Dinner with Gaskell

Sheila Hancock tells in The Telegraph and Radio Times about her inner connection with Emily Brontë before the airing of the Perspectives episode devoted to the Brontës which she conducts:

She compared their connection to that between the lead characters in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, who could not bear to be apart, and said she could empathise with Heathcliff’s pain as he watched Cathy die.
“Emily writes extraordinarily about the depth of Cathy and Heathcliff’s desperation, with him actually grabbing her body as she’s dying to try to stop her going, as it were,” she told Radio Times.
“Well, anyone who’s watched somebody die, that’s just what you want to do. I did. ‘Don’t go, don’t you dare go!’ She puts into words something I totally understand.”
Hancock, 80, said she believed there were certain people you were meant to be with and that once you had found that person, it was impossible to imagine life without them.
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“If you have ever known that obsessive love, which sometimes makes it difficult to be together but impossible to be apart, you can identify with the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff,” she added.
Thaw, the actor famed for his roles in Inspector Morse and The Sweeney, died of oesophageal cancer in February 2002, aged 60.
Hancock admitted that after years of pain, she had gradually learned to live without him.
It was her fascination with Emily, Charlotte and Anne Brontë, and their acclaimed writing, that prompted the actress to make a film about their lives for ITV’s Perspectives.
She suggested that all three sisters covered subjects that Jane Austen never broached, but admitted that she had always been “snotty” about Austen. (Victoria Ward)

The Lancashire Evening Post talks about the ambitious plans for Elizabeth Gaskell's house (but please, someone has to tell the writer that Emily was never a visitor to Gaskell's house, it was Charlotte):

Fancy dining like Dickens or having brunch like a Brontë?
Visitors to Manchester novelist Elizabeth Gaskell’s home will soon be able to dine in Victorian splendour – in the same room where she entertained some of the country’s most famous writers.
The rooms of the Ardwick mansion are set to be turned back to how they looked when Gaskell, author of classics Mary Barton and Cranford, lived there in Victorian times.
Once complete visitors will be able to sit where the author wrote her books or hire the house to eat in the dining room where Gaskell and her husband William entertained.
At that time, Charles Dickens and Emily Brontë were both regular visitors, along with Guardian newspaper founder CP Scott and orchestra founder Charles Hallé.
A bookshop and cafe will also be opened in the lower ground floor for visitors, with offices and meeting rooms on the top floor.
Expected to be complete by summer 2014, the £1.3m project is the final phase in a 15-year battle to save the Plymouth Grove house from decay and demolition.
Two years ago the outside of the house, once used as student halls of residences, was completely restored after years of fundraising.
Josselin Hill, vice chair of the Manchester Historic Buildings Trust, said: “Some historical houses can feel quite stale and unlived-in with signs saying ‘don’t touch’ or areas roped off.
“We very much want the house to feel as if the Gaskells have just gone out, with people able to walk around and explore.
“We’ll be having events in the dining room with people able to rent it out.
“The Gaskells were extremely sociable people, who regularly entertained, and I think they would be delighted to see the house back in use and full of visitors.”
Volunteers have been working with heritage experts at the Whitworth Art Gallery to find the right wallpaper and paint colours used in the house at the time.
Furniture from the period Elizabeth Gaskell lived there, 1850 – 1865, will also be used.
A specialist heritage firm has also been called in to restore the ornate plasterwork and carpentry still left in the house.
Armitage Construction, a family firm founded in 1874, will be using traditional lime plaster and woodworking techniques from the period.
Chief executive Daniel Armitage said: “It’s great to be involved in working on such an important Manchester building.
“We’ll be creating the modern offices upstairs but downstairs it’s about trying to retain as much of the house’s original features as possible.”

Gillian Orr in The Independent is not happy that fictional women are picked as inspirational

But apparently some of those polled struggled to come up with any real-life women who inspired them and were forced to turn to fiction. How encouraging. So we have Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice (11), Gone With the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara (14), Bridget Jones (15) and Jane Eyre (20) included in the top 20. It’s something that none of the character’s creators, such as Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, managed to do, despite perhaps being worthier picks.

The Daily Campus reviews Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy:

As an avid reader, I was very intrigued by the involvement of rabies in literature. Enlightened by “Rabid,” I realized that many works I had read in high school involved characters infected by rabies. “Rabid” suggests that Emily Brontë alluded to rabies affecting Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights.”  (Alyssa McDonagh)

The New York Daily News talks about the Warner sisters (Susan and Anna):

 One spot that didn’t rate — and is sinking slowly and quietly into oblivion — is the home that belonged to the Warner sisters, America’s answer to the Brontë sisters. The Warner House sits on a deserted island in the Hudson River off West Point, New York. (Rebecca Rego Barry)

Policymic seems to confuse good literature with a bad dinner in a Chinese restaurant:

The genre of the novel is full of famous examples of young adults in moments of doubt, conflict, distress, and anguish. Jane Eyre is 19 when she meets Mr. Rochester; so is Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch.  (...)
 And Jane Eyre seems a recurrently popular choice for a certain kind of sermon about the self: Be kind, be honest, be independent; but don't change yourself for anyone else, and be true to your feelings and ethics. We don't need Charlotte Brontë for that, however. We could glean as much from a few good fortune cookies. (And the Austen of Emma would disagree fiercely with Brontë about the "don't change for anyone" bit.) (Spencer Lenfield)

 Female First interviews the writer Kate Mosse::

What is your favourite novel?
Too many to list - but, it probably won't surprise you to know, that Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë is among them. Published in 1847, only a year or so before she died, It has everything - huge landscapes, an epic adventure story at the heart of it, two different time periods, strong female and male characters, overwhelming emotion - revenge, love, fear, tenderness. An extraordinary achievement.

BBC News uses Jane Eyre to visualize a growing social problem in the UK:

 Proposing the motion, Richard Salter, from Somerset, said students at further education (FE) and sixth-form colleges were being discriminated against.
"The student in an FE college is treated differently, not by their peers, not by their teachers, but by their government," he said.
Clare Kellett, a teacher from Somerset, told the conference about a 17-year-old pupil, Jess, who was living on her own because of difficulties at home and was struggling to feed herself.
"My colleague gave Jess what can only be described as a food parcel - that's the level of poverty we're dealing with.
"That is school life for some today - real Hard Times - not To Serve Them All My Days - or even Jane Eyre. (Katherine Sellgren)

Was Wuthering Heights 2011 rejected by Cannes or merely not yet finished? HitFix thinks it is the first option:

Others are more provisional: for the sake of our impatience, we hope "Twelve Years a Slave" will be there, but it could as easily be in Venice. And the Cannes selection committee can often throw our (not to mentiopn producers') hopes off-course: "Brokeback Mountain," "Vera Drake" and "Wuthering Heights" are examples of films that would have premiered at Cannes... had they not been been rejected by the festival. (Guy Lodge)

The Guardian celebrates but warns also about Hebden Bridge:

  I've heard all the jokes about in-breeding and I'd like to make it clear that they are offensive and we've moved on since the days of Wuthering Heights where the only opportunity for love was hooking up with your step brother on the next farm. (Rachel Pickering)

Persinsala (Italy) reviews the theatre play Comici Fatti di Sangue by Alessandro Benvenuti:

  E ci auguriamo che Benvenuti sia tanto bravo quanto lo fu Jean Rhys quando diede la versione dei fatti della prima signora Rochester, riscattandola dal ritratto – non a caso di parte – di Charlotte Brontë. (Luciano Ugge and Maria Frigerio) (Translation)

In Florence (Italy), the Cineteca di Firenze will screen Abismos de Pasión 1951 (today, 20.00 h); CineMaverick reviews Jane Eyre 2011; The Haunted Books Grave posts about A Breath of Eyre; Silly Eagle Books has loved Baby Lit's Wuthering Heights. A Weather Primer; Bookmarked reviews Jane Eyre's Daughter by Elizabeth Newark. Finally, Hathaways of Haworth publishes several pictures of Brontë country roads still covered with snow.