No ordinary heroine

Sophie Tobin, author of The Vanishing, writes about why 'Jane Eyre is No Ordinary Heroine' on the WHSmith Blog.

My first reason for loving Jane Eyre is its most famous element: the love story between Jane and the ‘grim’, brooding Edward Fairfax Rochester. What Brontë makes clear is that Jane is no ordinary heroine; she is not beautiful, but ‘poor and obscure, small and plain’, and her relationship with Rochester is one of mental connection, as well as physical attraction. Their conversational duels are witty, poetic and transcendent. But their relationship is also surprising and complex; as she thinks how to manage him in an emotional crisis, Jane feels ‘an inward power; a sense of influence…the crisis was perilous; but not without its charm’. They are spiritual equals, and he sees past her exterior to who she really is (‘a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high’). Her anguish as she leaves him is desperately painful to read – when I last read it, I had to put the book aside. (Read more)

The Guardian reviews the book Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire by Carol Dyhouse and tells the story of

Violet Winspear, a romantic novelist who became a pariah in 1970 after telling the BBC current affairs programme Man Alive that the heartthrobs in her fiction “must be the sort of men who are capable of rape: men it’s dangerous to be alone in the room with”. Winspear was 42, and the bestselling author of two dozen novels, which she rattled out at a rate of up to six a year.
Though the idea that women might get off on rape fantasies was an affront to second wave feminists, such swoonings, according to Dyhouse, reflected underlying social expectations of male dominance and female passivity that persisted through the 1960s and 70s (and, one might add, are only a safe-word away from the early 21st-century domination games of Fifty Shades of Grey). [...]
Her story is significant because she was in a lineage of female writers stretching back to Jane Austen and the Brontës who gave literary life to the desires of women. As Dyhouse writes: “The icons of romantic literature – Mr Darcy, Mr Rochester, Heathcliff or Rhett Butler – were mostly, in the first instance, products of the female imagination.” So when Laurence Olivier took to the moors in the film of Wuthering Heights or Clark Gable carried Vivien Leigh up the stairs in Gone With the Wind, they were enacting female visions of manliness, which these cinema heartthrobs in turn passed on to Winspear’s hard-muscled, mocking but lonely heroes. All of them, she told Man Alive, were “in need of love, but when roused, capable of breathtaking passion and potency”. (Claire Armitstead)

Also in The Guardian, Lyn Gardner mentions last year's adaptation of Villette as part of the Brontë season at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

While I recognised its ambition, I wasn’t a big fan of Linda Marshall Griffiths’ sci-fi version of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette at West Yorkshire Playhouse last year.

According to Den of Geek!, Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre is one of 'The 16 Best Romantic Movies on Netflix for Valentine's Day'.

Jane Eyre
We aim to be as diverse and all-inclusive as possible in this list of romances. So what would a list of romantic movies be without a period romance drama? Not much of a list at all. Jane Eyre is a relatively recent (2011), brilliantly adapted film from Director Cary Fukunaga (of the film Sin Nombre and the good season of True Detective). Mia Wasikowska is a revelation as the eponymous Jane and Michael Fassbender Fassbenders it up as her lordly love interest Edward Fairfax Rochester. Despite being based on a classic from the 19th century, Jane Eyre is wonderfully vibrant, alive and relatable. (Alec Bojalad)

The Young Folks interviews writer Elly Blake, author of Frostblood.

What were your favorite books when you were a young adult? Did that influence your own writing at all? My reading as a child and young adult has definitely influenced my writing. YA literature hadn’t really exploded into what it is now, so I read a mixture of middle grade, teen, and adult literature. In fantasy, I read C.S. Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, Tolkien, Alan Garner, Tanith Lee, and anything by Robin McKinley that I could get my hands on. I also read contemporary teen fiction (Judy Blume, Robert Cormier, Paul Zindel, Gordon Korman) and some adult classics (Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, Tolstoy). I read Robert Ludlum and Agatha Christie and short stories by Guy de Maupassant, which I found on my parents’ bookshelf. I also periodically read stories from a beautiful old edition of 1,001 Nights. And in between all that, I read category romance by the bucket-full. If you put that all in a blender, I guess you get a strange mix. (Lauren Wengrovitz)

According to The Minds Journal, one of the signs of 'The Excruciatingly Intense Person' is

18.  We’re die-hard romantic idealists.  Lord Byron and Catherine from Wuthering Heights are our paradigms of romantic partner perfection. (Aletheia Luna)

Keighley News shares a few pictures from the reopening of the Brontë Parsonage Museum. The Brussels Brontë Blog focuses on Korean translations of Villette and The Professor.