Brontë headline

Let's begin with a 'graduate level' kind of quiz question from the Contra Costa Times:

SUBJECT: LITERARY HEADLINES
Identify the title from the "headline." The author's name is given. (e.g., William Golding: "Marooned Kids Kill on Coral Island." Answer: "Lord of the Flies.") [...]
GRADUATE LEVEL [...]
5. Charlotte Brontë: "Crazy Woman Sets House on Fire, Then Leaps to Death."

Tough, huh?

This columnist from The Huffington Post reminisces about her dissertation director:

My dissertation director was old school. A Princeton graduate, he refused to answer to "Dr. Bulgin," insisting on "Mr. Bulgin" instead. Similarly, he never addressed his students by their first names, so I had to get used to the awkwardly formal "Miss Huggins." But to those of us lucky enough to be his graduate students, he was just Mac. "Got Mac this semester?" "Yep, Dickens seminar. Here come the index cards again." [...]
And although he graciously tolerated my fascination with the Brontës, he never missed an opportunity to opine on how George Eliot was really and truly a better novelist than Emily Brontë. (He was wrong, by the way.) (Cynthia Huggins)

We do think he was wrong too.

The London Evening Standard gives four stars to Bridget Christie's A Bic for Her.

One moment she is mocking veteran racing driver Stirling Moss’s sexism, the next she is a Brontë sister fumbling with a quill — the show’s title, A Bic for Her was inspired by the marketing of pastel-hued pens. (Bruce Dessau)

What's On Stage wonders whether stage adaptations can be too faithful and uses Peter McMaster's take on Wuthering Heights as an example.

After all, every theatrical rendering of a text, be it a novel or a script, is a sort of transformation. Often, by failing to recognise this and worrying too much about staying true to the original, literary adaptations offer dry, unimaginative or bloated theatrical experiences. I would much rather see the likes of Peter McMaster's Wuthering Heights , which bears little resemblance to Emily Brontë's novel but uses it as a foundation for its meditation on modern masculinity, than a slavish reproduction of something better suited to the page than the stage. (Catherine Love)

A columnist from AD (Netherlands) recalls dancing to Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights while El Acople (Spain) reviews a performance by André Matos where he sang a cover of the song too.

A New Republic columnist discusses the return of illnesses such as whooping cough because of people not vaccinating their children.

There’s a reason that we associate the whooping cough with the Dickensian: It is. The illness has, since the introduction of a pertussis vaccine in 1940, has been conquered in the developed world. For two or three generations, we’ve come to think of it as an ailment suffered in sub-Saharan Africa or in Brontë novels. And for two or three generations, it was. (Julia Ioffe)

While we don't recall the whooping cough featuring in any Brontë novel, the Brontë children did have whooping cough when very young. And we do think that Patrick Brontë would have welcome a vaccine for such an illness.

Mirabile dictu is going to reread Wuthering Heights before reading Minae Mizumura's A True Novel. A Reader's Footprints is reading Agnes Grey. Sonia Gensler posts about Jane Eyre 2011 and André Téchiné's Les Soeurs Brontë. The Brontë Parsonage Facebook page shows Anne Brontë's unfinished ‘Portrait of a girl with a dog’.