Denying the Brontës

Dave Astor, Brontëite in residence at The Huffington Post, shares a 'Start-of-the-Winter Post for Book Lovers'.

English novels offer plenty of low temperatures, too. For instance, there's the harsh winter that brings illness and death to many underfed, badly clothed Lowood students in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and the deep snow St. John Rivers trudges through to impart major monetary and familial news to Jane in her teacher's cottage.

The New York Times asks a few bookish questions to author Lee Child.

What do you plan to read next? My to-be-read pile is enormous, but winking ominously at me is Jane Austen’s “Emma.” I have never read Jane Austen — in my American wife’s eyes an incredible deficiency for an Englishman, matched only by the fact that I don’t really like Mozart. I hadn’t read “Jane Eyre” either, until she made me, and I’m glad I did, so I’ll get to “Emma” eventually — but perhaps not soon.

Speaking of Austen and Brontë, here's an incontrovertible statement from The Florida Times-Union:

Charlotte Brontë’s personal distaste for the work of Austen probably never bothered Jane much, as she died long before Brontë put her opinions in a missive to G.H. Lewes and likely didn’t hear about it after. (Jennifer Grey)

We have seen countless authors mentioning the Brontës' work as an influence but we don't recall any denying it. Romance writer Kaitlin O'Riley is interviewed by USA Today:

Justine: Declan is similar to the heroes in Gothic stories such as Jane Eyre and Rebecca. Did you draw from pre-existing works of literature when developing his character? Kaitlin: No, not really. I just knew that Paulette's character needed a man different from the ones she already knew to shake her up a bit. I didn't realize Declan Reeves was as dark as he seems while I was writing him. I wasn't thinking of him as a Gothic hero at all. He was simply a man who was heartbroken and disillusioned because of all he had been through, and he needed a strong woman like Paulette to pull him out of his sadness. Besides who doesn't want a dark, handsome stranger to intrigue them? But I suppose Declan is probably the darkest of any of my other heroes. Although some might think the character of Aidan Kavanaugh from my second novel, One Sinful Night, might be darker. But he's Irish, too, so maybe it is just Irishmen I find rather dark and brooding! (Justine Ashley Costanza)

Blouin Art Info's The Cutting Room picks 'The Top 10 Movies of 2012' and

Although I couldn’t find a space in my top 10 for them, I derived pleasure, worry, and/or insight from films as diverse as “Skyfall,” “Django Unchained,” “Compliance,” “Goodbye, First Love,” “Wuthering Heights,” “This Is Not a Film,” “The Loneliest Planet,” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” (Graham Fuller)

The film also makes it to IndieWire's Shadow and Act's look at  '2012 In Black Cinema - S&A Writers Take A Look At The Year's Highlights'. NewsReview also looks back on the films of the year but we fin it hard to take this take on the film seriously:

Wuthering Heights: Actually a 2011 movie, this British import didn’t hit the United States until last January’s Sundance Film Festival. It was hopelessly bad, so sub-YouTube incompetent that you often couldn’t hear or see the actors—which may have been a blessing. (Jim Lane)

Breitbart, in the meantime, goes further and picks 'The 10 Greatest Film Scores of All Time'. Wuthering Heights 2011 isn't one of them for obvious reasons, but the 1939 adaptation is there.

9. "Wuthering Heights," by Alfred Newman and "The Adventures of Robin Hood" by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
I’m cheating here, but for some reason I think of these films together because they were written within a year of each other. (I know, I know there’s another film from 1939 on the list but that’s my call.) The funny thing is that I usually eschew scores that are famous for one theme (pick a Henry Mancini score) but "Wuthering Heights" is my exception. Most of the score is good, not unbelievably good, but the theme! That theme is so romantic it drips with yearning and passion, and the leap in the melody is so real, not forced, that it just cries out with the anguish and longing of Heathcliff and Catherine. It revivifies my belief that writing a truly memorable melody is a gift from God. And "Robin Hood" is the greatest swashbuckling music I know of. It is the model for all adventure film scores ever since. (William Bigelow)

El País (Spain) features Michael Fassbender and praises his work as Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre 2011 in passing. Cleo's Literary Reviews posts about Margot Livesey's The Flight of Gemma Hardy. Mademoiselle Love Books writes in Portuguese about Wuthering Heights. La.donna.pietra imagines what some 19th-century writers' Tumblrs would be like.