A heroine you can really respect

The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch is very excited with the new Annie Loui's Jane Eyre choreography:

So what’s next for Jane Eyre? Next weekend at Washington University’s Edison Theatre, the enduringly romantic character will hold down the center of a new work by choreographer, director and St. Louis native Annie Loui.
In a recent phone interview, she said the book has been one of her favorites since, as a young adult, she received a copy from her mother.
“I was fascinated with it,” Loui said. “It’s a brilliant adventure story, as well as a coming-of-age story, and a love story. And the heroine is somebody you can really respect — smart, and kind of determined. She was very alluring as a role model.” (...)
In conceiving her version of “Jane Eyre,” Loui said, she wasn’t influenced by previous dramatic adaptations. Rather, she took her own approach to bringing the characters and events of the book onto the stage.
“The way I tend to construct new work is to take a novel and then condense it to the essence of each of its scenes,” Loui said. “You figure out what really needs to be there to tell the kernel of the story. And suddenly, a 700-page novel becomes a 35-page script — with a lot of movement that illuminates the action.”
As such, the 75-minute “Jane Eyre” strikes a balance between dance concert and theater piece. The words in the production “are all Charlotte Brontë’s.”
“The truth of the matter is, we have a lot of text in this particular production,” Loui said, such as when Jane expresses disagreement or forthrightness. But other moments from the novel lend themselves to the sort of imagery at which dance excels.
“For instance, when it says, ‘She rides on a horse to go to school,’ I literally have somebody as a horse, and somebody as the carriage, and she rides on that and gets to school,” Loui said. “So movement does what movement does, and words do what words do.”
She has also explored other ways of enhancing the story’s theatricality.
“There is a secondary character I created, who is ‘Voiceover Jane,’” Loui said. That character, whom the audience can see, represents “Jane’s inner conscience. As we see Jane going through teaching school or being submissive, we hear Voiceover Jane speaking her inner emotions, and her inner feelings.”
“Jane Eyre” was workshopped last year at the University of California, Irvine, where Loui is professor of movement.
“I had wonderful audiences, from people who were scholars of ‘Jane Eyre,’ to people who really knew nothing about it,” Loui said. “I did a talkback with the audience each time to find out if they could follow it, and everybody did. That was very exciting to me.” (Calvin Wilson)

Justine Picardie traces a profile of Harper Bazaar's legendary editor Diana Vreeland in The Telegraph:

And she also benefited from Carmel Snow's visionary choice of photographers and literary breadth (it was Snow who had run Bill Brandt's portrait of TS Eliot and landscapes of the Brontë parsonage in Haworth, and paired Truman Capote with Cartier-Bresson, commissioning the pair to do a story on New Orleans in 1946).

The model Holly Carpenter offers her opinion on Fifty Shades of Grey in The Independent (Ireland) :

"I also think it was trying far too hard to be shocking. The love scenes in books written by the likes of Emily Brontë are far less vulgar yet far more erotic and steamy."

The Boston Globe reports the winners of the New England Book Awards. One of the them is Margot Livesey's The Flight of Gemma Hardy:

In “The Flight of Gemma Hardy” (Harper) by Margot Livesey, a young woman, orphaned at 10, accepts a position as an au pair on a remote island. Livesey, a Cambridge resident, set her novel in Scotland, where she was born. (Jan Gardner)

Culture Map Austin interviews comedian Anna Renzenbrik about her show Spider Dance:

But beneath the mockery of rules is a hint of real nostalgia for them, which Renzenbrink attributes to Victorian fiction she read as a child. “Whether it was Anne of Green Gables or Jane Eyre, people were really stifled in their lives in those books,” she says. The advantage to strict rules of decorum? “It’s so easy to create drama, because you just have to break one of them.” (Amy Gentry)

The Chronicle Herald reviews Zander Sherman's The Curiosity of School:

Sherman completely misses the boat on public charter schools like Knowledge Information and Power and smaller, human-scale alternative schools. That’s a little odd because he strongly favours precisely that type of schooling. If he feels that Wuthering Heights is far preferable to Harry Potter, that Latin and Greek teach mental discipline, and everyone can be a polymath, then it’s surprising that he doesn’t turn to the very schools that continue to uphold that educational legacy. (Paul Bennett)

Another chance to listen to Maureen Corrigan's review of the revised edition of Juliet Barker's The Brontës on NPR's Fresh Air Weekend:

Juliet Barker released a new edition of her landmark 1994 biography, The Brontës. Critic Maureen Corrigan says that even the 136 pages of footnotes are "thrilling," as readers are taken "deeper into the everyday realities" of the Brontës' "strange world."

Thirdcoast Digest reviews the recent chamber piece by composer Anna Clyne, Fits+Starts (2003):

The music sounds like collage, bits of ideas strung together intuitively. It does advance as the title suggests, rather like a tornado moving erratically through the land, picking up and spewing out whatever mostly tonal musical bits lie in its path. If this description makes the piece sound disordered, it’s the ardent disorder of Heathcliff and Catherine dashing through a stormy night. (Tom Strini)

The Daily Mail describes like this the TV-series Hunderby:

A joyfully dark Victorian tale which, for reasons best confined to the master’s bedroom, really should have been called Fifty Shades Of Brontë.

The Times reviews Naomi Wolf's Vagina: A New Biography:

She calls dopamine the ultimate feminist chemical. Women can achieve great things when they unlock their sexual natures — and she quotes Edith Wharton, Georgia O’Keeffe and George Eliot as women who achieved the sublime through sexual fulfilment. In her excitement, though, she fails to mention Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Florence Nightingale or even Elizabeth I, all women who left their mark on the world despite not having much sugar in their respective bowls. (Daisy Goodwin)

The importance of language in The Sun Daily (Malaysia):

Language has always fascinated me, arising no doubt from the childhood imaginings of Grimm's fairy tales and Enid Blyton's Noddy adventures. From then grew an interest in English literature and the classics of Dickens, Hardy, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, D.H. Lawrence, Shakespeare and the romantic poets – inspired by the dedicated convent teachers. (Halimah Mohd Said)

Vorrei Essere un Personaggio Austeniano reviews the Italian edition of the Hiromi Iwashita Wuthering Heights manga;  Indianapolis Romance Novels Examiner posts about Rochester as romantic hero; 101 Books in 1001 Days reviews Wide Sargasso Sea; lindabloggen (in Swedish) reviews Wuthering Heights.