Executive Style (Australia) looks at (a very small part of) 'the internet's verdict on classic literature'.
Pride and Prejudice fares slightly better than Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, which is deemed "vastly overrated hysterical nonsense" and "the equivalent of watching [celebrity gossip website] TMZ". (Genevieve Gannon)
Author Melissa Green wouldn't seem to agree as per this interview by the
Los Angeles Review of Books.
You asked me before, and I’ve been trying to think back to the first time I was knocked out by a painting. I made a little trail of how I got to poetry by thinking back on all the books I did read that might have led me there. Daddy-Long-Legs, Old Mother West Wind — Thornton Burgess — they were wonderful little stories. Jimmy Skunk, Jack Squirrel. The world — the woods — was, were already peopled for me, peopled with creatures. So when somebody read it to me out of a book, it was like, all of what you read is true. Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, The Yellow Fairy Book, The Blue Fairy Book. Then straight to Little Women —
Oh, sure. Me too. And then seamlessly to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and Sense and Sensibility.
My poor mother, she was psychotic all her life, and just deeply, deeply. She was awfully destructive to me. But now that I’m so much older I feel such empathy. Because you see, she came to this farm. And she was raised in a city, and went to Emmanuel College, and she wrote poetry — which I didn’t know until much later. She joined the Book of the Month Club in the ’50s. And so these books would arrive, these slipcased books, beautiful, illustrated — and I could see, later, that she had this idea that she would have an intellectual life of some kind. She ordered a few years’ worth, and then stopped ordering. So it wasn’t an excitement we ever shared. I think now how sad it was that those books were just sitting there, and that they didn’t keep coming in.
I read all of them — I couldn’t get enough — and I kept wondering why there weren’t more. But the ones that were there — to me that was the whole world. So that was where I started. Jane Eyre, Sense and Sensibility, and from there to Middlemarch, House of Seven Gables, and Moby-Dick. But even before the novels, there were plays. I started reading plays first. (Sumita Chakraborty)
hkELD reviews the Hong Kong performances of
Jane Eyre:
Rarely does a production demonstrate such clarity with a complex story. This, together with the straightforwardness and without-pretense of the way the narrative unfurl was what made this performance an absolute pleasure. (Satoshi Kyo)
And neither would Barbara Bardin, Skiatook High School’s Teacher of the Year, who has spoken to
Tulsa World:
“I began to love reading literature when I discovered Wuthering Heights at the age of 13, but, even at that age I felt the classroom discussions and assignments did not really explore the essence of the author’s intent. I had decided by the age of 15 that I wanted to challenge myself to teach literature to a deeper level,” Bardin remembers. (Lindsey Renuard)
MPR News offers some background in an article about forthcoming book-to-screen adaptations.
The BBC packed the 90s with adaptations of Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen and others. More recently, critical darlings like "Friday Night Lights," "Dexter," and "Game of Thrones" have been pulled from the page. But the trend is accelerating, and everything from fantasy epics to Russian classics are getting their own series. (Tracy Mumford)
Performing Arts Hub (Australia) reviews a production of
A Midsummer's Night Dream in Maribyrnong.
Special mention must go to the actor who plays Hermia, who on several occasions is tasked with tearing along the banks of the river screeching like a mad woman, in an action rather reminiscent of a Brontë heroine wandering the moors. (Jo McEniery)
Learning to Love Anywhere reviews
Jane Eyre.
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