The Brontës as bestsellers

The Guardian's Reading group defends bestsellers:

How we define bestsellers is up to you. Anything, basically, that has sold truckloads of copies dating from Homer right up to 50 Shades of Grey. We shan't be pernickity about figures, so long as it has the right feel. So no Keith Ridgway even if you think that justice will one day see his books on every school desk in the land, but lots of JK Rowling, Margaret Mitchell and (god help us) Jeffrey Archer. Don't forget too that writers like Gibbon, Dickens, Hemingway and the Brontës have sold plenty of books in their time … (Sam Jordison)

And The Huffington Post looks at writers who kept their dayjobs. The Brontës don't make it exactly into that category.

Charlotte Brontë was a grossly underpaid governess before she made it big, and Stephen King was a high school teacher. Douglas Adams was a security guard, Kurt Vonnegut worked at a Saab dealership, and Jack London was an "oyster pirate," whatever that means.

NPR's Monkey See looks at the fall movie releases in the US.

For a more classic liaison and a more typical piece of award bait, how about a great Russian novel? Jude Law plays a chilly aristocrat and Keira Knightly his unhappy wife, Anna Karenina. Tolstoy's romance will square off against a new Wuthering Heights and a different spin on timelessness: the star-studded adaptation of the century-spanning bestseller Cloud Atlas. (Bob Mondello)

The Urban Wire looks at the Penguin English Library which includes Brontë titles. The exhibition Hope's Whisper is closing in a few days and Rebecca Chesney writes about what she will do afterwards on The Brontë Weather Project. L'amour pour la vie ! writes in French about Jane Eyre and its 2011 adaptation, a film which Great Minds Think Alike discusses in Portuguese and which Two of Twenty-Four didn't like. The Picky Girl imagines a minimalist poster for Jane Eyre. rachelcullen7 has created a composition inspired by and based on Wuthering Heights 2009. Biblioteca Navas posts in Spanish about the restoration work on an old copy of Wuthering Heights. O Lado Oculto Da Mente (in Portuguese) is giving away a copy of Wuthering Heights (also in Portuguese). A Belle's Tales reviews Wuthering Nights by Summer Day. WidowSphere comments briefly but positively on Jude Morgan's The Taste of Sorrow.

Reading Away the Days interviews Marta Acosta, author of Dark Companion while The Ninja Librarian talks to Sharon Cameron, author of The Dark Unwinding.

3. Are there any authors who have influenced your writing? Oh, yes. For The Dark Unwinding, Charlotte Brontë (à la Jane Eyre) is obviously a huge influence, but I also have to give major kudos to Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca. I think that book more than any other showed me how to make the ordinary and everyday seem just a little bit creepy. (Emily)

H.A Caine interviews another writer, Emily Guido.

4. Are you an avid reader? If yes, what kind of books do you like to read?
I love paranormal romance and sort of a Vampire Connoisseur, so I read a lot of those stories. However, there is nothing from stopping me picking up Jane Eyre for the 20th time and/or Dylan Thomas Poems and reading them. I love English and American Literature.
5. Do you think those works or those authors have influenced your writing in any particular way?
Of course the first paranormal book I read was Bram Stoker’s “Dracula!” I was way too young to read it but I found it on the shelves at the Public Library when I was a kid and I just had to keep coming back after school every day to read it in snippets because my mother would have never allowed me to read it! I do remember the Diana Gabaldon “Outlander” series. It took me a year to read them, and I was hopelessly in love with the hero Jamie Fraser! I loved him and just couldn’t get enough of him. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s, “Frankenstein,” was another that I just fell in love with. I am sorry, but the ‘Creature’ was so broken and in a way, I love broken characters, they are so juicy. Heathcliff, the character from Emily Brontë’s, “Wuthering Heights” is my all-time favorite twisted and broken character! I so want to comfort and help Heathcliff; he is so damaged by love, rejection, prejudice and hate; then he is warped by it all that he turns downright and unbelievably cruel! I just think it is so wonderful to open a door to a new twist in a character.

Finally, Vulpes Libris asks Actor Richard Armitage about his Sparkhouse:

L: Can I take you back to Sparkhouse for a few minutes? (For those who don’t know, Sparkhouse was a grim but fascinating three-part series written by Sally Wainwright, and loosely inspired by Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights – but with the two lead roles reversed … the ‘Heathcliff’ role was played by Sarah Smart and the ‘Cathy’ role by Joe McFadden.) Your character – John Standring – was a sort of amalgam of Isabella and Hareton. Did you read Wuthering Heights beforehand, and if you did – was it a help or a hindrance?
RA: I did read the novel, in fact I had read it many times before, and listened to Kate Bush!! The derivation of the character was less interesting in this instance, what was more useful was Brontë’s vision of that landscape, literal and metaphorical, the major themes in the novel, the wilderness and the madness. I didn’t try to locate John in Brontë’s novel and Sally was keen that there were no exact parallels. There was an elemental feeling from the novel, which had most impact on me. (Moira)