Haworth Calling

The editors at Bookpage have selected their favourite literary retellings and reimaginings and there are a couple of Brontë-related ones:

The Brontës
The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips
Phillips goes beyond the tale of Wuthering Heights' Cathy and Heathcliff to create a modern commentary on British colonialism and family. Set in 1957, 20-year-old Oxford student Monica Johnson has a bright future ahead of her, but she leaves it all behind in order to marry a divorced Caribbean grad student that's 10 years her senior. This reimagined story is intercut with scenes from Emily Brontë’s life: her daily activities, her writing on the moors. Phillips is an award-winning author whose own Kittian-British heritage makes this a powerful literary statement.
Jane Steele by Lindsay Faye
What if Jane Eyre wasn’t a quiet, stalwart young woman, but a clever, vengeful serial killer? You’d have Jane Steele, who has left the corpses of her tormentors in her wake. When she sees that the master of Highgate House is in need of a governess, she springs at the opportunity, and surprises herself by falling in love with her brooding boss, who appears to be hiding a past as dark as her own.

This columnist of The Brooklyn Rail has been a fan of Wuthering Heights from an early age:

As feminine-identified gay kid, a loner who also wanted to be part of a big world, I found heroes in Emily Dickinson and Emily Brontë (I read Wuthering Heights four, five times by age thirteen), and later George Eliot. (Holland Cotter)

Salon interviews music journalist Marc Myers about the song London Calling by The Clash.

The other thing that’s important is the madness of Guy Stevens, the producer. He was a real catalyst to get these guys going, to put them on the edge. He knew the best music came from them when they were almost biting their nails with anxiety.
He used to say, “In this world there are two Phil Spectors, and I’m one of them.” He was also physical: He’d smash chairs or pour wine over their hands on the keyboard: This guy was about disrupting as much as possible. He knew the song would have a more “Wuthering Heights” quality if he was tormenting them. (Scott Timberg)

History Extra brings back from the archives a February 2011 article from BBC History Magazine on King George III.

George III, locked away in his madness, represented the uncontrollable aspects of humanity that the Enlightenment could not explain. He was the nation’s secret and nightmare, England’s own madman in the attic. Thirty five years before Charlotte Brontë created Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre and 100 years before Freud gave a name to the dark forces within humanity, the king’s madness made the unconscious real. 

SarasBokBlog posts about Villette in Swedish.