Plaining up plain Jane

The Guardian has an obituary for film editor Anne V Coates, who died last Tuesday, May 8 at 92. Here's how her love for cinema began:

Even though she was a niece of J Arthur Rank, founder of the Rank film company, Coates was not allowed to go to the cinema as a child, but in her teenage years she saw film adaptations of such literary classics as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Henry V. She had found the books heavy, even boring, but the powerful effect on her of the cinema versions persuaded Coates that she would like to be a film director, rather than a racehorse trainer – her first ambition. (Sheila Whitaker)

Variety quotes her own words on the matter:

As a child she loved not movies but horses; she thought she might grow up to train race horses. With the introduction to classic literature that comes as one progresses through school, however, she changed her focus.
“When my parents divorced, my father used to take us to the cinema for his treat. I remember seeing films like ‘Lost Horizon,’ which I thought was magic; ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights.’ I fell madly in love with Laurence Olivier. When I saw the magic on the screen, what it could do, it suddenly came alive to me,” she told [sound design and film editing legend Walter Murch]. (Carmel Dagan)

Still on screen matters and in connection with the latest adaptation of The Woman in White, The Guardian discusses the age-old propensity to 'glam up plain women in books' on the screen.

Because while Jessie Buckley is spirited and delightful in the role, she’s far too pretty to be Marian [from The Woman in White]. [...]
Buckley is the latest in a long line of striking women actors trying to “plain up” – Sally Hawkins as Anne Elliot (“her bloom had vanished early; and as even in its height, her father had found little to admire in her”), Talulah Riley as Mary Bennet (“the only plain one in the family”), Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre (“Don’t address me as if I were a beauty, I am your plain Quakerish Governess”) – and just the latest attractive woman to play Marian: there was Diana Quick in the 1982 TV adaptation, Tara Fitzgerald in the 1997 film, then Maria Friedman in the oddly compelling musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber in 2004. (Kaite Welsh)

The Irish World interviews singer/songwriter Steve Carroll.

How did you team up with Megan [Lunar Rhodes]?
[...]“Megan has recently been doing an incredible cover version of Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush, which is 40 years old this year.
“When she does it she just stops people in their tracks. We are guitar based so we have two guitars and two vocals and although that sounds small it is actually quite a big sound.
“We have played in people’s kitchens but also in front of thousands of people at places like Newbury Races and we have more than held our own.” (Michael McDonagh)

The Guardian has novelist Carys Davies pick her 'top 10 wilderness books', including

8. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
When this classic novel was published in 1847 (a year before Brontë died of tuberculosis at the age of 30), critics hardly knew what to make of it. For some it was a work of “vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors”, of “brutal cruelty and semi-savage love”. Even so, they understood it was like nothing that had ever been written, and even the most appalled among them sensed what Charlotte Brontë called her sister’s “secret power and fire”, which was rooted in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors around Haworth. “Her native hills were far more to her than a spectacle,” wrote Charlotte. “They were what she lived in, and by.”

Horticulture Week has an article on what to expect of this year's RHS Chelsea Flower Show when it comes to new plants.

David Austin Roses will launch new roses Emily Brontë, Mill on the Floss and Tottering-by-Gently. (Matthew Appleby)

Royal Central quotes Queen Victoria's opinion of Jane Eyre and Bust looks at the obituaries of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens. Randomly Abled posts about Wuthering Heights. Brontë Babe Blog shares her 'old' pictures of Haworth.

On Facebook, The Brontë Parsonage Museum is looking for two Brontë fans to 'take part in The Great Who Wants to Be a Mastermind Challenge in Haworth on Saturday 9 June'.