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Sunday, December 28, 2014

Sunday, December 28, 2014 4:05 pm by M. in , , ,    No comments
The Observer's 2014 Tech Quiz contains an unexpected Brontë-related question:
Which author’s anniversary was celebrated with this Google doodle? (Ian Tucker)
The author Ruskin Bond talks about his literary passions in Outlook:
Another consumptive who died young was Emily Brontë (1818-1848), who gave the world Wuthering Heights, probably the most passionately original novel in the English language. I discovered it when I was twelve, spending the night in a leaking room in a house that was badly in need of repair. A storm raged outside; the lights had gone out; but I had a kerosene lamp. Just the right atmosphere in which to read this haunting epic of star-crossed lovers. I stayed up till three in the morning to finish the book. By then the storm was over, but the power of the writing was to remain with me for the rest of my life.
Last winter, after a gap of sixty-five years, I picked up Wuthering Heights again. Would it have the same hold over me? Or had I grown out of a tale of love, hate, longing and enchantment? Obviously I had not, for once again I was up all night, gripped by this haunting and lyrical tale of yearning and desire played out on the desolate Yorkshire moors. Catherine and Heathcliff yearn for union with each other but it is always denied. Just as Emily Brontë’s yearning for love and fulfilment finds exp­ression in this tale of her own frustration. Of your frustration and of mine, which is what gives it such a universal appeal. Emily’s anguish is repeatedly expressed in her poems, which should be read by anyone who loves her work: “There have been times I cannot hide,/There have been times when this was drear,/When my sad soul forgot its pride,/And longed for one to love me here.”
The Guardian reviews Roger Corman's adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe's stories. Talking about The Tomb of Ligeia 1964:
[Vincent] Price plays a deranged aristocrat pursued by his raven-haired late wife (whom he buries in a pre-credit sequence), and ill at ease with her blond successor, both played by Elizabeth Shepherd. The dark humour of the earlier pictures is absent, and it’s less a conventional horror story than a tale of romantic obsession hinting at Jane Eyre and anticipating Rebecca. (Philip French)
This columnist in SouthCoast Today has a similar, albeit more recent, experience:
Another book that really hit me this year was a multiple reread; I’ll give my Silver Medal to “Wuthering Heights,” by Emily Brontë (1847.) It was my fourth reading of this one since high school, and its brilliance shines brighter each time. (Lauren Daley)
Pagan Spirits reviews Sarah Gray's Wuthering Bites.

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