Brontë-fied

Current Carmel announces a very Brontë month at the Carmel Clay Public Library, IN:

The Carmel Clay Public Library will host several events to celebrate the 200th birthday of author Emily Brontë. She was best known for her classic novel, “Wuthering Heights.”
“This is the first time the library has hosted a Brontë-related event,” Laura Crockett, CCPL reference services senior assistant at CCPL, stated in an email. “We wanted to celebrate her work and her memory with various events throughout July. Brontë was a quiet, private and fiercely opinionated woman. She is an enigma, and people still study her and her work today. She gave a voice for female writers in a time when novels were considered frivolous and vacuous.”
Brontë-fied. The events will include a discussion of the book and showing of “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë July 19; a discussion of the book and showing of “Wuthering Heights” July 27;  and an event called “Celebrating Emily” July 30.
“We’re celebrating all things Emily Brontë with Dr. Joyce Huff, professor of Victorian and Gothic Literature at Ball State University and Brontë expert,” Crockett said. “She will lead us down the fascinating road that was Emily’s life and literature, the impact of ‘Wuthering Heights,’ and the complex nature that defined the Victorian age. Dr. Huff is known for her energy and enthusiasm, and her wealth of knowledge will be welcomed by anyone interested in history, British literature, feminism and, of course, the Brontë family.” (Renee Larr) 

Today's anchors share their picks for best summer reads:

Savannah Guthrie:
"Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë
The timeless classic from 1847 follows the orphan girl raised by her cruel aunt on her journey to becoming a governess, who falls in love with her employer before finding out his dark secret. Her quest to be loved without losing her autonomy continues to enrapture readers.

Reader's Digest has a selection of romance novels:

Jane Eyre:  “Reader, I married him.” Charlotte Brontë’s gothic masterpiece, with its unyielding heroine, dashing love interest Mr. Rochester, creepy manor house, and foggy English countryside, has become synonymous with 19th-century romance. And writing love stories ran in the Brontë family—Charlotte’s sister Emily’s classic Wuthering Heights is also a strong contender for this list of best romance novels.

The Guardian reviews Caryl Phillips's A View of the Empire at Sunset:

Born in Dominica in 1890, Jean Rhys drew on memories of her distant childhood for Wide Sargasso Sea, her masterly “prequel” to Jane Eyre published in 1967. Back in 1936, Rhys and her second husband had revisited the island of her birth. It is here, watching “the full glory of the sun rising over her now empty world”, that Caryl Phillips ends his sporadically brilliant fictionalised life of Gwen Williams (Jean Rhys’s real name), the Welsh doctor’s daughter whose piercing consciousness of an English world – ie excluding and judgmental – mirrors the experiences described by Phillips in his own work. (Miranda Seymour)

Also in The Guardian a review of The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading by Edmund White:

Books are so intimate, somehow, and perhaps this is one reason why so many of the current glut of reading memoirs leave me cold. Even as they strain for this sense of disclosure – don’t you feel like this, too? they ask – their tone is proprietorial, hellbent on exceptionality (I love the Brontës even more than you). (Rachel Cooke)

Glamour lists the many occasions in which the characters of the legendary sitcom Friends are reading:

Season 5, Episode 9: “The One With Ross’s Sandwich”
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Rachel and Phoebe are taking a literature class together, but Rachel isn’t really reading the books. If Wuthering Heights is about how destructive jealousy and revenge can be, and Jane Eyre is about the evolution of a character, then it’s safe to say that both literary themes are applied to the main plot of this episode, which is that Ross loses his shit over someone eating his sandwich and is forced to take leave from work. (Vanessa Golembewski)

Vanity Fair reviews My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh:

The female body has long been an unruly subject, and a favorite one for women writers seeking to throw a wrench into the societal machinery. In last year’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxane Gay calls hers “wildly undisciplined”; in Sick, out in June, Porochista Khakpour presents her relationship to her body as a lifelong battle; in Body Full of Stars: Female Rage and My Passage into Motherhood, Molly Caro May describes the painful awareness she feels toward her corporeal self during and after her pregnancy. At the heart of all three books is an inherent chasm between body and mind, between physical demands and societal rules. These contemporary memoirists find progenitors in the fiction of earlier writers: Charlotte Brontë, Anaïs Nin, Clarice Lispector, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Take, for example, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman’s 1892 short story about a wife bedridden at the orders of her husband, a doctor, who has decreed that what she needs to calm her nerves is a long period of rest and confinement. (Alexandra Kleeman)

Smooth Radio lists power ballads:

Celine Dion - 'It's All Coming Back to Me Now'
Celine Dion recorded the most famous version of this Jim Steinman power ballad in 1996, seven years after girl group Pandora’s Box first released it. Inspired by Wuthering Heights, it was an attempt to write “the most passionate, romantic song” he could ever create. (Tom Eames)

Teachwire thinks that secondary students need to read strong female characters in literature:

For all her strengths, though, Scarlett was no leader. Leadership is a role that female characters don’t often adopt. Jane Eyre, Hermione Granger and Elizabeth Bennett are all clever, brave, hardworking, resilient and so much more, but they’re not leaders. (Sally Green)

Clarín (Argentina) interviews Laura Ramos, author of Infernales. La hermandad Brontë:

Sonia Budassi: Escribís en diálogo con la versión de Elizabeth Gaskell, que es la fundadora del mito de santificación de Emily, entre otras cosas...
-Sí, aunque la de Gaskell, no es una biografía, es una novela biográfica extraordinaria, bellísima, que todavía se sigue editando, sobre la vida de las Brontë…
SB: Es como el relato oficial, el más conocido ¿no?…
-La versión de Elizabeth Gaskell fue pensada por ella y Charlotte. Esa historia quedó como una estatua de piedra, gigantesca, en el mundo literario, sobre la vida de las Brontë. O sea, todo el mundo, lo que sabe de la vida de las Brontë, lo sabe por ella, y esa versión fue repetida por las siguientes biógrafas, hasta fines del siglo XX, en que una biógrafa inglesa, Juliet Barker hizo una investigación extraordinaria, enorme, buenísima, pero bueno, como esas biografías inglesas, que te cuenta cómo era la parroquia del padre Brontë, treinta años antes de que él llegara, los sermones del señor Brontë, cómo eran los pueblitos donde nacieron cada uno de los padres, los abuelos. O sea, es una biografía ilegible para un lector que no sea un académico. (...)
SB: Leemos que El profesor de Charlotte le debía mucho a un texto de Branwell…¿Cómo calificarías la influencia de él en la obra de las hermanas?
-Desde muchos puntos de vista, como personaje, como inspiración para todos los personajes masculinos de ellas. Ellas lo vampirizaron de todas las formas posibles. Saquearon su literatura y vampirizaron la vida de él, los sufrimientos de él, su errar como poeta maldito y su errar de poeta romántico. La poética de él tiene mucho que ver con la poética de Lord Byron, que la de otros poetas románticos más oscuros de esa época, como Shelley… Bueno, ellas lo vampirizaron de esa manera, porque la cólera del señor Rochester es la cólera de Branwell, la cólera y lo tempestuoso de Heathcliff son de Branwell. Y La inquilina de Wildfeld Hall, de Anne, tiene un personaje que se llama Hundington (sic) que es Branwell también. Y todos los otros personajes masculinos de Cumbres Borrascosas, malvados, también están inspirados en Branwell, porque Branwell, bueno, reunía en sí tantas cualidades para ser un poeta romántico… así como Byron era cojo, él era petiso, miope. (Translation)

The interview is full of imprecisions we hope will not be present in the actual book.

Svet Plus (in Serbian) lists love movies:

 Orkanski visovi / Wuthering Heights (1992). Postoji nekoliko ekranizacija i interpretacija genijalne knjige Emili Brontë. Jedan od najistaknutijih ekranizacija jeste film sa Žilijet Binoš i Ralfom Fajnsom. Film pokazuje i portretiše sav očaj, tragediju i bol koja se dešava u životima glavnih junaka. Ljubav između Keti i Hitklifa je jaka i destruktivna…

Mundiario (in Spanish) interviews the writer María Engracia Sigüenza:

Crecí leyendo a Dostoyevski, Tolstói, Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Camus, Cortázar, Kafka, Cortázar, Poe, Baudelaire, Rilke, Whitman, Paz, Lorca, Hernández, por citar algunos de mis favoritos. En cambio a ellas: Woolf, Dickinson, Flannery O´Connor, Elena Garro, K. Mansfield, Lispector, Beauvoir, las hermanas Brontë, Rhys, Austen, y tantas otras, las fui descubriendo por mi cuenta después de un proceso más costoso, y caí tan rendida a los pies de todas que, llegar a las sucesoras, fue un proceso mucho más fácil. (Ada Soriano) (Translation)

Washington Independent Review of Books posts about Wuthering Heights. The Sisters' Room reminisces about Emily Brontë's 150th anniversary in 1968.

Blunder zone: A letter from a reader to Segre (in Catalan) (mis)quotes Charlotte Brontë. Espinof (in Spanish) attributes Jane Eyre to... Daphne du Maurier.