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Friday, July 20, 2018

Samantha Ellis is a recovering Heathcliff addict and talks about it in this (paywalled) article in The Telegraph:
I don’t quite know how to mark Emily Brontë’s 200th birthday a week on Monday. I’d bake a cake or take a bath and read her one and only novel Wuthering Heights, as I used to do every year, but unfortunately the celebrations can only inspire mixed feelings, because they bring memories of my toxic relationship with Heathcliff, her doomed antihero.
I like to describe myself as a recovering Heathcliff addict. In fact, he was my gateway drug. After I first read Wuthering Heights at 12, I also fell for Rhett Butler, Rupert Campbell-Black, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Spike and (Hilary Mantel’s) Thomas Cromwell. But none of them was as perfect a literary bad boy as Heathcliff.
On a similar vein, Entertainment Weekly interviews the journalist and writer Caitlin Moran:
Clarissa Cruz: Did something similar happen to you in your own life?
CM: Yes, it happened to me. All the young women that I knew who moved down to London in the ’90s knew there were these vampire-like men, a lot of them famous or in the industry. And you would see them at parties and they would be all charming and dark and charismatic, and you would gradually realize that darkly charming men — there’s a reason we say darkly charming. The problem is that so many male characters in romantic novels are these difficult, f—ed-up guys and it’s down to the women to understand them. Help them and heal them and make them better people. And I wanted to write a story where it’s like, “No, your job is not to go in there and save these dark guys, your job is to go around and tell people to keep away from them.” These days you look at Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre and just say no.
 Heathcliff as a relationship villain on Ten Daily:
Said people are common in literature – yes, a classic example is Shakespearean devil, Iago. But you might also like to throw into the mix a Mr Wickham, a Heathcliff, even a Christian Grey. (Lisa Portolan)
The Daily Mail reviews the upcoming I Am Heathcliff compilation of short stories:
I Am Heathcliff
Curated by Kate Mosse (Borough Press £12.99)
Inspired by Wuthering Heights, these tales of toxic relationships, an entirely disturbing episode of stalking and necrophilia, blighted lives and bleak landscapes reveal that contemporary responses to Emily Brontë’s endlessly controversial classic can be equally stark, cruel and shocking.
There are, however, exceptions; Louisa Young’s furious, funny, righteous rant redresses the ‘romantic’ hero myth as she recites the violent misdemeanours of bad boyfriends in Heathcliffs I Have Known.
In the wonderful, wistful One Letter Different by Joanna Cannon, two teenagers head to the moors in silent, secretive communion, while crime writer Sophie Hannah embarks on a musical murder mystery in Only Joseph. (Eithne Farry)
The Sydney Morning Herald reviews Bohemia Beach by Justine Ettler:
Bohemia Beach is also a pacy read about another young woman's almost terminal adventures in life, sex, art and romance; in addition, Ettler self-consciously frames her narrative in the context of other literary and philosophical tropes – here, Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Freud's notion of a primary trauma. (Rose Lucas)
The Telegraph (India) reviews A Secret Sisterhood by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney:
Everyone knows that famous male writers were also great friends. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway - these friendships are firmly ensconced in literary lore. But where are the women in this list of iconic alliances? Were they not friends? Was Jane Austen merely "a cottage-dwelling spinster", Charlotte Brontë "an impassioned roamer of the moors", George Eliot an "isolated thinker" and Virginia Woolf "a melancholic genius"? (Nayantara Mazumder)
The Yorkshire Post traces a profile of the poet and writer Mark Connors:
He writes everyday, always early in the morning (“before anybody else is up”) and with his partner Gill Lambert runs a monthly spoken word night, Word Club, at the Chemic Tavern in Leeds. The couple also set up an annual poetry event, Poetry at the Parsonage, in partnership with the Brontë Society. (Yvette Huddleston)
Also in The Yorkshire Post:
“Professional Yorkshireman” is a label lazily applied to anyone born in the Broad Acres who has made it down south. Any man that is. For some reason it doesn’t apply to successful women like Jodie Whittaker, Judi Dench and, well, the Brontës. It is a form of insult and implies the chap in question is dour, has a penchant for flat caps and whippets and constantly prattles into a microphone about the wonders of God’s Own County. (Anthony Clavane
RNE Radio 5's (Spain) Preguntas a la Historia tries to explain what is a governess in Charlotte Brontë's fiction:
Preguntas a la Historia - ¿Qué es una governess para Charlotte Brontë? - 19/07/18
Ningún escritor muestra la violencia social hacia las governesses como las hermanas Brontë. Las tres habían ejercido esta profesión y novelas como Jane Eyre, escrita por Charlotte en 1847, muestran como mujeres cultivadas son degradadas aunque rechazan ser tratadas como sirvientas. Eran "upper servants" que vivían de su formación y erudición transmitiéndolas a los hijos de familias pudientes.
María Teresa González Mínguez, profesora de Filología Inglesa de la UNED. (Translation)
La Diaria (Uruguay) analyzes the impact of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein:
Atrapada entre la imaginería pop y las limitaciones del cine de terror, hasta la década de 1960 Frankenstein entraba a la academia como un producto menor del Romanticismo. En realidad, para esa época era considerada parte de un subgénero poco prestigiado, el gótico, cuyo núcleo temático, según Harold Bloom, era un conflicto de identidad. Entonces, irrumpió otra mirada. Era la época de la segunda ola del feminismo, que buscaba convertir en igualdad de hecho aquello que el primer feminismo había consagrado por ley. Frankenstein sería capital para la rama literaria de esta renovación teórica (“esa novela fue la veta madre de la crítica feminista”, escribió Diane Long Hoeveler) y tal vez sólo Jane Eyre, de Charlotte Brontë (1847), haya generado tanta variedad de enfoques dentro de lo que dio en llamarse ginocrítica. (JG Lagos) (Translation)
La Opinión de Málaga (Spain) has some summer reads for you:
Cumbres Borrascosas
Qué mejor manera que celebrar el 200º aniversario del nacimiento de Emily Brontë que leyendo estos días uno de sus clásicos más universales. Esta novela se ha convertido en la gran obra romántica por excelencia, llegando a inspirar películas, secuelas o incluso canciones. Criticada en su época, 'Cumbres borrascosas' fue un libro adelantado a su tiempo en el que la intensidad y la locura se palpan en cada página. (C.G.) (Translation)
Deutschlandfunk (Germany) talks about the differences in the German and English literary canon:
Das zeigt sich auch daran, dass zum Beispiel deutschsprachige Autorinnen sich sehr viel häufiger auf englischsprachige Autorinnen beziehen, zum Beispiel auf Virginia Woolf, eben wie Sie gesagt haben: Auf Jane Austen, auf die Brontë-Schwestern, als auf deutschsprachige Autorinnen, weil es da wirklich so wenige gab. (Veronika Schuchter) (Translation)
On Bookes reviews Wide Sargasso Sea. En blogg för bokugglor (in Swedish) discusses Jane Eyre.  TV2000 (Italy) will air Jane Eyre 2006 (July 22nd and 29th); Scroll.in publishes images of several Most Wuthering Heights Day Eve celebrations; the Canton Daily Ledger lists several films about writers, featuring Devotion 1946; The Independent (Ireland) mentions the Brontës in an enumeration of 'Romantics'. Popsugar includes a Charlotte Brontë quote in a... wait for it... list of motivational quotes to leave in your kid's lunch box on their first day of school. Ooook. Another random Brontë quote can be read today in La Gazetta dello Sport (Italy).

Finally Eikoku News-Digest (in Japanese) publishes an article celebrating Emily Brontë's 200th anniversary and Girl with her Head in a Book reviews Villette in a post you should read.

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