Podcasts

  • With... Bethany Turner-Pemberton - Sassy and Sam chat to researcher and curator Bethany Turner-Pemberton. Bethany is PhD candidate in Textiles and Museum Studies at Manchester Metropolitan...
    20 hours ago

Friday, September 06, 2013

Friday, September 06, 2013 8:50 am by Cristina in , , ,    1 comment
According to the Daily Mail, some 'match-making psychologists' have decided to meddle in literature and here are their findings when it comes to Jane Eyre.
Researchers also found high compatibility between people from different fictional couples.
The most compatible was Superman’s Clark Kent had and Jane Eyre, the heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel.
Researchers said they both wanted to spend lots of time with their other half and regularly showed their partner how much they mean to them. [...]
Brooding Jane Eyre hero Mr Rochester and Bella Swan from Twilight were found to be a good pair because they are both introverted and anxious. (Eleanor Harding)
That's hilarious and all (it's supposed to be, right?) but we seriously wonder what the point is.

More toying with novels, although we do find this to be rather intriguing. From The Independent:
It’s a rare problem that cannot be solved by a sit down with a good book. That at least is the thinking behind The Novel Cure, a new A to Z of literary remedies to all manner of ailments, published by Canongate next week.
Man flu? Take a dose of Les Miserables. Heartbroken? Jane Eyre will heal it. Tinnitus? Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom will drown that out. Baldness? Patricia Cornwell’s Blow Fly will make you glad to be hairless.
These are some of the 750 or so tonics suggested by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin who began “prescribing” books to each other at Cambridge University. “I gave Sue a copy of Don Marquis’s Archy and Mehitabel about a cockroach poet when she was feeling temporarily unconfident about her writing. It grew from there,” Berthoud tells me. “This book is the result of 25 years of thought. It has cures for everything from being stuck in a rut, to dealing with your mother-in-law or hating your nose.” (Alice Jones)
Your Tango has chosen Wuthering Heights as their number 1 love story of all time.
1. Wuthering Heights: A total eclipse of the heart.
In one of the oldest heart-wrenching classics in the "lost love can turn a good man evil" scenario, Emily Brontë’s novel takes us back to 1802 [sic] at the Wuthering Heights estate. In this timeless love story, our leading man Heathcliff grows to become best friends with his adopted sister, Catherine, his life-long crush. But an offhand comment, overheard at the Heights, changes the course of both of their lives.
Fun Fact: The 1983 Bonnie Tyler power ballad "Total Eclipse of the Heart" was inspired by Wuthering Heights. (Nicole)
Was it so difficult to get the date right, though? It's the very beginning of the novel (although of course things are happening before and after it). It's 1801.

The Daily Mail reviews the biography Olivier by Philip Ziegler. Laurence Olivier
is an electric presence as Heathcliff, Darcy, Max de Winter, and so forth, precisely because he is so theatrical and histrionic. (Roger Lewis)
Maths doesn't seem to be the strong point of this columnist from the Huntington News:
I am a writer.  I kiss the rings of the greats who came before me:  Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Victor Hugo, and those brilliant and completely improbable Brontës…all of them nineteenth century authors who wrote under impossible conditions and turned out book after book after book (okay.  Forget the Brontës…they turned out an average of one book each and then promptly died). [...]
Then we have the Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Anne, and Emily, who taught themselves to write in minuscule script on tiny pieces of paper while sitting around a kitchen table, in a cold, cold room.  Despite growing up near a cemetery where rotting corpses polluted their drinking water…and despite the inclement weather, poverty, a cruel father and a drug-addicted brother, they managed to write great, great prose.  (Shelly Reuben)
Oh the grimness of that story! Apart from the fact that they Brontë sisters published 8 books, which makes an average of 2.6 books per sister.

Jay Miranda discusses motherhood in The Huffington Post.
I wanted a love story. The sort of aching, vulnerable, reluctant-but-inevitable-submission-into love found in the pages of Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice. I thought love would be poetry and English fields, even though I've never even been to England nor did I marry Mr. Darcy. [...]
And she is poetry come alive. Sometimes she is Bukowski, spitting and growling, sometimes she's as disarming as a Brontë passage, and sometimes she's a little bit Neruda when I catch her smiling in her sleep and I can tell she's dreaming. I wanted a love story and quite unexpectedly I find myself in the middle of one.
The Huffington Post also reviews the drama Suits:
Their romance, and I'm convinced it is one, is the slowest of slow burns, and the way the palpable chemistry between them is restrained by a Victorian sense of propriety is kind of divine, if you're into that Jane Eyre sort of thing. (Maureen Ryan)
Examiner lists 'Charlotte Brontë's lesser known works'. The most recent treasure trove finding over at the Brontë Parsonage Facebook page is Charlotte Brontë's honeymoon dress. Speaking of her marriage, Stay At Home Artist shares a lovely drawing of Charlotte and Arthur Bell Nicholls (together with accompanying text and the announcement she is writing a novel about the Brontës!). The Briarfield Chronicles posts a school essay on Jane Eyre. Bookgoonie also posts about the novel. Evermoretheclever reviews Eve Marie Mont's A Breath of Eyre. Many Media Musings shares a few thoughts on Shirley.

1 comment:

  1. "Mr Rochester and Bella Swan from Twilight were found to be a good pair" ... WHAT.

    sdögkjhfdgpoaw4u6pq304utåp0f *bangs head on keyboard*

    WHAT?!

    That's HERESY!

    Oh wait, it's from the Daily Mail. Yeah, that figures. But still. *shudders*

    ReplyDelete