I was named after Charlotte Brontë, so it's safe to say that I grew up reading Jane Eyre. I loved Jane as a kid. I, too, wanted to go out and seek my fortune as a plain but determined young governess and get swept off my feet by a Mr. Rochester. I blame this (at least in part) for my love of moody, Gothic fiction and for my interest in moody, emotionally unavailable men. But even I must admit that there are, in fact, a few Gothic novels out there that aren't Jane Eyre (some of them aren't Wuthering Heights, either). So if you're looking for a torrid, creepy romance that doesn't involve a problematic secret attic wife, here are a few excellent alternatives. (...)Also on Bustle, a list of new book releases:
'Jane Steele' by Lyndsay Faye
A Gothic retelling of a Gothic novel? Yes. Please. Jane Steele is a lot like Jane Eyre, if Jane killed a lot more people. This Jane also has a rough childhood, and she also works as a governess, and she even falls in love with her hot boss. But will he discover her murderous past before it's too late? (Charlotte Ahlin)
'Wrong In All The Right Ways' by Tiffany BrownleeMore Bustle, now with retellings of classic books:
Emma's AP English class is reading Wuthering Heights — meanwhile, she's living the plot of Emily Brontë's gothic romance: She's fallen in love with her new foster brother, the one person in the world whom she can't have. (Cristina Arreolo)
'Brightly Burning' by Alexa Donne is a spin on 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte BrontëBarnes and Noble Teen Blog presents Wrong in All the Right Ways, by Tiffany Brownlee
I mean, is there anything cooler than Jane Eyre in space? Stella jumps at the chance to work as a governess aboard a private spaceship, the Rochester. The ship's captain, Hugo Fairfax, has a reputation for being a recluse, but she believes him to be kind. But everything takes a turn when Stella uncovers a conspiracy to assassinate Hugo.
'My Plain Jane' by Cynthia Hand, Jodi Meadows, and Brodi Ashton
The author trio that brought you My Lady Jane is back with a rollicking retelling of Jane Eyre... with ghosts. (Melissa Ragdales) (Translation)
Wuthering Heights gets an update and makeover in this addictive debut about a forbidden attraction between a high-achieving AP student and her new foster brother, a moody bad boy. Emma discovers parallels between her tumultuous romance with Dylan and that of doomed lovers Katherine (sic) and Heathcliff, while writing about the classic book for English Lit. But if her parents discover what’s going on between the two teens, Dylan could become ineligible for adoption. (Sarah Skilton)The Scotsman reviews Helen Dunmore's Girl, Balancing and Other Stories.
“Grace Poole Her Testimony” is a gloss on Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Poole, the nurse-guardian of Mrs Rochester confined to the attic, seeing Jane Eyre herself as a pale and greedy conniving little bitch, and a gloss on Joseph Severn’s memoir of the dying Keats. (Alan Massie)The Augusta Chronicle lists tales worth retelling:
Jane, by April LinderCincinnati CityBeat reviews a local production of The Mystery of Irma Vep:
Jane Eyre is brought into the 21st Century as Jane Moore. Jane has been forced to drop out of school upon the death of her parents. Resorting to taking a nanny position in the home of Nico Rathburn, a famous rock star, she finds herself falling in love with him. But not is alright with the scenario. Mr. Rathburn harbors a dark secret from his past. Even those acquainted with the original story will find the twists and turns in Linder’s retelling worth following. (Scott Strawn)
[Charles]Ludlam’s delirious tale — set at “Mandacrest,” an ancient, sinister estate on a remote desolate moor — pokes fun at literary classics by the likes of the Brontë sisters and Edgar Allan Poe, plays by Shakespeare, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 psychological thriller Rebecca and more. Ludlam was known for pushing theatrical boundaries; he liked to say he was “recycling culture.” (Rick Pender)The York Press reviews the current exhibition of photography by Simon Palmour:
“To the south west lies the millstone grit of the Pennine moors, where Brontë and Hindley links lurk amid the grim landscape with industrial heritage in every dyke. To the north are the North York Moors, an uplifting heather-clad plateau that comes to the sea at Whitby, Robin Hood's Bay and Scarborough. (Charles Hutchinson)Hello Giggles interviews the writer Tara Isabella Burton, author of Social Creature:
This book is very much, and very consciously, a response text to Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. I wrote it exactly as a response text the same way, for example, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is a response text to Jane Eyre.Some belated reports of the Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever in the media: Anglotopia, Lithgow Mercury. Bega District News, Concierto (Chile), Canada Music Scene...
En Infernales, la hermandad Brontë (Taurus), Laura Ramos recupera la figura de Branwell, poeta maldito que siguió un camino de autodestrucción y terminó olvidado por la historia oficial. La biografía de Ramos es monumental, exhaustiva, puntillosa: le llevó más de siete años de trabajo y varios viajes a Inglaterra, en especial a Haworth, el pueblo del norte en el que vivió la familia Brontë, devenido en meca de peregrinación turística con merchandising, cafés Brontë, taxis Brontë y hasta un Brontëbus con wifi gratis que hace el recorrido desde la estación de tren más cercana. Al museo llegan alrededor de 70.000 visitantes por año, cifra que aumentó desde 2016 por el bicentenario del nacimiento de Charlotte. (Natalia Blanc) (Translation)La Tercera quotes from Joseph of Wuthering Heights:
Visto así, estamos rodeados de viejos terribles. Acotado el término al grupo etario sobre 80, también. Nunca falta el viejo leso, cuyo entendimiento ha decaído mucho antes que sus extremidades, o el viejo severo, cuya vocación, diría Emily Brontë, es estar siempre “allí donde haya mucha maldad que reprochar” (Vicente Undurraga) (Translation)France Info (France) interviews the author Guillaume Musso:
"Il n'y avait plus de télévision et il faisait trop froid pour sortir jouer", justifie-t-il. Alors petit garçon, Guillaume Musso avait le choix entre les Mémoires du général De Gaulle et Les Hauts de Hurlevent d'Emily Brontë. C'est la découverte de ce dernier qui l'a troublé : "Pour la première fois, j'avais l'impression d'être dans le cerveau de quelqu'un d'autre."Solo Libri (Italy) reviews the novel #lamoreaccade by Dodo Corfù:
Il a trouvé cette sensation "incroyable". Alors que roman avait "été écrit un siècle et demi plus tôt, par une jeune anglaise, qui n'avait jamais quitté sa lande", il a eu un "impact fort sur le pré-adolescent" qu'il était. Guillaume Musso reprend une expression d'Umberto Eco pour illustrer ce vécu : "Celui qui ne lit pas, arrivé à 70 ans, aura vécu une seule vie. Celui qui lit, en aura vécu au moins 5 000." (Elodie Suigo) (Translation)
Dopo l’ennesimo trasloco nel palazzo di fronte al suo, e dieci giorni di appostamenti incessanti, Lidia ha infine visto chi si è trasferito nel monovano del secondo piano – un viso alla Heathcliff, il tenebroso personaggio di Cime tempestose, un romanzo che ha letto tre volte, a distanza di dieci anni[.] (Lidia Gualdoni) (Translation)Vampire Maman loved Jane Eyre; strong women quotes (including from Jane Eyre) on Bookriot; The latest podcast of the Standard Issue Magazine includes a Brontë discussion:
Mickey and Hannah were surrounded by birdsong as they chat #TeamEmily with the Brontë Parsonage Museum's Lauren Livesey.Jane Eyre's Library (in Spanish) compiles the many languages in which Jane Eyre has been translated.
The Craven Herald & Pioneer announces a programme of free events celebrating the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë in Lancashire:Events will bring to life the places just over the border that inspired her writing, including the atmospheric village of Wycoller with its ruined hall – the real Ferndean Manor in Jane Eyre.The list of events can be found on the Visit Pendle website. The first one is today, May 1:
Pendle neighbours the Brontë moors, and so Pendle Council is launching a programme of 21 events from today until October 30 to mark the anniversary.
Pendle Council’s Brontë enthusiast, Sarah Lee, co-ordinated the programme, working with Pendle’s tourism officer, walk leaders, artists, photographers and storytellers to bring the area’s Brontë connections to life.
She said: “It’s often forgotten that Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne often walked across the border over the moors into Lancashire.
“Charlotte knew this area well, drawing inspiration from the landscape, turbulent histories, local news and Lancashire folklore.”
Tourism officer Mike Williams agreed, saying: “Pendle in Lancashire is little-known for its Brontë connections, but they are compelling.” (Daryl Ames)
Sun 1 May 11am – 1pmThe Daily Mail in the footsteps of literary giants:
Walk in the footsteps of Charlotte Brontë
4 mile walk exploring Wycoller’s Brontë associations.
Meet leader John Crow at the Aisled Barn
Wycoller, BB8 8SU grid ref SD 933391
No need to book. Tel. 01282 870253.
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| Source |
They say it's grim up north - and this walk across the Yorkshire Moors does nothing to disprove the theory. The landscape might be uplifting, but the poets and novelists it has inspired were almost all gloom-mongers. Don’t say you weren’t warned...The Times is concerned about how much Jane Eyre should have paid in taxes today for her inheritance:
We start at Haworth Parsonage – two centuries ago the home of the Brontës.
It was here Charlotte wrote the gloomily romantic Jane Eyre, Anne wrote the fierily feminist Agnes Grey, and the depressive Emily wrote the gothic nightmare that is Wuthering Heights.
Is it already time to do what Branwell, brother of the three sisters, did every night and slope off to the Black Bull for a gallon or two?
Not if you want to make it across the moors, it isn’t. So instead, make your way across to the church, next door to the Parsonage, and take the footpath that skirts the graveyard and leads on to the Brontë Way.
This takes you across Penistone Hill and on to Haworth Moor – the terrifyingly beautiful landscape that inspired Emily’s novel.
An hour or so in, just after joining the Pennine Way, you come to the ruins of Top Withens Farm – thought by many to be the inspiration for Wuthering Heights.
When the wind blows the trees (as it usually does here) you feel ‘the intense horror of nightmare’ as Cathy knocks at the window: ‘Let me in – let me in.’ And let me out of here! (Christopher Bray)
Reader, I married him, but Osborne clobbered me for £600,000BBC Radio 4's Poetry Please latest programme includes a poem by Charlotte Brontë: Parting.
Our great literary heroines and heroes are forever inheriting fortunes, but how much tax would they have to pay on them today?
“‘Twenty thousand pounds?’ Here was a new stunner — I had been calculating on four or five thousand. This news actually took my breath for a moment.”
So says Jane Eyre, the eponymous heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s debut novel, on learning she has inherited a fortune from her Uncle John. She is shocked that she alone will receive the full £20,000 but soon realises it will be a “grand boon”.
An inheritance of £20,000 would still be a boon, but when Jane Eyre was published in 1847 it was a vast sum — equivalent to about £1.9m today. (Ruth Emery)
Roger McGough marks a series of poetic anniversaries with a programme on the theme of time, memory and remembrance. Shakespeare, of course, makes an appearance, as does Charlotte Brontë. It's also a century since the Easter Rising in Dublin inspired WB Yeats and others to put pen to paper. More reflections on time and memory come from poets including TS Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Producer Sally Heaven.DNA (India) has an article on the Elena Ferrante mystery:
Women writers, especially, have tended to take on masculine-sounding names because they perceive a male bias among publishers and readers. Think of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), or the Brontë sisters who wrote first as Currer (Charlotte), Acton (Anne) and Ellis (Emily) Bell. But a famous and recent example of this is E.L. James, Erika Leonard in real life, who took on the gender neutral initials because she felt that Fifty Shades of Grey's sexual content would be better accepted coming from a male writer. (Gargi Gupta)Página 12 (Argentina) explores the life and works of Cynthia Ozick:
Desplazamiento, soledad y pertenencia: tres sensaciones que experimentó cuando comenzó a leer esos cuentos mágicos, y volvió a experimentar más tarde al meterse en la retorcida Jane Eyre de Charlotte Brontë, y más tarde cuando los poetas románticos la hicieron llorar en el baño de su casa. (Fernando Krapp) (Translation)Electric Lit is re-reading Jane Eyre; Confesiunile unei iubitoare de cărţi (in Romanian) blogs and Jen Campbell and Emily Hornburg vlog about Jane Eyre; Create with Joy reviews Rita Maria Martinez's The Jane and Bertha in Me; Blissful Blog reviews Patricia Park's Re Jane; Les Soeurs Brontë (in French) has a new imagined Brontë portrait using paintings by Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans; Mind the Gap (in French) reviews the French translation of Jolien Janzing's De Meester; Writergurlny reviews Margot Livesey's The Flight of Gemma Hardy; Multicatable posts about Wide Sargasso Sea.
An Evening with Author Margot Livesey
June 3rd, 2013 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Wilmington Memorial Library
Margot Livesey’s latest book, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, was published in 2012 to wide acclaim. It is an inventive reimagining of the Jane Eyre story. Ms Livesey’s other novels include: The House on Fortune Street, Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, and Banishing Verona.
The stone terraced house in the village of Thornton near Bradford, west Yorkshire, sold to a private developer last week for around £100,000 after the local council refused to step in in times of austerity.Also in the Daily Mail.
There has been a long-running campaign to create a museum in the four-bedroom property to celebrate the early years of Charlotte, Emily and Anne.
Its literary legacy earned it a Grade II listing. The family lived in it for just five years before Rev Patrick Brontë moved them eight miles to the Parsonage in Haworth, where many of their great works were written.
Steve Stanworth, chairman of the Brontë Birthplace Trust, believes its new owner plans a commercial use. "I understand its been bought by a local businessman and I think he is going to turn it into a bistro" he said
Rev Brontë, who was the curate of the nearby St James's Church, wrote that the time spent at Thornton was the happiest in his life. [...]
The Brontë Birthplace Trust group have vowed to continue their campaign and will bide their time until it comes on the market again.
Efforts to make the house into a heritage centre have a history of failure.
In 1996 the Heritage Lottery Fund rejected an application for a £500,000 grant. Novelist Barbara Whitehead, bought and renovated it in an 1820s style, but visitor numbers were low but her failing health forced her to sell 2007.
Today it is unoccupied and thought to have suffered from flooding. (Hayley Dixon)
Charlotte, acclaimed author of Jane Eyre, walks the audience through her seminal years. The loves lost; the tales of triumph and tragedy.The Cedar Rapids Gazette reviews Margot Livesey's The Flight of Gemma Hardy.
The experience is illuminating, if a little confusing. Marking each year in bold type across the hardcover of a book is a useful device. But it helps to know a little about the family and their published works.
This new play is stitched together from excerpts of Miss Brontë's writing - her books, letters and diaries.
It's fascinating to hear about the true characters that inspired the fiction and the production has a lot to offer, the costume and the old-world setting work a treat. (Clare Peddie)
When I heard Margot Livesey had written a retelling of “Jane Eyre” — set in the mid-20th century in Scotland and Iceland — I was forced to give up a long-standing bias. For many years, I have steadfastly refused to read “Jane Eyre,” holding (unfairly, of course) the work of Charlotte Brontë’s sister Emily against her.The Red & Black continues discussing the new cover for classics:
But I loved Livesey’s last novel, “The House on Fortune Street,” and was eager to read “The Flight of Gemma Hardy” (Harper, 447 pages, $26.99). So, now I have read both “Jane Eyre” and “The Flight of Gemma Hardy,” and I owe Livesey a double debt of gratitude.
I loved both books, and am mightily impressed by Livesey’s ability to adhere to the central plot points of “Jane Eyre” while still rendering her own story moving and suspenseful. Admittedly, reading the two books over a short period time meant that I could predict certain turns of events (and also meant that in the early going of “Flight,” I had to get used to a more modern set of technologies and concerns), but Gemma doesn’t just live Jane’s life by rote. Rather, Livesey breathes life into her protagonist so that she can stride across her story as an individual. (Rob Cline)
Sure, the decision by HarperCollins’ teen division to redesign covers for classic works by William Shakespeare, Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters was likely a financial one to piggyback off the success of the teen novels. The fact remains that the exterior of the book does not change the text within. What it does do is attract a reader’s attention long enough to give the works a second look.The fashion section of The Telegraph reaches an 'interesting' conclusion:
And supposing a reader chooses to purchase Wuthering Heights simply because it’s Edward and Bella’s favorite book, does this motivation make the experience any different? True, these “classics” as we call them do require a bit more “struggle” for a modern reader to understand, but is that an altogether bad thing? They require the same effort in their new hip covers as they would clad in leather backing.
The argument that authors like Shakespeare, Jane Austin [sic[ and the Brontë Sisters shouldn’t be associated with “popular dribble of the day” fails to acknowledge the fact that at one time these authors’ writings were the popular drivel of the day. Shakespeare wasn’t writing for the intelligentsia, he was writing for the masses. His plays were intense and funny and crude and horrifying — they weren’t literature, they were entertainment. Austin [sic] published her popular novels under the pseudonym “A Lady,” and each of the Brontë sisters chose to publish under male names to varying levels of success. What, then, about being linked with one of the most widely-read books of the past decade would lead any one of these authors to roll over in their graves? [...]
It’s the unparalleled genius that we associate with their names that scares readers away from the “classics.” Shakespeare and Austen and each of the Brontës were humans just like us. It’s the human observations in their work that gives them relevance today.
So what makes these Twilight-inspired covers any different from the equally generic artwork these stories have undoubtedly endured in their lifetimes? Their covers are constantly reimagined in hopes of finding new readers. In my mind, if these new book covers introduce even one of Twilight’s largely adolescent readership to the work of William, Jane, Charlotte, Emily or Anne, then they’ve done their job. (Will Murdock)
"Austere but romantic," said Consuelo Castiglioni after her show this morning. That conjures up one figure as far as we're concerned: Jane Eyre. Teleport her to winter 2013, arm her with Mr Rochester's full panoply of credit cards, and she'd have a surreptitious splurge on Marni's knee high riding boots, calf length, gently flaring mohair checked skirts and belted jackets. Marni's flat brogues-with-everything approach would almost certainly get the Eyrian thumbs up, although being Victorian and from Yorkshire, Jane would probably have been baffled by their metallic panels. Rest assured Jane, a metallic brogue is very next season, but also a classic-in-the-making. Ergo thrifty. (Lisa Armstrong)The whole credit-card-surreptitious-splurge has us thinking that the writer hasn't actually read the novel. Or has totally forgotten about that unimportant part of the story that is Jane's independence.
The Flight of Gemma HardyMargot Livesey's promotion of her previous novel, The House on Fortune Street, showed us that she was quite a Brontëite and she recently told how she came to write The Flight of Gemma Hardy.
Margot Livesey
Harper Collins
February 2012
ISBN: 978-0062064226
We did not go for a walk on the first day of the year.
thering Heights (on the right, a promotional picture) in Red Deer, Alberta (Canada):Red Deer College theatre students are planning to stage two well-known works: The fairy tale Beauty and the Beast will be presented as a Christmas-time musical at the RDC Arts Centre, while an original version of Emily Bronte’s brooding novel Wuthering Heights — a stark tale of cruelty and thwarted love — will be a melodramatic Valentine’s offering. (Lana Michelin)It is scheduled for next February (11-13).
The novel’s ending, which invokes Jane Eyre, comes out of left field. It will delight you and leave a sweet aftertaste. (Rebecca Wigod)Writers Read asks Margot Livesey what she is reading:
Currently I'm re-reading Jane Eyre, and marvelling all over again at Bronte's capacity to invoke the giant passions of childhood and the stages of Jane's journey as she makes her way from girlhood to adulthood. This time I'm trying to pay more attention to Bronte's handling of religion throughout the novel. She was, after all, a minister's daughter.EDIT: And The Boston Globe insists on Margot Livesey's love of Jane Eyre:
Margot Livesey kicks off theÉpoca (Brazil) interviews the author Meg Cabot:Celebrity Bookclub at Newtonville Books this week. The club was her idea; she thought it would be fun for authors to lead a discussion of a favorite book. Livesey selected “Jane Eyre’’ by Charlotte Bronte, a book that she pays homage to in her most recent novel, “The House on Fortune Street.’’ Many readers first encounter “Jane Eyre’’ at a young age and develop a more complicated response to it as adults. The meeting starts at 7 p.m. Tuesday. (Jan Gardner)
ÉPOCA – O que você costuma ler na sua infância e adolescência?La Repubblica (Italy) quotes Jane Eyre in an article about interior design:
Meg – Eu amava Jane Austen. Mas também gostava de livros mais populares. Eu lia, na verdade, tudo que chegava às minhas mãos: romance, ficção científica, fantasia, livros de humor, Stephen King, Agatha Christie, Charlote Bronte, Michael Crichton, Bram Stoker, Harper Lee. Eu adorava todos.. (Bing translation)
E da queste righe, come un lampo, ci appaiono dettagli di quadri di Vermeer. Praz, per sottolineare queste differenze, poi analizzate nelle altre pagine del libro, dove ci passano davanti case medievali e interni Impero, cucine ottocentesche e salotti liberty, cita, fra i tanti autori, la Charlotte Bronte di Jane Eyre: «Era un leggiadro salotto che conteneva un boudoir; entrambi avevano tappeti bianchi su cui sembravano deposte ghirlande di fiori, entrambi avevan soffitti con nivei stucchi di grappoli e di foglie di vite, sotto cui ardevano con ricco contrasto divani e ottomane di color cremisi». (Bing translation)Têtu (France) presents like this the new film by Maria Beatty, Bandaged:
Imaginez le romantisme des Hauts de Hurlevent d'Emily Brontë, le côté oppressant de Psychose d'Hitchcock et le fétichisme de Fassbinder, et vous aurez une idée de ce que va provoquer en vous Bandaged... (Xavier Leherpeur) (Bing translation)According to the Łódź Gazeta (Poland) the autum-winter collection of Hexeline is inspired by the moors of Wuthering Heights:
Wiemy już, czym inspirowali się projektanci łódzkich firm odzieżowych. I tak: głównym motywem jesienno-zimowej kolekcji Hexeline jest wiatr na wrzosowiskach. Projektantki przełożyły to hasło na zbiór charakterystycznych motywów kojarzących się np. z "Wichrowymi wzgórzami" Emily Bronte, ale też z elementami popkultury, np. Robin Hoodem. (Izabella Adamczewska) (Google translation)Silvia Mina wins a singing contest in Italy with Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights (on targatocn)
Daphne, by Justine Picardie (Bloomsbury). A complicated tale-within-a-tale about Daphne du Maurier's obsession with the Brontës.-- (Nicholas Delban)The list also includes other books with Brontë connections:
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Dial). Characters spring to life in letters and telegrams exchanged over the course of nine months shortly after the end of World War II. (Wendy Smith)Nigel Hawkes in The Times makes his own selection of Christmas Science Books:
The House on Fortune Street, by Margot Livesey (Harper). The most durable structure here is not a house but the novel itself, whose design unites so seamlessly with its intentions that one wants to admire it from every angle. (Donna Rifkind)
Catharine Arnold clearly has a Gothic imagination of Brontë dimensions. Fresh from writing about London's dead in Necropolis, her new tale of madness Bedlam: London and its Mad (Simon & Schuster, £14.99/ £13.49) interweaves the history of the Bethlem Hospital with that of changing attitudes towards the insane. Bethlem was mostly a ghastly place, home to the violent, the depressed and the simply dotty, such as Margaret Nicholson, who tried to kill George III with a cake knife. (Its former building now houses the Imperial War Museum, by the way.)Curiously, Charlotte Brontë visited Bedlam. Quoting Robert & Louise Barnard's A Brontë Encyclopedia:
[Bedlam was] visited by Charlotte during her last London visit in 1853, when she chose to see “rather the real than the decorative side of Life” (to EN, 19 Jan 1853)OfficialWire tells a nice story of Brontë readers in Alaska:
I'll call her Molly, though I doubt that is her name. I never asked her name. She came into the bookstore at the Anchorage airport, where I work part-time. (...)"I am reading Wuthering Heights now," she told me, sparkly-eyed. "I love it! But I am almost finished with that one."The Twilight phenomenon is analyzed on The Guardian:
I asked her if she had read Jane Eyre. "Oh, yes!" she replied. "That one was very good, but I am liking Wuthering Heights better."
I expressed some mild surprise at that: most teenage girls, I remember, seemed to prefer Jane Eyre.
"I think it's because it reminds me of Barrow," she went on to explain. "All that roaming on the moors. It's like the tundra—and the way the wind sweeps over it. And how they call out to the wind! I used to do that!" (Wayne Mergler)
And in Buffy's wake came a flood of fang fiction aimed at a female readership hungering for worthy successors to Heathcliff, Mr Rochester and Darcy. Typically, these stories are narrated by a plain Jane Eyre type — usually a virgin — who considers herself nothing special (though she may be gifted with paranormal abilities) but who, to her amazement, finds herself acting like catnip on a seductive male vampire who in centuries of existence has never encountered a young woman as beguiling as she. It's the love that lasts for ever. Wishful thinking, or what? (Anne Billson)Catholic Online has its own opinion:
Perhaps the darkness of Edward’s true nature when seen onscreen was too unsettling for even the most loyal fans. Maybe Bella’s blind devotion to Edward pales in the gloomy light of the cinema, and this film dwindles in stature from a modern rendering of the gothic “Wuthering Heights” down to just another unhealthy teenage relationship?Afaqs! informs of the upcoming broadcast of Jane Eyre 2006 on the Indian TV channel Zee Studio:
Perhaps a generation of young women who haven’t read such classics are seeking the darkness into light of a true gothic romance, or a strong, strangely chivalrous romantic man (it admit it’s a unique device to make Edward seem noble for saving Bella from himself!) Couldn’t these young women so hungry for masculinity, self-sacrificing love, and romance find a better story than “Twilight”? (Leticia Velasquez)
You certainly don’t want to miss out on an interesting adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s much-adored classic Jane Eyre on Friday Jan 23 & Jan 30 on Zee Studio. The adaptation mines Bronte's novel for every ounce of passion, drama, color, madness and horror available, bringing to life Jane's inner world with beauty, humor and at times great sadness.The Australian discusses a possible top-five list of Australian films. Including Jane Campion's The Piano:
Her inspirations included Wuthering Heights, Emily Dickinson's poetry, Roman Polanski's short film Two Men and a Wardrobe, and records of NZ colonial history. (Evan Williams)Also in The Australian we can read about the wonders of summer reading:
David Malouf, who writes of Australia with great insight and tenderness, recalls the intensity of reading during the holidays as a child. It was the Christmas break between his 12th and 13th years. His family had taken a house in Southport on the Gold Coast, and he read Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, William Harrison's Old Saint Paul's. He has visual memories of reading on the beach and while lying in bed. (Miriam Cosic)Ackworth born, gone West posts about Ian M. Emberson's Mourning Ring chapbook of poems:
Mourning Ring by poet and artist, Ian M Emberson, is not just a collection of nine poems with a Brontë connection. The chapbook is a work of art in itself. The poems are printed using a script-font that resembles writing but is very easy to read. The margins of the pages are covered by Ian's charcoal-like drawings.Elastic Pop reviews the Studio One Anthology DVD release (with Wuthering Heights 1950), South London Women Artists introduces a new Brontëite, Alicia Logan:
The inspirations behind my work are the romantic writers such as Emily Bronte, and William Blake, who had a solid idea of the spirit world and hell; and Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacra and Simulation’, where the media is taken as obscuring reality.The Stuck In a Book Jane Eyre vs Wuthering Heights battle was finally won by the former inmate of Lowood School:
Congratulations... Jane Eyre!Nevertheless, Life must be filled up defends her Emily Brontë choice on the quiz. A choice that surely Literary Corner Cafe would share. Jane Eyre has also her own supporters: A Devoted Reader, Just Books or acorna-cat.
To be honest, I had a suspicion that the vote would swing that way. Jane Eyre received 23 votes, Wuthering Heights only 10, with a couple abstentions.
You reference the bob dylan documentary don’t look back during the film. Are there other rock documentaries you like?Inspired or not by Patti Smith, the Eye Weekly staff also includes Wuthering Heights in their Idler’s Guide to Fall Reading:
I think Don’t Look Back is the ultimate one. That’s the time I grew up in. Like everyone else, I liked The Beatles’ movies. I’m from a different era. I like Spinal Tap — there’s the great rock documentary. It’s the great rock ’n’ roll movie. But I like fiction, so I’m not generally one for documentaries. I’m just as happy as watching a detective movie or Jane Eyre. I don’t watch so-called “rockumentary” things. I don’t like to see the dark side of the people I romanticized on VH1 or something. I like people for the work they do, whether it’s Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan or Radiohead or Michael Stipe. I’m not the kind of person who gravitates toward trying to discover people’s secrets. (Damian Rogers)
Nov 17 and 18: November sublime: Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte (David Balzer, Lee Ferguson and Douglas Kwan)The Miami Herald reviews once again the George Packer's theatre play Betrayed:
The single female interpreter, Intisar (Ceci Fernandez, whose expressive eyes tell the story), quotes Emily Bronte and dreams of being allowed to ride a bicycle through the streets like her brothers, without being punished for ''immodesty.'' She's already angered the Sadrists by refusing to wear a hijab, the traditional Arab head covering. (Eileen Spiegler)The Millions interviews Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street:
TM: At the end of the novel, Abigail says her grandfather always thought "everyone had a book, or a writer, that was the key to their life." This is certainly the case for your characters: Sean refers to Keats, Cameron to Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Abigail to Dickens, and Dara to Charlotte Bronte. For better or for worse, your characters look to the stories and/or biographies of their favorite artists to help them navigate through life. I wonder if this theme, which seems central to the story in many ways, helped in your conception of these characters. Did it shape their destinies on the page? Were there particular challenges to weaving this real life art into your fictional world?Abaculus has visited the Brontë Parsonage Museum and posts quite a lot of pictures of the visit (the complete set of pictures can be found here). Bronte's Socratic Blog posts about Jane Eyre, Aelfwine translates into Spanish Charlotte Brontë's Passion in El Espejo Gótico and enlightenmentgirl reviews Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres.
ML: The idea of giving each of my characters what I think of as a literary godparent came to me when I was working on Sean's section. As a graduate student of English he had to have an area of study and I decided that Keats - the poet of erotic love, early death and immortality - was the perfect choice. Then of course it got a little harder with my characters who weren't doing Ph.Ds, but I still loved the idea of how a literary godparent could point to a character's deepest concerns and enlarge the reader's understanding. My rule for picking the godparents was that they had to be well known and nineteenth century and somehow I had strong instinctive feelings about who was right for who - Dickens, for instance, would never have been a good fit for Dara. The biggest challenge was working the necessary information into the plot in a natural way so that the reader could enjoy this aspect of the novel. (Edan Lepucki)
15. Charlotte BronteHollywood Today reviews The Blackstone Key by Rose Malikan. The review ends with this enigmatic comment:
20. Emily Bronte
There could have been a bit more conflict between Mary and Captain Holland. Her hero, or is he? Blackstone Key moves along the lines of the works of Charlotte Bronte with regard to the suspense. (Gabrielle Pantera)Charlotte Brontë, a Hitchcock avant la lettre?
Fans of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters will be in a familiar landscape reading The Magicians and Mrs. Quent (498 pages; Bantam Spectra; $23) by Galen Beckett. This fantasy debut uses those authors’ famous works as a template. Does the place name Heathcrest Hall ring any chimes? (Robert Folsom in Kansas City Star)The Concord Monitor talks about one of our usual suspects, Margot Livesey's The House on Fortune Street:
We hear each of their stories in turn, exemplified by a similar situation in a famous novel or an author's life: Dara becomes a real-life Jane Eyre when a tall, dark stranger literally falls at her feet. Cameron's story parallels Lewis Carroll's, the author of Alice in Wonderland, who was fascinated by young girls and took many photos of them. In Abigail's ending narrative, we learn that her beloved grandfather loved Dickens, and Great Expectations is reflected in her story. You don't have to remember much about the classic works to enjoy Livesey's comparisons. Betrayal is a major theme, as are luck and the search for truth. In the end, you will wonder how anyone can ever know another person, even one living under the same roof. (Claire Davis)Some days ago we talked about Watson & Oliver sketch comedy show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. MetroLife gives more information:
What these grammar school pals should aim for is more invention and twist on universal themes. They do show they're capable of doing that with a Wuthering Heights sketch, where Cathy and Heathcliff's romantic witterings on the moors take an unexpected turn when they're interrupted by a mobile phone call. As does a fight, batons in hand, between film score composers John Williams and John Barry. (Sharon Lougher)Another local newspaper, The Huddersfield Daily Examiner, presents Tony Earnshaw's Made in Yorkshire (more information on this previous post).
Sorte de polar à la sauce victorienne, Clues est, d’après son auteur, un mélange entre Sherlock Holmes, Gangs of New York, My fair Lady et Jane Eyre. (Laurent Boileau)Le Monde publishes an article about an exhibition of Paula Rego in Nîmes, France:
"Paula Rego, rétrospective de l'oeuvre graphique", Ecole supérieure des beaux-arts, hôtel Rivet, 10, Grande-Rue, Nîmes. Tél. : 04-66-76-70-22. Jusqu'au 21 septembre. Du mardi au samedi, de 10 heures à 18 heures.EDIT (September, 3): An English translation of the article can be read on The Guardian.Certaines s'expliquent partiellement par la littérature : Rego a en effet consacré des séries d'estampes à Peter Pan ou au corbeau maléfique de Poe. Elle connaît par coeur Lewis Carroll, et la suite que lui a inspirée Jane Eyre en 2002 suit le roman très loin dans le grotesque, la laideur accablante, le désespoir le plus morne. On y retrouve l'humeur noire et railleuse qui caractérisait en 1996 sa galerie de sorcières contemporaines.
Contemporaines : le deuxième terme importe. Ce fantastique à la fois funèbre et comique de Rego pourrait n'être qu'hommages rendus à Hogarth et à Goya. Elle les a salués en effet plusieurs fois et, de temps en temps, leur adresse encore un signe de complicité. Mais, à l'exception des images pour Jane Eyre, tout, dans ces gravures, les situe aujourd'hui, costumes, attitudes, décors et, naturellement, ses ruptures de style, sa manière sèche d'abréger et de couper court aux détails inutiles et encombrants. (Philippe Dagen)
Well, the remark is a bit misleading, as the school report was made when she was 8 years old. For the sake of completeness Charlotte Brontë's complete entry at the Cowan Bridge Clergy Daughters' School reads:Almost six in 10 schoolchildren believe they have to work harder now for A-levels and GCSEs than their parents did, a survey suggests.A similar number believe that news coverage of their results will be critical, regardless of how well they perform. (...)
And he added that history had shown that school performance is not necessarily the best indicator of future success.
"Churchill was a poor performer at school," Dr [David] Wright [,CIEA chief executive,] said.
"Einstein struggled with his school diploma, and Charlotte Bronte's school report in 1825 said that 'she knew nothing about grammar' and wrote 'indifferently'. So what's new?"
Charlotte Brontë 8 1824 August 10th Vaccinated H.The Washington Post publishes a positive review of Justine Picardie's Daphne:
Cough Reads tolerably - Writes indifferently -
Ciphers a little bit and works neatly. Knows nothing
of Grammar, Geography, History or Accomplishments. Left Schools
1825 June 1st Governess Altoghether clever of
her age but knows nothing systematically.
The Daphne of this novel's title is a novelist herself, Daphne du Maurier, the bestselling author of Rebecca (1938). Among her other books is a speculative biography, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (1960), for which she's less well known. Yet du Maurier was haunted by the figure of the Brontë brother, that hard-to-decipher and troubled boy who chronicled the world of Angria, an imaginary kingdom he and his sisters could shape. In minuscule script, he dreamed of adventure and conquest, calling himself the Earl of Northangerland; he may have furnished a template for Emily's Heathcliff or Charlotte's Mr. Rochester. When Branwell died at 31, in 1848, he left behind both thwarted ambition and -- with reference to who wrote what -- some mysteries unsolved. Was he an important talent or an artist subject to delusion; which manuscripts are genuine, which forged and when, for what reason, by whom?The London Free Press announces that the Theatre Nemesis's production of Wuthering Heights presented at the London Ontario Fringe Festival:
Justine Picardie's Daphne is a complicated tale-within-a-tale about literary detective work, the tangled web we weave when trying to make sense of earlier deception. The novel begins in 1957. Du Maurier is famous, 50 years old, unhappily married to an ex-soldier and anxious to prove her intellectual credentials to those who scorn her as merely successful. Compelled by the world of the Brontës, she makes contact with a reclusive editor of their work, buying (on her part, innocently) purloined memorabilia and seeking his advice. In real life, du Maurier did dedicate The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë to John Alexander Symington, a "now-forgotten Brontë scholar" to whom she wrote letters and from whom she received epistolary suggestions; their actual letters are reproduced here. In this fictional treatment of their encounter, the portrait of Symington is deftly drawn, and Picardie evokes the world of scholarship and how it can edge up to self-destructive obsession.
(...)In this novel's accomplished retelling, Picardie moves with ease from Daphne's memories of Barrie ("Uncle Jim) and Gertrude ("Gertie") Lawrence to her attempt to unravel the question of authorship of the Brontë siblings' poems and even, perhaps, the great prose.
Most of this sleuthing is performed by a contemporary narrator, a young woman living in London (near the du Maurier home and burial ground), as haunted by du Maurier as du Maurier was by Brontë. Orphaned, old-fashioned and working ineffectually on a Ph.D., she travels to Yorkshire and visits the Brontë manse, Haworth, then gets lost in the woods of Menabilly, du Maurier's retreat in Cornwall. Near action's end, she explains her compulsion: "I feel alive when I think of Daphne du Maurier; I feel that her life contains all kinds of clues and messages that might help me make sense of mine."
Less successful as a character is the narrator's husband Paul, a "Heathcliff and Mr. Rochester and Maxim de Winter" out of central casting. He may look the part of a romantic hero, but he's a middle-aged scholar of Henry James who still yearns for his first wife, Rachel. As the narrator observes, "I must say, there's nothing like being lectured on Henry James by one's husband to put you off both of them." Rachel, a seductive poet also fascinated by du Maurier and the Brontës, gets equally embroiled in the hunt for lost texts; there's a kind of Keystone Kop scramble for who will find which notebook first. Unfortunately, Picardie's mirroring stories grow not so much illuminating as repetitive, and we care less than do her characters about who first wrote what.
The narrator spells out the problem: "What right do I have to try to make connections between [du Maurier's] books and her life? It's dangerous territory -- like all those dated, sentimental Brontë biographies, spinning the myth about saintly Charlotte and spiritual Emily and bad Branwell and gentle Anne. Those kinds of books make me feel uncomfortable; it's the literary equivalent of catching butterflies, and then killing them, in order to pin them down and display them in a box."
But the reader need not be a devotée of Branwell Brontë or Daphne du Maurier or even the Gothic genre to take pleasure in this novel; the butterflies are brightly colored and the display well-lit. (Nicholas Delbanco)
A video of the production can also be seen.Four shows have won coveted spots on the Impresario Performance list at this year's Fringe fest.It means extra attention, and an added performance for each of the winners.
Open-call auditions for the first season at Farmers Alley Theatre will begin at 7 p.m. Aug. 17 and 18 in the Community Room of the City Center Building, 125 S. Kalamazoo Mall. Bring a current photo and a resume. Prepare your choice of a short song (no Jason Robert Brown), short monologue or both. An accompanist will be provided. (...)Ok, now you know...but, why is Jason Robert Brown off limits?
April 3-18: ``Jane Eyre,'' music and lyrics by Paul Gordon and book by John Caird.
The plot is closer to Jane Eyre than Drac-ula, with a heavy dose of Romeo and Juliet. And the series is carried along by an elastic sexual tension that one critic has characterised as “the erotics of abstinence”. (Tony-Allen Mills)The Charleston Post and Courier reviews an old BrontëBlog acquaintance: Margot Livesey's The House on Fortune Street:
If Livesey's novel is dense with parallels, it never feels as if the connections are forced. Each of the important characters is scathed by childhood trauma, and each builds a life over the scar. Each narrative also has its own literary mascot. Sean is drawn to Keats, Abigail to Dickens, Dara to Bronte's "Jane Eyre" and Cameron to Lewis Carroll. (Catherine Holmes)A Brontë reference introduced in a recreation of another well-known novel is a new kind of metafiction intertextuality. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reviews What Happened to Anna K by Irina Reyn. The K is for Karenina, of course:
As in Tolstoy's novel, Reyn tells two stories, one of Anna Roitman, who's about to marry Alex K., and the other, Lev Gavrilov, who has for years been quietly in love with Anna's cousin, Katia. (...)El País Semanal publishes a survey to 100 Spanish-speaking writers choosing the ten books which somehow changed their lives. There are a couple of Brontës: Jane Eyre is chosen by Nuria Amat and Wuthering Heights by Ana María Matute.
A veteran of 14 readings of "Wuthering Heights", Anna is a Romantic with a capital R. She longs more for intensity than for singing birds. When she encounters the hoped-for fiance of Katia, a young writer with his own literary illusions, Anna thinks she has met a soulmate. Even without reading Tolstoy's novel, we know where a romantic's heart wants to go, and Anna goes there. (Sherri Hallgren)
Eric Markle, 37, has trouble sleeping. He sits at a long table poring over a grand jury report on the biggest story in the city - the starvation death of 14-year-old Danieal Kelly. He is appalled and quotes a line from Jane Eyre: "Such dread as children only can feel." (Jennifer Lin in The Philadelphia Inquirer)On the blogosphere - several readers of Wuthering Heights: staticmatrix, Only a Novel:
Whoa! Emily Brontë, where did that come from?! As I was perusing this novel, I was just as intrigued by the person who wrote the story as by the novel itself. Who was this Emily Brontë who dared imagine and put into words this bold, brash, intense, in-your-face story? How courageous; how risky; how different; how honest. I like her.Pixiechick_sw has read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:
Wow! That was one intense book! Anne is very ahead of her time. I can see why this book did terribly in the 1840s. It deals with the injustices of a woman's place in society, sex, infidelity, spousal abuse, alcoholism, and other addictions. This book was heavy, painful, redeeming and no matter in what century a person lives--EXACTLY RIGHT!Categories: Books, Brontëites, In the News, Jane Eyre, Music, References, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Theatre, Wuthering Heights
The Guardian's Books Section publishes a special report devoted to writers' rooms. Lucasta Miller talks about Charlotte Brontë's one (Picture source):This is the room in Haworth Parsonage, variously known as the dining room, the drawing room or the parlour, in which the Brontë sisters used to write and discuss their work with each other. When the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte's friend and future biographer, first visited in September 1853, she was struck by its exquisite cleanliness and neatness. In contrast to the "bleak cold colours" of the Yorkshire moors outside, "the room looked the perfection of warmth, snugness and comfort, crimson predominating in the furniture".The Telegraph publishes an article about the Blackwell's Espresso Book Machine and uses Jane Eyre as an example:
Despite having published Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette pseudonymously, Charlotte had, by that time, become a - somewhat reluctant - literary celebrity. Gaskell noted the portrait of her over the fireplace, commissioned by her publisher from the fashionable artist George Richmond. The experience of sitting for it had been a trial for the self-conscious Charlotte, who had collapsed into mortified tears when asked by the artist to remove something odd from the top of her head (he thought it was possibly a bit off the inside of her hat, but it may have been, even more embarrassingly, an unsuccessful hairpiece). Richmond nevertheless captured the fire in Charlotte's eyes, even if he flattered and conventionalised the rest of her face, which Gaskell found plain, with missing teeth and irregular features.
Despite the welcoming warmth of the décor, the parlour retained an aura of melancholy. Charlotte's sisters Emily and Anne had died in 1848 and 1849 - Emily is said to have died on the sofa in this room - and the space seemed to resonate with a sense of loss. After Gaskell had retired for bed in the room directly above, she could hear Charlotte's footsteps in the parlour. The servant told her how the three sisters had been used to walking round the table as they talked late into the night: "Miss Emily walked as long as she could, and when she died Miss Anne and Miss Brontë took it up - and now my heart aches to hear Miss Brontë walking, walking on alone."
It would be unfair to characterise book lovers as Luddites. Only a couple of weeks ago, I sat down to lunch with one who immediately pulled out an exceptionally space-age gizmo and proceeded to show me how legible Jane Eyre was on its high-definition screen. (...)The Times asks their readers about summer readings. We liked this contribution:
Plus, within a couple of seconds in my hands, and one errant touch of the cursor, Jane Eyre had vanished, never to return. (Alex Clark)
In the summer of 1990 I had just finished my GCSEs and was looking forward to a dissolute and lazy summer. My mother had other ideas: athree month break would be an ideal opportunity to start on the reading listfor my A-levels. So I spent that summer immersed in Wuthering Heights,reluctantly at first, but with increasing enthusiasm as this great tale ofpassionate love and revenge unfolded before me in my sheltered, middle-classback garden. I've re-read the book countless times since, and always those wildand windy moors bring back memories of that long, hot summer. (100 words) (Liz Gregory, Didsbury)The Book Reporter reviews Margot Livesey's The House on Fortune Street:
From a literary point of view, Livesey manages to subtly integrate four different British literary figures --- from Keats and Charles Dodgson to Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens --- into the lives of her characters, at times drawing explicit parallels but more often trusting her readers to make the connections themselves (thereby delighting thousands of English majors worldwide). (Norah Piehl)Fabula has a reminder of the Jane Eyre: text, context, urtext appeal to contributions that we published a few days ago:
For more than 160 years, Jane Eyre has been the object of all sorts of readings, critiques and sequels. When it appeared in 1847, the novel enjoyed incredible success: Jane Eyre, an Autobiography was widely read, but its plot and heroine were also accessible through the first critical interpretations or the numerous plays that were adapted from the novel as early as 1848. Known at first or second hand ever since its publication, Jane Eyre nowadays belongs to the category of books that one can discuss without having ever read them. Yet, to Brontë scholars and enthusiasts, appreciating the plot without having a taste of Charlotte Brontë's style seems impossible, claiming a clear understanding of the novel without resituating it in its context seems absurd, just as it feels pointless to try to appraise the talent of Charlotte Brontë's literary descendants without having been carried away by her own genius. This special issue of LISAe-journal, to be published in the first quarter of 2009, intends to reexamine Jane Eyre, its context, its text and its scope as an urtext, in order to exploit the full richness of the novel and to allow the readers to become immersed once more in this major text of nineteenth-century British literature.Kwick! posts about a recent German translation of Jane Eyre.
Returning to sources, with such a novel as Jane Eyre, means first of all exploring what surrounded its creation. Victorian England, Yorkshire, Haworth or the parsonage may all be apprehended as fundamental to the novel, and examining their importance may lead to a better understanding of the thematic background of the text. Other elements in the genesis of the novel equally deserve our attention: the collective reading at the parsonage, allowing each sister to use the other two as touchstones to test the quality of her writing, Charlotte Brontë's involvement in the publication of the three sisters' works, or the energy she spent writing Jane Eyre in only a few months, while her first novel wound its way from publisher to publisher and kept being rejected. The context sheds a precious light on the novel and also functions as a background against which the originality and timelessness of Jane Eyre may be traced.
The text itself, because of its uniqueness and also the way it merges History with its story, has been the object of many readings, from feminist to Marxist, from psychoanalytical to structuralist, and so on. It is true that the novel is very fertile ground for critical discourse and offers an invitation to react, to comment or to decipher. The fields of investigation are as wide as the text itself, wider even, if one considers the importance of intertextuality (Bunyan, fairytales…) and of all the other art forms that punctuate the text (like painting or folklore), incessantly enabling it to transcend itself.
Reexamining Jane Eyre also means reading its sequels and rewritings, considering Charlotte Brontë's text as an urtext, an original text founding an artistic continuation. New connections may then be discovered between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. The notion of quotation in works published afterwards may be of interest in a context of dissemination of Jane Eyre, as well as a study of adaptations for stage, screen or television, or of the illustrated versions of the novel that have been released so far.
Please send your proposals (20 to 50 lines), along with a short bio-bibliographical note, to Elise Ouvrard (ouvrard_elise@hotmail.com) or Charlotte Borie (borie@univ-tlse2.fr) before 30 September 2008 (the deadline for completed articles is 30 November 2008). Please follow the norms for presentation indicated on the LISA e-journal website (http://www.unicaen.fr/mrsh/lisa/presentFr.php?p=1).
Responsable : Charlotte BORIE et Elise OUVRARD
With the zeal of a soul-saver, Robert Wright has delved into garbage bins, filled up his minivan and made space in his Willow Glen basement, rescuing books once destined for oblivion.That's the way literature has to be judged, no doubt. What a shame.
This week, Wright, 57, rumpled in sweatpants and a T-shirt, rushed to Morrill Middle School after the Berryessa school board had declared 686 library books surplus. The teacher browsed through volumes laid out on tables. He filled boxes until the custodian turned out the lights and chased him out. He returned Friday morning, his triumph mixed with amazement and distress.
" Why get rid of 'The Yearling'? Or 'Leaves of Grass'! How could anybody say there just isn't room for 'Leaves of Grass'?" he asked. "If they were throwing out 'Captain Underpants' I'd understand, but not 'Leaves of Grass!' "
School libraries periodically cull worn, obsolete and sometimes underused books from their collection. In Berryessa, they're pulled from shelves and stamped: "Material is inaccurate. Does not meet district standards. Stereotypes gender or culture."
Sometimes, media technician Jeanne Palmer said, the library has five or six copies of a books - as was the case with "The Witch of Blackbird Pond." Other books, like Anne Bronte's "Agnes Grey," she said, "The kids will never read." She judges that in part by the dust accumulated on top. (Sharon Noguchi)
But the book's hopefulness has an even deeper source: the continuity of the English literary tradition. All the characters have sincere attachments to canonical British authors, going so far as to travel to their houses to observe how they lived. Sean has his beloved Keats, of course, while Dara often compares herself with Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. (Donna Rifkind)The Book Reporter reports the appearance of Meg Cabot's The Babble Queen Gets Hitched. We knew that the author was a Brontëite, but her new book actually begins with a Wuthering Heights quote:
Chapter OneOn the blogosphere: Roxy the Killer offers an ineffable Wuthering Heights analysis in her latest installment of Because You Suck. More literary creation, poetry in this case, Anna E. Evans posts the following on Dreaming in Iambic Pentameter:
Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same. --- Emily Brontë (1818-1848), British novelist and poet
A couple of acceptances to report. “Emily Bronte Begins Wuthering Heights” finally found a home in The Delaware Valley Poets Anthology, which will be good for my local profile.Le Blog de Lorelai (in French) recommends Villette. AnimeGirl's Book Blogging posts about Cara Lockwood's Wuthering High. Finally, if you are reading Jane Eyre right now you may be interested in sharing your thoughts in this Librarything forum.
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