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Friday, September 21, 2018

Lots and lots of news outlets report that Cary Fukunaga will be directing the new James Bond movie. Many of those sites comment on his past work, including Jane Eyre 2011.
Fukunaga has never shown interest in telling stories that rely on comfortable presentation or a lack of risks. Take his adaptation of Jane Eyre (2011) for example, which despite the numerous adaptations of Charlotte Brontë's novel, managed to bring out the inherent horror of the story, the madness that tinged Victorian civility. (Richard Newby in The Hollywood Reporter)
Jane Eyre was Fukunaga’s interesting and perhaps underrated adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel, in which he shepherded excellent performances from Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender. (Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian)
His first feature, “Sin Nombre,” took the best director prize at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. He followed that up with his innovative “Jane Eyre,” and then the volatile, unblinking, hard-hitting “Beasts of No Nation,” (Owen Gleiberman in Variety)
And plenty more.

Kathryn Hughes reviews Nell Stevens's The Victorian and the Romantic for The New York Times.
After a few false starts, Stevens decides to concentrate on the three months in early 1857 that Gaskell spent in Rome living among a colony of expatriate British artists and writers. The 46-year-old author had timed her flight from her home in rainy Manchester in terrified anticipation of reaction to her new book, a biography of her late friend Charlotte Brontë. Already Gaskell had received several intimations of legal action from people who believed that “The Life of Charlotte Brontë” had libeled them, including the family of the Rev. William Carus Wilson, founder of the criminally negligent boarding school for clergy daughters that appears in the opening chapters of “Jane Eyre” as the hellish Lowood.
Those who are familiar with Gaskell’s work — and she continues to inspire loving devotion around the world — may fret about the way Stevens has ruthlessly filleted the novelist’s life and reoriented it for her own purposes. Then again, this is exactly what Gaskell did to Charlotte Brontë in her revisionist (for which read “borderline-fictionalized”) biography, so one could argue that there is a neat symmetry in play. Certainly, there can be no doubt about the genuine affection that drives Stevens’s project. She draws her book to a close by furnishing Gaskell with a make-believe finale in which her heroine takes the longed-for trip to America and finds Norton waiting for her on the dock. By this point, it would take a stonyhearted reader to begrudge Elizabeth Gaskell her happy ending. 
And The New Yorker recommends it too.

KWBU's Likely Stories has a podcast on Villette.
Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece, Villette is an absorbing excursion through the middle of the 19th century.  Her stories of love and heartbreak are every bit as real today as they were a century and a half ago. 5 stars! (Jim McKeown)
The imaginary worlds of children (aka 'paracosms') are discussed by The Wall Street Journal.
In 19th-century England, the Brontë children created Gondal, an imaginary kingdom full of melodrama and intrigue. Emily and Charlotte Brontë grew up to write the great novels “Wuthering Heights” and “Jane Eyre.” [...]
Prof. Taylor asked 169 children, ages eight to 12, whether they had an imaginary world and what it was like. They found that about 17 percent of the children had created their own complicated universe. Often a group of children would jointly create a world and maintain it, sometimes for years, like the Brontë sisters or the Lewis brothers. And grown-ups were not invited in. (Alison Gopnik)
The Brontës' imaginary worlds are also mentioned in an article on Australian author Gerald Murnane in The Guardian.
“I became obsessed with things that happened nowhere in a purely imaginary place,” he said. This would be “sufficient to sustain me in all the years when I was no longer writing fiction”.
He suspects that the audience might laugh at this, too, but we don’t. He reminds us that the Brontë sisters created an imaginary world, Gondal, with kingdoms, adventures and romance.
“If it was good enough for the Brontës, for a middle-aged guy in Australia there’s no reason to think badly of what I’m doing. I’m just doing what the Brontës did.” (Gay Alcorn)
And another Brontë mention in The Guardian. The Pillar portrait seems to have been the inspiration behind the 1950 book Personas en la sala by Argentinian author Norah Lange, now translated into English for the first time as People in the Room.
Born in 1905 in Buenos Aires, Norah Lange entered the Argentinian literary scene early, first as a poet; later, her novels and a childhood memoir became part of the Spanish-language canon. As César Aira says in his introduction to this first English translation of her work, she once told an interviewer that People in the Room had been inspired by the portrait of the three Brontë sisters painted by their brother, his own image erased from the canvas. Combining painterly qualities with poetic imagery, Lange’s prose is rich in metaphor, self-absorbed and, at its best, darkly irresistible. (Anna Aslanyan)
India Blooms interviews writer Lopamudra Sen.
What kind of books have acted as inspiration for the book? I am a bibliophile. I can't stay without books. My inspiration are The Notebook , A Walk to Remember and Dear John by Nicholas Sparks. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Me Before You by Jojo Moyes.
BAE Negocios (in Spanish) interviews Laura Ramos about her book on the Brontë family, Infernales.
—¿Qué fue encontrando de cada una de ellas? —En el curso de la investigación fui descubriendo, estupefacta, que Emile [sic] Brontë era un ser parecido a esa construcción artística infernal llamada Heathcliff, el héroe (malvado y despiadado) de Cumbres borrascosas. Cuando Catherine Earnshaw, la heroína, dice “yo soy Heathcliff”, está hablando Emily, ella es Heathcliff. Sus escasas cartas y sus seis diarios (poquísimos, porque la mayoría de sus papeles desaparecieron, probablemente quemados por ella misma) la revelan como feroz, despiadada, de un temperamento fuerte como una roca. Mi idea sobre ella cambió absolutamente, porque creía que era una joven tuberculosa débil, frágil y tímida.
—¿Qué impresión le queda de Emily?—Creo que Emily era una artista exquisita, la más genial de la cofradía, sin dudas, que desfallecía si no podía escribir, como de hecho le pasó mientras estuvo en Roe Head, una escuela para niñas donde Charlotte era maestra.
Emily era la más poderosa en el campo de batalla de la relación entre los hermanos. Se reía de Branwell, como demuestran escritos encontrados en el margen de unos textos de Branwell que anticipan la saga de Games of Thrones. Emily aconsejó a su padre, siendo niña, que si no podía razonar con Branwell, lo azotara. Charlotte era la más pasional. Como Jane Eyre, la heroína de su obra maestra, es pura pasión (eso dijo Virginia Woolf). Charlotte se enamoró violentamente más de una vez, y sus cartas de amor son casi demenciales. También era una refinada seductora, como lo muestra la colección de cartas que le mandaba a su editor, un joven soltero, hermoso y sofisticado que llegó a un punto de enamoramiento de ella, que no era menos fea que su heroína Jane Eyre, la primera heroína fea de la literatura (y la más adorable). “Una mujer que no es hermosa, ni rica también tiene sentimientos, y puede ser heroína de una novela”, desafió a sus hermanas cuando creó Jane Eyre. (Maria Ripetta) (Translation)
The Brussels Times lists 'The 10 most famous émigrés to call Brussels home' and of course Charlotte and Emily Brontë are among them.
4) The Brontës
When we think of the Brontës, the first image that springs to mind is that of the wild and windswept Yorkshire moors. Yet Charlotte and Emily Brontë spent a number of their formative years in Brussels at the Pensionnat Heger on Rue d'Isabelle. The boarding school where the sisters both studied and taught is also where Charlotte met Constantin Heger, the dark haired, cigar-smoking tutor she quickly became infatuated with. Heger later became the prototype for many of Charlotte's male love interests, including Monsieur Paul Emanuel in Villette and Mr Rochester himself. The site where the Pensionnat Heger once stood is now Brussels' Palais des Beaux Arts. The Brussels Brontë Group organises talks and guided tours about the sisters' time in Brussels. (Marianna Hunt)
The New York Public Library has selected the best covers of Wuthering HeightsPleno.News (in Portuguese) recommends Wuthering Heights among other classic novels. TodayTix has picked '9 adventurous adaptations of Jane Eyre'.

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