, da ich weder die Geschichte, noch die anderen Verfilmungen kenne. Jedoch ist Arnolds Film durchaus gelungen, da sie es versteht die Widrigkeiten, die Heathcliff im Hochmoor von Yorkshire durchleben muss, in entsprechend düsteren, freud- und trostlosen Bildern einzufangen – zu Gute kommt hier auch Arnolds Entscheidung, in 4:3 zu drehen – und den Zuschauer mit Heathcliff zusammen leiden lässt. Allerdings hat der Film vor allem in Bezug auf Länge und Inszenierung einige Schwächen, die das Gesamtbild doch etwas trüben und er dadurch an Intensität verliert. Auf Grund ihres Regiedebüts Fish Tank waren meine Erwartungen relativ hoch, welche der Film leider nicht gänzlich erfüllen konnte.  (Nils Pape) (Translation)

Słowem Malowane (in Polish) and beckybentrim write about Agnes Grey and So Many Books the other Anne book, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Au fil des mots... writes in French about Jane Eyre; The Literary Ladies' Guide to the Writing Life posts about Emily Brontë; Magic Words (in Polish) reviews her novel Wuthering Heights; Picture Books for Older Readers reviews the Classical Comics's rendition of Jane Eyre; Mad about books talks about Victoria Hislop's recent talk at the Brontë Parsonage; Mister Comfypants, Ce que mes yeux ont vu (in French) and Jaime Morrow briefly post about Jane Eyre 2011; Clean Teen Fiction eagerly waits for the release (in October) of Tina Connolly's Ironskin; The Lost Entwife and BookHounds review Dark Companion.