Miserable childhood or failed parenting?

The Guardian reviews the novel The Women’s Pages by Debra Adelaide.

Academic and author Debra Adelaide has a long been fascinated with the creative acts of writing and reading – how certain stories, in her case Wuthering Heights, stay with you for life. The Women’s Pages, based on the opening short story in her collection Letter to George Clooney, pays homage to this idea as Adelaide spins an intriguing tale with missing, absent and dead mothers at its core.
It is 2014 and 38-year-old Dove has recently lost her adoptive mother. Grief makes her inert. Unable to muster the energy to continue working, she quits and decides to write a novel. She’s never written one before and is uncertain how to proceed.
All she knows is that it will be set in 1960s suburbia, a time when girls’ ambitions stretched little further than securing a husband and raising a family. Her main character is Ellis who, at 16, has never known her mother nor been able to gain a glimmer of information about her from her father Edgar. Alone in the house where her father was born, she realises that assumptions about her future are modest, but she has greater ambitions.
We know the story. As readers, we settle into the expectation that Ellis will somehow buck the system. Except that now Dove intervenes in the narrative. [...]
 In the hands of a less gifted author, it could have failed miserably. But Adelaide creates a cohesive narrative around her themes: creativity, the struggle of women to define who they want to be and the impact of missing mothers on those left behind.
She did it before, of course, in her internationally acclaimed novel The Household Guide to Dying. In that book, her character Delia Bennet is preparing her children for her forthcoming demise (another dead mother) and quotes Dylan Thomas and George Eliot. In The Women’s Pages, Adelaide takes that idea one step further by inserting Emily Brontë into the actual story.
Wuthering Heights is Dove’s adoptive mother’s favourite novel. Dove read it to her as she lay dying and now Emily Brontë, high on the moors, haunts her dreams. It is never made clear whether Dove consciously or subconsciously names Ellis after Emily Brontë’s pseudonym Ellis Bell. Or, for that matter, draws on the characters from Wuthering Heights, naming Ellis’ father Edgar, the housekeeper Nell and her missing mother Catherine.
Wuthering Heights is a novel with barely any mothers: “They were all dead or dying, or simply blank spaces, unnamed and unacknowledged.” And for her part, Dove cannot decide if Emily Brontë’s novel is a story about a miserable childhood or failed parenting. She never seems to fully grasp that the story haunts her because she too is motherless. (Meredith Jaffe)

Le devoir (France) features Scènes de ménage. Une anthologie by Pierre Lepage in which

À travers quelque 80 scènes de deux ou trois pages, pensées à différents moments de l’histoire, tirées de textes d’Homère, de Raymond Chandler, Emily Brontë, Georges Feydeau, Corneille, Nabokov ou Svevo, monsieur Lepape dressent un portrait de l’évolution de l’amour et de ses emportements à travers la littérature. (Catherine Lalonde) (Translation)

And now for some Crimson Peak:

Playing the film’s heroine, Mia Wasikowska develops a real maturity in her acting, demonstrating a vulnerability which is believable and induces our sympathy; she becomes victim to the very Austen-Brontë worlds she initially recoils from. (Oliver Yeates on Varsity)

Per prepararsi, Hiddleston ha rispolverato i classici del gotico, a partire dal Castello di Otranto di Horace Walpole: "Ma in questo film ci sono anche echi di Rebecca la prima moglie, un romanzo di Daphne Du Maurier che ho sempre amato, e soprattutto di Jane Eyre di Charlotte Brontë, di Jane Austen...". Citazioni made in England che con Hiddleston fanno tutt'uno: dopo aver frequentato l'Eton College con il principe William, si laurea in Lettere classiche a Cambridge, fino al diploma alla Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. (Eva Carducci in La Repubblica) (Translation)

What is clear, though, is that Crimson Peak might almost be designed to appeal to the young female demographic addicted to the Twilight franchise, which pounces on anything to do with Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre or Northanger Abbey with their brooding anti-heroes, beleaguered heroines and high-gothic plotting. Whether or not the message will get through to its intended audience remains to be seen; the film, with its tantalising glimpse of Tom Hiddleston’s buttocks, may yet find itself welcomed into the Hen Party DVD canon. (Anne Billson on Multiglom)

Crimson Peak certainly has elements of horror, and it speaks horror’s language. But for every connection the film has with Hammer or Universal Horror, the film resonates with the works of Edgar Allan Poe or Charlotte Brontë. Crimson Peak is a Gothic romance; a film about the darkness of the world and the inner workings of the heart. (Brandon Wagner on The Emory Wheel)

Several highly-varied mentions of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights today too:

What is the hardest song you [Naked Choir finalists Sons of Pitches] have had to do?The hardest song HAS to be Wuthering Heights, the chord sequences and rhythms were horrid to learn! And adding visual theatrics to it made matters worse. (Grace Duncan on Red Brick)

[Recap of season one, episode three of River]
“Oh, it gets dark. Oh, it gets lonely, on the other side from you,” sang Kate Bush in Wuthering Heights. It could be the soundtrack to tonight’s episode as River delves further into the murky world of Stevie’s secret life. (Julia Raeside in The Guardian)

[9 outrageous Daniel Craig facts]
8. Hopelessly Devoted to 1980s music:
What does he listen to in between takes and during furiously tough trainig sessions? Oh yes, Daniel Craig is apparently partial to the Grease soundtrack.
The actor has more than 5,000 songs on his iPod including some Kate Bush.
Couldn't you just imagine him wailing along to a bit of Wuthering Heights? (Stefan Kyriazis in Express)

Greenish Bookshelf reviews Jane Eyre.