The Great Gatsby at Wuthering Heights

The Week compares The Great Gatsby's box office performance with that of other recent book adaptations.

Jane Eyre
The 2011 version of the Charlotte Brontë novel — unbelievably, the 19th Jane Eyre movie — cleared just $32 million at the box office. Besides potential audience fatigue, the film may have been plagued by its lack of a recognizable star. Mia Wasikowska isn't exactly a household name. (Danny Groner)

While an article in The Huffington Post looks at how faithful the movie is to the original novel.

3) The dog. The poor little dog Tom buys for Myrtle in New York from "a gray old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller" is, for my money, the most pathetic animal in literature. He, or she, is sadder even than the first animals whose fates made me cry in a novel: the puppies Hareton Earnshaw hangs from the back of a chair in Wuthering Heights. (Anne Margaret Daniel)

And yet many people wouldn't seem to be able to make comparisons of that kind, as according to The Telegraph,

David Nixon, the artistic director of Northern Ballet, who directed, choreographed and designed the costumes for the company’s Gatsby ballet [...] recently gave a talk to an audience after a performance: “I asked how many people had read the book. Only about 10 per cent had. But rather like Wuthering Heights, it’s a book people may feel they’ve read when they haven’t. ” (David Gritten)

Further details on the screenings of Wuthering Heights 2011 as part of the European Film Festival taking place in Hanoi, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) from May 15 to May 26. According to Tuoi Tre News:

the movie will be brought to Vietnamese cinema lovers at 7pm on May 23 and 25 at HCMC’s Cinebox – 212 Ly Chinh Thang Street, 8pm on May 26 at Da Nang’s Le Do Cinema – 46 Tran Phu Street as well as at 10am on May 25 and 8pm the next day at the Hanoi’s National Cinema Center – 87 Lang Ha Street.
Tickets are being released for free at The British Council at 20 Thuy Khue Street in Hanoi and 25 Le Duan in HCMC.

A while ago we mentioned composer Louis Karchin's work on a Jane Eyre opera. Further information is to be found on D Magazine's FrontRow:

Composer Louis Karchin and librettist Diane Osen draw from another monument of British literature for their full-scale version of Brontë’s Jane Eyre, evoking that personal epic with neo-romantic lyricism and—as explained by composer Karchin, though not included in the two brief excerpts presented on Thursday—quotations from Donizetti, contemporaneous with the original story. (Wayne Lee Gay)

Tanya Gold discusses the Bridezilla phenomenon in the Guardian:

A wedding day is a tiny empire, it is true, but one in which a woman can exercise complete, if tiny, autonomy and this must be mocked – perhaps this is the egg that hatched Bridezilla? That wedding bakers and dress makers ordinarily overcharge may add to Bridezilla's myth. From Jane Eyre to Wide Sargasso Sea to now, it must always be explained to outsiders, and clearly. The woman isn't mad. She's angry. Or afraid.

Sally McDonald writes on the Brontë Parsonage Blog about the dedication of the plaque at Anne Brontë's grave. Make My Monday had an inspiration challenge based on Jane Eyre. Circle, Uncoiled posts about Wide Sargasso Sea.