Repackaging the classics

An interesting article on the new ways to market classics is published in The Guardian:

“There’s a Penguin Classics edition of Emily Brontë’s Complete Poems, of which we sell a few hundred a year,” says Winder. “But by choosing some of the poems, and packaging them for 80p, liberated from the large format, we sold 30,000 copies. An enormous audience for curated literature has suddenly been conjured up out of nothing.” (John Walsh)

The Night is Darkening Round Me is the title of the Penguin Little Black Classics edition.

The Observer promotes Wordsworth country:

Now, in a response to the recent re-establishment of “Brontë Land” on the other side of the Pennines, Wordsworth is leading a comeback for Cumbrian literary tourism, reminding visitors that if it was not for his work, and that of his fellow Lakeland Poets, we might never have felt so strongly about one of England’s most dramatic natural landscapes. (Vanessa Thorpe)

The New York Times discusses insomnia:

My voracious appetite for spoken-word audio led me to discover a treasure: the free audiobooks on LibriVox, a storehouse of public-domain literature narrated by volunteer readers. I began to spend my nights in the company of great authors, wandering around in the 19th century, an era no longer protected by copyright laws. Here I befriended the “lady explorer” Isabella Bird, who scaled the Rocky Mountains and survived the winter in a cabin cooped up with frontiersmen. Charlotte Brontë whisked me to the fictional kingdom of Labassecour. (Pagan Kennedy)

Sometimes it really hurts to see someone you respect misquoted and misused in the so-called American Thinker (we can imagine some better names for it):

Virginia Woolf knew that if you wanted to be a great writer like George Eliot and the Brontës and Jane Austen, you would probably have to go childless, as they did. (Jeremy Egerer)

Carolina Ciucci on Bookriot didn't like Wuthering Heights 1992:

The distrust only got worse when I caved and watched a Wuthering Heights adaptation. Beyond the fact that I found it hard to buy that Ralph Fiennes would be considered “as dark almost as if it came from the devil” (not to mention that I always thought Heathcliff was either Romani or black Irish, given the numerous “gipsy” references throughout the book), I actually, literally face-palmed when I realized that Catherine Linton was played by the same actress who played Catherine Hareton. And let’s be real, it’s pretty clear that makeup team didn’t put all that much effort into making her look younger, or Heathcliff older. I felt betrayed, you guys. WH has been my very favorite book for eleven years, and this felt like watching a middle school play adaptation of it. I turned off the TV and vowed to never, ever watch another WH adaptation again.

The Herald Sun enters in the Lionel Shriver- Yassmin Abdel-Magied controversy:

And doesn't she realise that in the end she is demanding a complete repudiation of acts of imagination and empathy, so that writers are forbidden to write anything but autobiography?
Hear here the voice of segregation, insisting the Shakespeare was wrong to give us Shylock, Tolstoy insensitive to give us Anna Karenina, Mark Twain a bastard to write of Jim, and, I guess, Emily Brontë impudent to imagine Heathcliff. (Andrew Bolt)

The Brontë Parsonage Blog recommends the upcoming new production of Villette in Leeds; Heroines and Heartbreakers explores heroines who find their power, including Jane Eyre.