'She is Mrs Gaskell to Charlotte Brontë, burying her subject in myth'

The New Statesman has a well-argued and truly perceptive article by Tanya Gold on Marilyn Monroe and Netflix’s new film Blonde based on Joyce Carol Oates’s novel.

Now Netflix has released Blonde, a film by Andrew Dominik, adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, which has Monroe battered, splattered, blood-drenched, tear-drenched and adrift. Is there any liquid left to toss on her? Chanel No 5? Petrol? If there wasn’t enough pain in her real life – who would be a starlet in the 1950s? – Oates imagines more, as passive-aggressive tribute: she is Mrs Gaskell to Charlotte Brontë, burying her subject in myth, because her reality was too threatening. “She made herself into the blonde who looks dumb,” Oates said. “So she was complicit in her own fate, I’m afraid.”

The Irish News sums up the 2021 interview of Hilary Mantel by Michael Rosen for BBC 4's Word of Mouth.

As a child she read without discrimination - from Blyton to the Brontës. (Nuala McCann)

More to listen to as the latest Los Angeles Review of Books podcast includes a bit on Villette:

Also, Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose, returns to recommend Charlotte Brontë’s Villette.

A contributor to The Evening Sun on watching Wuthering Heights 1939:

It started when I was searching through movie options on TV, and suddenly came upon one that I had not seen in years. Produced in 1939, it was directed by William Wyler, starred Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, and was based a novel written in 1847 by Emily Brontë.

I hadn’t seen it in many years, believing that the last time I’d watched the movie, it had packed such an emotional wallop, to do so again would be anti-climactic. How wrong I was.

Over the image of a desolate cottage on a lonely moor, with a magnificent Alfred Newman score thundering in the background, my screen filled with the words: Sanuel Goldwyn presents "Wuthering Heights"  ... and watching it was like falling in love for the very first time.

Surely, never again, as the bitter, passionate Heathcliff, was Laurence Olivier so masculine. So handsome. Surely, never again, as wild, vain, and equally passionate Cathy, was Merle Oberon so terrifyingly imperious. So heartbreakingly vulnerable.

They love. They part. Cathy worships Heathcliff. Cathy rejects him. He runs off to seek his fortune, and she turns for affection to wealthy but arrogant Edgar, about whom Heathcliff had proclaimed, “If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day.”

Two years later, Heathcliff comes back, a wealthy man, to claim Cathy. But she has married Edgar. In her anguish at his return – his heart filled with jealousy and vengeance – Cathy loses the will to live. As she dies in his arms, Heathcliff rages:

“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you – haunt me, then...Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”

Cathy dies. And I cry. I cry. I cry. (Shelly Reuben)