There are 67 speaking characters in Jane Eyre

BlogCritics interviews Katy Owen, who plays the roles of Isabella Linton and Linton Heathcliff in Emma Rice's Wuthering Heights.

What was your first encounter with Wuthering Heights?

It was at school when I was doing my A-Levels at 16 or 17. My first impression was that it was tedious. I remember I didn’t engage with it properly or really understand what the story was about, because I was so naughty in class. But when the teacher said, "Who wants to read out loud?" my hand would shoot up in the air. I wasn't interested unless I ;could be the one reading it out loud and doing the voices.

I didn't understand the story until I came to it now.... I love it and I think it's amazing. (Pat Cuadros)

The Harvard Gazette has a Q&A with literature scholar Tara K. Menon.

Gazette: You recently signed a book deal with Princeton University Press for “Spoken Words,” which originated as your dissertation. How does academia think about this topic?

Menon: Surprisingly, there has been little research on direct speech in the novel. My approach combines large-scale data analysis of a large corpus of texts and formal close readings of individual canonical works. I’ve been able to take this computational approach because I’ve been lucky enough to have excellent collaborators. Adaner Usmani, an assistant professor of sociology and social studies, wrote most of the code that my project uses. And since arriving at Harvard, I’ve also had the opportunity to work with a stellar group of undergraduate and graduate research assistants. My work allows us to observe basic trends in the use of speech across 900 19th-century novels. For example, at the beginning of the 19th century, characters were more likely to give longer speeches, but by the end, when realism has taken hold, we see shorter exchanges that more closely mimic dialogue between two or more people. My approach also prompts us to reimagine how we think about celebrated novels. To give another example, “Jane Eyre” is often thought of as a tight domestic drama that plays out between very few characters, but I show that there are actually 67 speaking characters in the novel. This simple fact surprises both lay readers and lifelong scholars of Victorian literature. (Jill Radsken)

According to writer Kate Bowler in an interview for The Church Times,

We are Heathcliff, forced to lose our Catherines and endure our storied life as a collection of memorabilia that we have loved and lost. (Madeleine Davies)

James Marriott recommends BBC Radio 4's In Our Time in The Times:

The actual In Our Time is back on the radio too. You don’t really need to be told how great it is. Listening to recent episodes (on Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the evolution of crocodiles and Herodotus — but of course) made me think how prescient Melvyn Bragg and Olivia Seligman’s format has proved to be.