An Evolution of Jane and Lizzie: Adaptation Studies Need to Accommodate for the Rise of Internet-Based Media
by Katherine Anne Bryce
The University of Vermont, 2019
Adaptation studies have been a part of film studies since the beginning of cinema itself. However, there is a need for a push in a new direction to incorporate and acknowledge internet-based, web-series adaptations. The purpose of this paper was to come to terms with the current status of adaptation studies as a field and to determine how to best incorporate internet-based media into the previously established framework. Combining a study of adaptation studies with a study of transmedia and the specificities of internet-based media, I looked at two web-series adaptations of classic novels: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, an adaptation of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Using these two case studies, I outlined the distinctive characteristics of web-series adaptations - their benefits and their drawbacks - as a means of showing how adaptation studies could benefit from an expansion to incorporate the new media our technology is producing.
Riscrivere Jane Austen e le sorelle Brontë: Emma Tennant e il romanzo intertestuale
by Marinella Ferri
Università degli Estudi di Modena et Reggio Emilia, 2019
The aim of this work is to investigate the main characteristics of the “intertextual novel”, adapting the famous definition of Gèrard Genette, through an analysis of some novels by the contemporary Scottish author Emma Tennant. In particular, we will focus our attention on her rewritings of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, each of them exemplifying a particular type of intertextuality. The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first one will present the different kinds of intertextuality, while the other two will discuss Tennant's works. The theoretical frame of the thesis is informed by Gérard Genette’s notion of transtextuality, in particular the categories defined as intertextuality and hypertextuality. In postmodernism, they are very popular practices, and they are also used by Tennant, who, like other contemporary writers, resorts to textual strategies such as pastiche, sequel and forgery. In the first part of the Nineties, Tennant rewrote various novels by Jane Austen. This dissertation will analyze Pemberley, A Sequel to Pride and Prejudice (1993) and Emma in Love, Jane Austen's Emma Continued (1996). The first one is a sequel of the famous novel of Austen; the narration begins one year after the conclusion of the hypotextual story and it is set during the Christmas period in Pemberley. Tennant uses the main characters of Pride and Prejudice with their main characteristics; for example, Elizabeth Bennett is, once again, victim of prejudice and Mr Wickham plays the role of the villain. In Tennant’s novel the House of Pemberley is like a stage on which all the characters have their moments to appear. In the sequel of Emma, Tennant maintains the original plot, which once again has at its core a capricious heroine who, in this case, never achieves her maturity, not even at the end of the novel. We see the new heroine organizing a marriage between her brother-in-law Mr John Knightley and Miss Jane Fairfax, until she meets an enigmatic French Woman who creates in her a lot of curiosity. The third part of this work examines Tennant’s rewritings of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Tennant's aim is to give voice to minor characters of the hypotexts. Heathcliff's Tale (2005) and Thornfield Hall (2006) are composed by complex narrative structures and different versions of the same story. For example, in Heathcliff's Tale the narration is given in Chinese boxes all linked together by the figure of the editor. In Thornfield Hall the author gives voices to different characters who narrate the story following Brontë's hypotext but adding new parts.
A successful novel must be in want of a sequel : second takes on classics from The Scarlet Letter to Rebecca
M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo.
Jefferson, North Carolina : McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
ISBN: 978-1-4766-7282-3
2019
What happened after Mr. Darcy married Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice? Where did Heathcliff go when he disappeared in Wuthering Heights? What social ostracism would Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter have faced in 20th century America? Great novels often leave behind great questions, and sequels seek to answer them. This critical analysis offers fresh insights into the sequels to seven literary classics, including Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, the Brontë sisters’ Jane Eyre, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
3. The Madwoman in the Attic and Other Family Secrets: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and The French Dancer’s Bastard by Emma Tennant 66
4. Beyond Wuthering Heights: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Windward Heights by Maryse Condé and Heathcliff: The Return to Wuthering Heights by Lin Haire-Sargeant 78
A new Charlotte Brontë study appearing this summer:Charlotte BrontëLegacies and afterlivesEdited by Amber Regis and Deborah Wynne
ISBN: 978-1-7849-9246-0 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-1-5261-1985-8 (ebook)
Manchester University Press
July 2017
Charlotte Brontë: legacies and afterlives is a timely reflection on the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë's life and work. The new essays in this volume, which cover the period from Brontë's first publication to the twenty-first century, explain why her work has endured in so many different forms and contexts. This book brings the story of Charlotte Brontë's legacy up to date, analysing the intriguing afterlives of characters such as Jane Eyre and Rochester in neo-Victorian fiction, cinema, television, the stage and, more recently, on the web. Taking a fresh look at 150 years of engagement with one of the best-loved novelists of the Victorian period, from obituaries to vlogs, from stage to screen, from novels to erotic makeovers, this book reveals the author's diverse and intriguing legacy. Engagingly written and illustrated, the book will appeal to both scholars and general readers.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: picturing Charlotte Brontë - Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne
Part I: Ghostly afterlives: cults, literary tourism and staging the life
1 The 'Charlotte' cult: writing the literary pilgrimage, from Gaskell to Woolf - Deborah Wynne
2 The path out of Haworth: mobility, migration, and the global in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley and the writings of Mary Taylor - Jude Piesse
3 Brontë countries: nation, gender and place in the literary landscapes of Haworth and Brussels - Charlotte Mathieson
4 Reading the revenant in Charlotte Brontë's literary afterlives: charting the path from the 'silent country' to the seance - Amber Pouliot
5 Charlotte Brontë on stage: 1930s biodrama and the archive/museum performed - Amber K. Regis
Part II: Textual legacies: influences and adaptations6 'Poetry as I comprehend the word': Charlotte Brontë's lyric afterlife - Anna Barton
7 The legacy of Lucy Snowe: reconfiguring spinsterhood and the Victorian family in inter-war women's writing - Emma Liggins
8 Hunger, rebellion and rage: adapting Villette - Benjamin Poore
9 The ethics of appropriation; or, the 'mere spectre' of Jane Eyre: Emma Tennant's Thornfield Hall, Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair and Gail Jones's Sixty Lights - Alexandra Lewis
10 'The insane Creole': the afterlife of Bertha Mason - Jessica Cox
11 Jane Eyre's transmedia lives - Monika Pietrzak-Franger
12 'Reader, I [shagged/beat/whipped/f****d/rewrote] him': the sexual and financial afterlives of Jane Eyre - Louisa Yates
Appendix: Charlotte Brontë's cultural legacy, 1848-2016 - Kimberley Braxton
Several news outlets report the death of the writer Emma Tennant (1937-2017). She was a prolific author of novels, editor of journals (with quite a colourful life which deserves its own novel) and a conspicuous writer of post-modern (or so they were often described) sequels of Jane Austen novels. She also entered the Brontë arena with a couple of sequels of both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
In 2002 she published Adèle. Jane Eyre's Hidden Story which retells the story of Jane Eyre from Adèle's perspective:The daughter of a celebrated Parisian actress, Adèle is a homesick, forlorn eight-year-old when first brought to Thornfield Hall by Edward Fairfax Rochester, her mother's former lover. Lonely and ill at ease in the unfamiliar English countryside, she longs to return to the glitter of Paris ... and to the mother who has been lost to her. But a small ray of sunshine brightens her eternal gloom when a stranger arrives to care for her: a serious yet intensely loving young governess named Jane Eyre.The novel was republished in 2006 as The French Dancer's Bastard. The Story of Adèle from Jane Eyre and yet again in 2007 as Thornfield Hall. Jane Eyre's Hidden Story. In a way it is surprising that there were so many editions after the rather appalling reviews that the novel received quite systematically.
As time passes, Adèle watches with wonder as an unexpected romance blossoms between her governess and her guardian -- even as her curiosity leads her deeper into the shadowy manor, toward the dark and terrible secret that is locked away in a high garret. And on Jane and Rochester's wedding day, it is Adèle who brings about the fiery catastrophe that will shatter her "family" and send her fleeing, frightened and alone, back to Paris.
Somewhat more critically successful was her Wuthering Heights sequel: Heathcliff's Tale published in 2005:Emma Tennant's new novel, Heathcliff's Tale, brings together a chilling ghost story, a literary mystery, and a satire of Brontë academic studies. It is the story of the haunting of Henry Newby, a hapless young lawyer despatched to Haworth Parsonage shortly after the death of Emily Brontë to retrieve a novel by Ellis Bell for his uncle, publisher of Wuthering Heights. He soon finds himself adrift in a sea of possibilities: are the pages which burn on the study fire the work of fiction which his uncle awaits, or, as he believes, do they comprise the confessions of a wicked man, a murderer who has brought destruction and misery to all he meets? Who is this Heathcliff who spills his black soul among the flames and ashes?
Fact and fiction are intertwined as we are confronted with the enigma of Emily Brontë. How could a young woman with no apparent experience of passion or knowledge of evil, have summoned up Heathcliff? Can evil be passed from one generation to the next? Or is it born out of deprivation and despair? Does it linger, long after the death of the evil-doer-and can it haunt chillingly through the pages of a book?
Characters migrateMore information here.
Université de Caen Basse Normandie, France - 7-8 February 2014
Deadline for proposals: 1 September 2013
This international conference follows the two previous ones organized by ERIBIA on Happy Endings and the Unfinished in 2009 and 2011: next we shall deal with these characters that "live on" beyond the endings written by their authors and who overstep the limits of the work in which they have been created.
"Characters migrate," Umberto Eco wrote, explaining that some characters (by no means all of them) leave the text in which they were "born" to migrate to a space in a universe which is very difficult to delineate. Thus Little Red Riding-Hood, d’Artagnan or Ulysses "become individuals with a life apart from their original scores" and "even those who have never read the archetypal score can claim to make true statements about them". They have become "true for the collective imagination because over the course of centuries we have made emotional investments in them". Some form of fixity is necessary for these migrating characters who can become "role models for our life". In the postmodern novel studied by Brian McHale, borrowing a character is used for breaking the realist framework and highlighting the intertextual dimension of a text.
For Eco and McHale, these migrations do not alter the literary entities since their very characteristics, known by everyone, inform the text and/or the reader. The question of this transposition as a writing strategy will be addressed. The conference will also study characters that evolve as they migrate from one text to the other and will also discuss what is at stake when a fictional character is thus revisited or rewritten. Papers will focus on the different transformations or non-transformations of these migrant characters. These can appear in another text by the same author at another stage of their fictional lives, like Federica Potter in the universe invented by A.S. Byatt in her tetralogy (The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman) but also Juliet, the protagonist in Alice Munro's three short stories in the collection Runaway. While being part of the same narrative universe, some characters can also move from the foreground to the background: this is the case for Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp, the main protagonists in Changing Places, who reappear in a minor role in Small World, a Romance and Nice Work by David Lodge. Conversely, Jane Gardam makes one of her secondary characters in Old Filth the main protagonist of The Man in the Wooden Hat.
Characters can also go on evolving within their own narrative universes but in allographic texts. Thus sequels, the function of which, according to Genette, is to exploit the success of a work often considered as complete when it was first published, and to set it going again with new episodes (Palimpsestes, 223), to the adventures of a famous character take up endless pages of contemporary novels: for example, some of Emma Tennant’s many novels, but also more recently, Peter Pan in Scarlet by Geraldine McCaughrean and Death in Pemberley by PD James. In the same vein, new insights and interpretations on canonic characters abound: the March sisters' father in Geraldine Brooks' March, Jane Eyre’s pupil in Emma Tennant's Adèle. For its part, Ronald Frame’s Havisham puts the spotlight on the most famous of Victorian fiancées. The migration to an allographic text can also take the form of a "trans contextualization" (Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 12), when a character reappears in another context, in another period, like in Will Self's Dorian, another place or even another sub-genre, like Elizabeth Bennett as a zombie huntress in Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Character migrations can also be studied in filmic adaptations and their successive remakes. Within the framework of this intermedial praxis, as director Patricia Rozema said in an interview about her Mansfield Park, "interpretation is impossible to avoid. It must be openly declared by the filmmaker (writer and director) but 'imposing meaning' is impossible to avoid". Thus the choice to have two coloured actors play Heathcliff in the latest Wuthering Heights by Andrea Arnold is a good example of this somewhat radical re-interpretation of the main character in Emily Brontë’s novel when he migrates to another media.
Papers on one of the above-mentioned characters or other migrant-characters in contemporary anglophone literature are especially welcome, as well as those dealing with the following topics:
- the character in a cycle or series,
- the character in a prequel/sequel/coquel,
- the character in a transposition/rewriting,
- the character in a cinematic adaptation.
A double wedding anniversary celebration will be staged at Haworth Parish Church this Saturday, December 29.Derbyshire Times presents the book A Peak District Anthology by Roly Smith:
It will be exactly 200 years since the Rev Patrick Brontë, father of the famous sisters, married his wife Maria. He was vicar at Haworth from 1820 to 1861.
It will also be 39 years since the current priest-in-charge, the Rev Peter Mayo-Smith and his wife Eileen, were married.
To mark Patrick Brontë’s double centenary, the church bell ringers will carry out a two-and-three-quarter-hour full peal.
The bell ringers previously staged this demanding performance last year, as part of the celebrations for Prince William’s wedding.
Simon Burnett, the Haworth Church bell captain, said: “A full peal of bell involves 5,040 changes in various methods, and to complete it is a magnificent feat of concentration, because just one mistake invalidates the performance.”
Earlier in the day the bell ringers at Guiseley Parish Church will also be attempting a full peal to mark the Brontë wedding, as it was at their church that the original ceremony took place.
The Haworth peal is expected to start at 3pm.
Mr Mayo-Smith said: “It’s an amazing coincidence that I should be priest-in-charge at Haworth when the 200th anniversary of Patrick and Maria Brontë is celebrated, and even more remarkable that my wife Eileen and I should have three daughters too.
“It’ll be wonderful if our bell ringing team succeed in delivering the full peal and it will help make our anniversary an even more special and memorable day.”
Compiled and introduced by Peak District expert Roly Smith, it revives many forgotten descriptions of one of the finest, most varied and best-loved landscapes in the whole of Britain.The Oxford Mail interviews Chief Constable Sara Thornton about the Oxfordshire Reading Campaign:
From William Camden to Daniel Defoe, Sir Gawain to Lord Byron, literary visitors have long been astonished by the sublime wonders of the Peak.
The coming of railways proved another great impetus for writers and tourists. Ruskin extolled the beauties of the Peak, while novelists Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot used closely observed Peakland settings for some of their most vivid narratives. Topographical writers including Edward Bradbury, Thomas Tudor and James Croston enthusiastically described the delights of the Derbyshire scenery to the ever-increasing stream of Victorian visitors.
Asked what her favourite book is, she said: “It has got to be Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte which is the only book that I have read many times.
“I was always fascinated by the life of the Bronte sisters and how three girls who lived in a remote house on the edge of the moors could write with such feeling and insight.
“I have always been enchanted by the romance of the story and managed to overlook the fact that the hero, Mr Rochester, had locked his wife in the attic.” (Tom Jennings)
(Another of the gruesome sequences is alluded to in Cowboys & Aliens.) There are touches of Macbeth and Jane Eyre. A gang of ambiguously gay outlaws dresses alike in Fascist black. (Howery Pack)The Student Newspaper reviews an Edinburgh performance of Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera:
We are talking doomed, elemental, all-consuming love of the Heathcliff/Cathy variety: offering pure escapism into the macabre world of the Opéra Populaire of 19th century Paris.La Nouvelle République (France) announces the screening of Jane Eyre 2011 and Wuthering Heights 2011 at the Semaine du Cinéma Britanique in Blois (January 2013):
Par ailleurs, on appréciera deux adaptations récentes des grands romans des sœurs Brontë.The Haber Turk (Turkey) reviewer begins by reviewing Anna Karenina 2012 and ends up talking about Wuthering Heights 2011:
En effet, pour Les Hauts de Hurlevent, on en était resté à la version de 1939 de William Wyler, réunissant rien moins que Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon et David Niven. Quant à Jane Eyre, la mouture 1944 de Robert Stevenson n'était pas trop desservie non plus par son casting : Orson Welles, Joan Fontaine, et une petite débutante nommée Elisabeth Taylor !
Et bien cette semaine britannique nous offrira deux versions dignes de leurs aînées et ne datant que de 2011. (Translation)
Bu da bir anlamda “Uğultulu Tepeler”in (“Wuthering Heights”, 2011) stilize, açı simsarı, az diyaloglu ve öznel dünyasının tam ekranla ‘Andrea Arnold’ gözünden kavranışının, burada biçimci, nesnel, tiyatro estetiğini benimseyen ve sinemaskop formatında bir başka ‘sıkışmışlık’la farklı tabanlardan ‘postmodern 19. yüzyıl yasak aşkları’nı portrelediğini belirtelim. Bu sayede ‘kostümlü drama özlü tutku’ların üst üste böylesi radikal elbiseler giyebilmeleri sevindirici. Wright ile Arnold’un isimleri de bu konuda ‘kostümlü drama’ tarihinde özel bir yere not edilecek. Zira burada türün içinde yapılanlara ne kadar geçmişe gitsek de gerçek bir karşılık bulamıyoruz. (Kerem Akça) (Translation)BlackBook features Wuthering Heights 2011 on its best-of-the-year-list; Les Soeurs Brontë (in French) posts about how Christmas could be celebrated at the Brontës's home; Bookish Whimsy reviews Emma Tennant's Adèle: Jane Eyre's Hidden Story; Stupid Stuff posts about Wide Sargasso Sea.
There's a fundamental film-making point here: if a classic text is still relevant, surely it doesn't need a historical setting? It's a question worth asking when literary period movies are being churned out: we've recently been inundated with Dickens, Austen and Brontë, not to mention another Anna Karenina. Rose hasn't seen Joe Wright's recent version. "But if I was going to do Anna Karenina now, I would make her a Beverly Hills housewife, and have her throw herself under an SUV in the valet parking lot." (Steve Rose)At any rate Shockya picks the latest screen adaptation of Wuthering Heights as one of the 25 best films of 2012.
Now what I love about Andrea Arnold’s “Wuthering Heights” is not just its subject matter but also its presentation. We have certain ideas of what a literary costume drama should be but what Arnold does is strips those elements away to show it at its bare bones. There is no artifice with “Wuthering Heights,” there’s brutal honesty in devotion and passion. A passion so deep that it’s never talked about or acted upon. The idea of the two would-be lovers – Heathcliff and Cathy – never giving in to their love and desire for one another is so heartbreaking and painful that it’s almost palpable as it translates to the audience watching the film. This film is so raw, gritty, and crude, but, somehow, also well mannered and deliberate. It’s almost incomprehensible how these two ideas come together so well but I guess that’s just the lyrical beauty of Andrea Arnold’s “Wuthering Heights.” (Rudie Obias)The Daily Mail reviews the WW2 diary of May Smith, published by Virago as These Wonderful Rumours!, and mentions the classic adaptation of the same novel.
May’s own outlook on life is, for the most part, irrepressibly upbeat. Keep Calm And Carry On might almost have been coined with her in mind.Oh, what a surprise: according to HitFix's The Fien Print Gossip Girl is no Wuthering Heights:
She is a regular cinema-goer, and lists every film she sees: Goodbye Mr Chips, Fantasia, Pride And Prejudice and Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier, which ‘made me feel all romantic’. (Craig Brown)
[Earlier in the episode, Blair got uppity with Serena about all of the bad things Dan had done to her and Serena responded that Chuck had done worse to her. Blair responded, "He's one of us," perhaps the most disgusting allowance for deviant criminal behavior that the show has ever attempted. Because Chuck was from the same social circle, we excuse violence, attempted rape and that thing where he sold Blair? Well... OK! If this were a 1800s Gothic romance, that might fly, but Chuck Bass is no Heathcliff, whether we're talking about the brooding anti-hero or the chunky cat who just won't be undone.] (Daniel Fienberg)
Novelists can create unique and unforgettable characters — there's never been anyone quite like Jane Eyre or Ignatius J. Reilly — [...]The Telegraph reviews The Beautiful Child by Emma Tennant, who can't quite leave the Brontës out of her novels.
A guest at the Media Mansion has written a paper on Charlotte Brontë and spiritualism entitled “Jane! Jane! Jane!” (Frances Wilson)The Keighley News features Ann Sumner, who will take up her post as director of the Brontë Parsonage in February.
“As a lifelong Brontë enthusiast, I could not be starting at a better time, with refurbishment of the Parsonage Museum coming up in early 2013 and planning for the bicentenary celebrations of Charlotte Bronte’s birth in 2016,” she said.Hopefully Ann Sumner will see the return of Charlotte Brontë's parasol to the Parsonage as well, a story told by Susan Calder. See ongi elu (in Estonian) posts about the Estonian stage musical adaptation of Jane Eyre. Book Blogging Bliss and Terribly Sorry write about Wuthering Heights while Catellina posts in Romanian about the 2009 adaptation. Raphaeloo has visited Haworth and shares some lovely pictures of Haworth in Christmas time.
“I feel honoured and excited to be taking up my new role and returning to work in the beautiful county of West Yorkshire. I’m hugely looking forward to the challenges ahead.”
Brontë Society president, Bonnie Greer, said the appointment would be a huge boost.
She added: “The wealth of Ann’s curatorial experience is a great resource for us to draw upon, and her national high standing as an art historian and museums director will certainly boost our profile, both within the UK and internationally.”
Then there are novelists who want to “escape” real life and real people and create alternate universes. They are the ones who wear headsets while writing in Starbucks, rather than pulling their chairs close to strangers, the better to jot down random bits of overheard dialogue. These “escapist” cases’ characters are made up of a combination of memory, imagination, literary influences and shared mythology. In other words, equal parts experience and fantasy.Flavorwire is inspired by Emily Brontë's anniversary:
This explains how writers with very little life experience can create characters that appear to be so unlike themselves. Exhibit A: Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s classic novel “Wuthering Heights.” Brontë, who lived a sheltered life with her sisters and father in Haworth, England, rarely going farther than the moors surrounding the village, created the most psychologically complicated male character in literature.
There are those who say Heathcliff was partially modeled on Emily’s brother, Branwell, a talented but self-destructive young man likely addicted to alcohol and laudanum, and thought to be in love with a married woman he could never possess. These facts may have been the skeleton for the character of Heathcliff, but the emotional power that brings him to life as a separate being comes from Brontë’s imagination. If indeed there was a human model for the character, then the author added so many levels of her own insights that another, stronger being was formed.
One half of a famous pair of real-life sisterly scribes has a birthday today: Emily Brontë. The Wuthering Heights author spent a lifetime penning poems and other tales with siblings Charlotte and Anne (using masculine pseudonyms), all devoted to their craft and each other — especially during the troubled times of their youth. Since the Brontës often used material from their lives to inform their stories — including their tight-knit relationship — we felt inspired to take a look at fictional sisters who also shared powerful bonds full of passionate and complex emotions unique amongst women and girls. (Alison Nastasi)WCSH asks Emily's pen name.
In the early 19th century, writing professionally was frowned upon as being unladylike. But Brontë had too much talent keep it hidden. She got around the limitations placed on women by writing under a male pen name.Global Times (China) discusses the book market in China:
Unfortunately, she never got the chance to write another novel. She died of tuberculosis when she was just 30 years old.
Two years later, her sister Charlotte made sure she got the credit she never received during her lifetime by reprinting Wuthering Heights under her real name. (Mike Kmack)
From classics like Anderson Fairy Tales and Jane Eyre to modern fiction like Norwegian Wood, literature from abroad floods China's market every year. (Lu Qianwen)La Repubblica (Italy) interviews Enrique Vila-Matas about romance in literature:
"Non necessariamente. Nabokov per esempio è uno scrittore che ha saputo descrivere anche amori leggeri, compiuti. Però è vero che i più bei romanzi d'amore raccontano di passioni che spezzano la vita. Amori che sono malattie, come quello tra Heathcliff e Catherine, in Cime Tempestose di Emily Brontë. Eterni, indissolubili.["] (Elena Stancalli) (Translation)The School Library Journal reviews Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling by Michael Bocaccino:
This is a perfect read for teens who enjoy gothic atmospheres, and a great companion to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or the works of Victoria Holt and Daphne du Maurier. (Laura Pearle)Mediatel talks about independent UK movies:
What constitutes an independent UK movie? The top five were, The King's Speech; The Inbetweeners Movie; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Horrid Henry The Movie; and Jane Eyre.We disagree with these figures. Not about accuracy but interpretation. Young audiences have seen the film (as we have been reporting for more than a year) but not necessarily on a cinema screen.
Jane Eyre had the most skewed audience of all; 86% of the audience were women and 54% were aged over 55. I saw it and with hindsight it is a wonder that I came out alive. (James Whitmore)
Mitch is still outside, wandering the moors of Cronulla like some Sutherland Heathcliff. Well, moor. (Giles Hardie)WNYC presents a student reading Jane Eyre this summer; Classics///Hits, Carmadou, Mensagem de Isa (in Portuguese), CharlottePierce13 and Goodthingtheworldisround review Jane Eyre; Prism and The Musty Study post about Wuthering Heights; The Bradders Blog have visited the Brontë Parsonage; Ler(-te) (in Portuguese) posts about Villette; Między wersami książek (in Polish) reviews Agnes Grey; A Postcard to Lumière reviews Wuthering Heights 2011; Pages from my Thoughts interviews Marta Acosta, author of Dark Companion; Once Upon a Time (in Polish) reviews The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; The Literary Omnivore hates Emma Tennant's Thornfield Hall; Out and About in Paris posts about the French references in Jane Eyre 2011; the film is reviewed on My Pen, My Screens, My Friends!, Arlyomag, Alphacin, Pop-Corn et Oreille de Chien and Ciné Partout (in French); A Book and a Record reviews April Lindner's Jane.
Next month, actors and writers are due to congregate in Haworth to promote the autumn premiere of Blake Morrison’s new play about the Brontë sisters.We must say, though, that Emily did go to London en route to Brussels and, according to Mary Taylor, they did see as many things there as possible in just one day.
Juliet Barker, biographer of the extraordinary Brontë family, will be there, along with actors from Barrie Rutter’s Northern Broadsides company, as well as Blake, a writer of poetry and plays who specialises in giving the language of his theatrical works a Yorkshire twist. [...]
We Are Three Sisters, his latest [play], was influenced by Chekhov’s 1901 comic drama of provincial unease The Three Sisters.
“Chekhov had read about the Brontës shortly before writing The Three Sisters,” he adds. “The likeliest source was Mrs Gaskell’s 1857 biography of Charlotte Brontë, commissioned after her death by her father Patrick.”
“So there are good reasons for transplanting the play to Haworth and identifying Irene, Masha and Olga with Anne, Emily and Charlotte – they even have a troubled and self-destructive brother in common.
“Above all, I hope that, by taking a cue from Chekhov, the play will banish the gloom surrounding the Brontës and reveal the Northern humour and resilience they showed, despite the ever-present threat of death and disease.
“In other words, I’d like to honour the truth of the Brontës while showing Charlotte, Emily, Anne, Branwell and Patrick as they’ve never been seen before.”
“If you read Charlotte’s letters, there is a real spirit and wit and humour about them that has never been brought out.
“The Brontës tend to be portrayed as poor, tragic victims – figures of gloom,” Blake adds, saying it was a matter of getting away from these stereotypes.
Arguably, people are drawn to the Brontës because they are tragic figures. Branwell, Emily and Anne all died of TB within the space of nine months, from September 1848 to May 1849. Charlotte died in March 1855. Patrick Brontë, old and blind, outlived his entire family. [...]
“It’s going to be a real Brontë fest in September,” Blake says. If he’s lucky, his play, directed by Barrie Rutter, will benefit from any extra interest created by these films. At the moment he’s still writing the script.
“This is the fifth draft now. Costumes and stage designs are still unfolding – casting has been done, I think; but undoubtedly there will be re-writes until the last minute.
“There are 70 pages of text, so I don’t think it will be a long play; but we won’t know until it’s up and running,” he adds.
Part of the purpose of the half-day at Haworth on July 21 is a cast read-through before an invited audience at the Baptist Chapel. Afterwards, a social event with drinks and nibbles is planned for the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Chekhov’s play is set in the provinces. The elder of the Russian writer’s three sisters, Olga, is forever pining to leave the suffocating boredom of the army outpost where the family lives and return to busy life of Moscow where she was born.
Blake’s play is set in Haworth in 1848, “in a gloomy parsonage where there are neither curtains nor comforts”. This is where his three sisters light up their self-contained world with laughter, dreams and ideas; and writing, always writing.
The Brontë sisters, of course, were born in Thornton and later migrated over the hills to not so far away Haworth. But London, insists Blake, was on the minds of at least two of them.
“Anne and Charlotte were interested in London. They were the two who made the trip to see the London publisher. Emily wouldn’t go because she wanted to stay at home.” (Jim Greenhalf)
Most of us get excited when we hear that our favourite book is going to turn into a movie. We might even get all excited and go see the movie. The movie would have been incredibly, no doubt. And with all that excitement you go watch the movie. What if the movie is a total buzzkill? The scenes you envisioned cut thanks to the time factor (and also money!). Popular movies are based on books; from classics such Wuthering Heights to the latest Edward fever, everything seems to be turning celluloid. So the ultimate question here is; the book or movie? Which one would you prefer? It's not an easy answer. The answer however lies somewhere in between. [...]The Globe and Mail tells part of the story of Alice and Rebecca Walker:
Movies also help children understand the importance of classics like Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice.
Rebecca Walker, whose mother, Alice, wrote the 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winner The Color Purple, is one of the better-known memoirists to criticize the way their author-parent raised them. Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence describes the younger Walker’s painful teenage years, when her radical feminist mother rejected her as a symbol of the enslavement women have to their children, comparing having baby Rebecca to the early deaths that squashed the literary greatness of the Brontë sisters. (Lucy Silag)AllVoices posts a poem written by self-styled hockey-mom Sarah Palin adding afterwards:
Hardly Dickinson, Brontë or Plath – in fact its horrific. (catspirit)We agree wholeheartedly.
Two films here are remakes of Hollywood classics—will the leading ladies in new adaptations of Jane Eyre and Mildred Pierce (staples these days of Turner Classic Movies) be able to erase memories of those two stunning Joans, Fontaine and Crawford? [...]We find the fact that the e-book will also include the screenplay quite interesting actually.
march
Jane Eyre
Starring Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, Judi Dench
Directed by Cary Fukunaga
Release date March 11 (Focus Features, limited)
Tie-in from Vintage Books: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (hardcover, trade, e-book [will include screenplay])
Talk about remakes. Jane's nearly two dozen film and TV versions listed on IMDb.com range chronologically from a 50-minute 1914 silent movie to a 2006 British TV miniseries. Of course the classic, as noted earlier, is the 1943 film starring Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. Other incarnations include a 1983 BBC miniseries, a 1968 Greek version, and, from 1996, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre—lest there be no authorial confusion. The newest Jane appeared in The Kids Are All Right and played the title role in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland; Fukunaga directed and wrote last year's Sin Nombre, which won the Directing Award at Sundance plus several film critics association awards. (Dick Donahue)
“I was going to be a great novelist and what am I? I’m a circus act. Nigella Express sold a million copies. Obviously I was very pleased but I was also embarrassed. It wasn’t a ‘proper’ book.”And the Express draws the following conclusion from that:
Nigella Lawson decries her success as a celebrity cook as a “circus act”, revealing what she really wanted was to be the next Emily Brontë or Charles Dickens.Er - yeah, sure.
. . . the ludicrously overblown sentiment of the group’s newest single Bittersweet Memories, a song that could only have added more emotion if Kate Bush had turned up to warble about Heathcliff. (Jonathan Geddes)The blogosphere is all about Jane Eyre: Laura's Reading posts about Jane Eyre, [Bloggers [[heart]] Books] reviews April Lindner's Jane and Rebekah Reads the Library and Tyler Learns to Read writes about Emma Tennant's Adèle.
We are very grateful to University of Toronto Press for sending us a review copy of this book.Bluebeard GothicThe influences and legacy of Jane Eyre have been explored from many different perspectives and using all kinds of critical approaches. Its alleged adherence to a particular trope or tropes of stories and how these tropes intersect in its interior have been profusely studied. In the last decades the further spreading of its influence in other novels has also been explored and it's currently an active field of research.
Jane Eyre and Its Progeny
Heta Pyrhönen
University of Toronto Press
ISBN 9781442641242
I am mostly interested in the Brontë effect that this novel has had on the adaptations it has spawned, because I claim that they provide the first-hand critical reception where the workings of this effect are best evident. In anticipation, adaptors tend to seize on what they think are the blind spots, contradictions and discrepancies in Jane Eyre, thus demonstrating the effects it has on them and on their culture. We may in advance wager that these effects are precisely what have turned Jane Eyre into a mnemonic symbol not only in Britain but also worldwide. (p. 14)The second chapter discusses novels that can be read as testimonies to Jane's narrative of trauma: Anna Leonowen's The Romance of the Harem, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Emma Tennant's Adèle: Jane Eyre's Hidden Story. In order to show how adaptors act as witnesses to their inmediate literary heritage, the author reads their discourse within the (Lacanian) symbolic register(4).
Mrs. Fairfax stayed behind a moment to fasten the trap-door; I, by drift of groping, found the outlet from the attic, and proceeded to descend the narrow garret staircase. I lingered in the long passage to which this led, separating the front and back rooms of the third storey: narrow, low, and dim, with only one little window at the far end, and looking, with its two rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard's castle.(4) Which generates an altogether pedantic and condescendent statement when the author says:
Characterizing adaptations of Jane Eyre in terms of the discourse that governs the rewriting appears to suggest a concomitant aesthetic evaluation: the texts that prize symbolic discourse seem to score lower points than the other two [hysteric and analytic]. To some extent this is true; yet all studied texts certainly have merits.(5) This reviewer finds many possible future objects of research. The book follows Bluebeard Gothic rewritings of Jane Eyre but can we filter this trope and find out how previous novels (i.e. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho) have also been used as a precedent which Jane Eyre reformulates and resignifies? And what about how Michael Berkeley's Jane Eyre opera envisions Bluebeard Gothic elements? Such a discussion will involve interesting connections with other operas such as Paul Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-Bleue or Bela Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle.
Our thanks to Virtualbookworm.com for sending us a digital review copy of this book.Adele, Grace & Celine.Adele, Grace & Celine. The Other Women of Jane Eyre(1) explores these three women tangential to the story of Jane and Rochester. Three female characters which Charlotte Brontë uses as little more than archetypes and hardly develops. Adèle is probably the only one that evolves from the stereotype of the young French girl eager for glamour and obsessed with her toilette but affectionate and easily pliable to a docile, good-tempered, and well-principled English young lady. Charlotte Brontë, nevertheless, hides from us this evolution and attributes it to a sound English education correcting her French deffects. Grace Poole is presented as a character with virtually no past and no future who is only there to provide the adequate dose of Gothic epitomising mystery and the hiding of a terrible secret(2). Finally, Céline Varens is only used as the background to Rochester's immoral past when he was entangled with, of all women, a French opera-girl. An immoral, unprincipled, foreign woman, just one step above from prostitution.
The Other Women of Jane Eyre.
by Claire Moïse
Virtualbookworm.com
ISBN 978-1-60264-501-1
$16.95
322 pages.
(...)but I always think it best to err on the safe side; a door is soon fastened, and it is as well to have a drawn bolt between one and any mischief that may be about. A deal of people, Miss, are for trusting all to Providence; but I say Providence will not dispense with the means, though He often blesses them when they are used discreetly. (Chapter XVI)(3) Fortunately this is not a novel along the line of Emma Tennant's Adèle. Jane Eyre's Hidden Story where the characters rather than subverted were perverted.
I'll give Mrs. Poole two hundred a year to live here with my wife, as you term that fearful hag: Grace will do much for money, and she shall have her son, the keeper at Grimsby Retreat, to bear her company and be at hand to give her aid in the paroxysms. (Chapter XXVII)Céline Varens, according to Rochester's narrative in Jane Eyre, left Paris for Italy following a musician or singer, leaving Adèle behind. Nevertheless, in the present novel the event is told differently. Céline writes to Grace that she made Rochester believe that she had died so that he agreed to take care of Adèle. We wonder if Ms Moïse was not thinking of the musical adaptation of Jane Eyre by Gordon & Caird.
Our thanks to Éditions Bénevént for providing us with a review copy of this book.Edward F. RochesterWhen Charlotte Brontë gave voice to a little, young, plain governess and invested her with revolutionary qualities normally associated with the (male) hero (courage, independence of thought, determination, honesty... ), she also created a counterpoint in the figure of the moderately dark, certainly broody and mostly Byronic, Rochester. In all probability when she was delineating his character it never even occurred to her that more than a hundred years afterwards there would be authors with the necessity to explore Jane Eyre's story from Rochester's point of view. After all, when the eldest of the siblings was imagining Jane in Manchester, Rochester's POV was the norm, the contemporary literary mainstream.
by Christine Paris Bruyère
Editions Bénévent
ISBN : 9782756313320
Pages : 132
Publication : 8/2009
Un soir, mes pensées se sont tournées un peu plus que d'habitude sur la tour Nord, je me suis laissé aller à boire plus que de raison et la tête embrumée je me suis affalé sur mont lit, mes bottes encore au pied et ai sombré dans un sommeil lourd et plein de rêves fantasmagoriques.Something that appears in the 2006 adaptation but not in the book. This fact was pointed out by C. de Villemer on The Inn at Lambton.
Had Jane Eyre still been in copyright when Jean Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea, Charlotte Brontë could presumably have prevented publication. But would readers have really wanted her to?The Guardian also mentions sequels and prequels of Jane Eyre in an article about the same subject:
Once well-known figures are out of copyright, they fall very rapidly into other hands. By now, the minority of Sherlock Holmes's appearances are in stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is neatly book-ended by both a prequel (Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea) and a sequel: DS Thomas's Charlotte. Emma Tennant has been the most active heroine smuggler, transplanting heroines from Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy into her own fiction. (Mark Lawson)The Film Music Society reports about the recent Motion Picture Academy Tribute to the legendary lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman:
Michel Legrand flew in from Paris for the event, playing the piano and singing "I Was Born in Love With You" from Wuthering Heights (1970). The evening's highlight for many, however, was the stunning duet of Legrand and Alan Bergman on one of their most famous songs, "The Windmills of Your Mind" from The Thomas Crown Affair that also included footage of Steve McQueen's glider sequence that inspired it. (Jon Burlingname)The New Statesman reviews the latest book by Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger and talks about country-house novels:
There are two main traditions of country-house novel. One of them, the one these novels have in mind, is the Gothic tradition, which extends back to what is usually thought of as the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s preposterous The Castle of Otranto, and takes in Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher, Bartram-Haugh in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre, Bly House in The Turn of the Screw, Manderley in Rebecca, et al. (John O'Connell)Now, a gem of random thinking. In the Indian Financial Chronicle we find a paragraph which is able to link together running naked (among wolves, sic), Titanic and Wuthering Heights:
For some, passion is running naked with the wolves… it’s so extreme! I remember this one scene from the movie Titanic, when Kate Winslet jumps out of her lifeboat, just as happy to sink or swim with Leonardo Di Caprio. In that moment any woman would have traded places with her. Remember the movie Wuthering heights? Certainly passion gripped the audience hearts as much as the actors. (Bubbles Shabharwal)Also in The Independent Elaine Showalter's latest book (A Jury of Her Peers) is reviewed, The Portsmouth News and The Leamington Spa Courier have a reminder of the current Tamasha Theatre's performances of Wuthering Heights (with a wrong picture, though).
Our thanks to Sourcebooks, Inc. for sending us a review copy of this book.Elizabeth Newark first published this novel in 1999. Now Sourcebooks republishes it with both a beautiful new cover and very nice artwork - not illustrations - in the inside, before each chapter, as well as an appropriately chosen quotation from one of the novels by Charlotte Brontë.Jane Eyre’s Daughter
By: Elizabeth Newark
Product ISBN: 9781402212376
Price: $12.95
Publication Date: September 2008
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