Jane Eyre meets Doom

The Washington Times reviews Joseph Caldwell's The Pig Did It, a book which has been featured previously on BrontëBlog. The reason? Read:

[Kitty McCloud]is a best-selling novelist who has made her fortune by writing books in which she blithely corrects what she sees as the failings of the classics and endows them with happy endings.
She tinkers with such books as Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre," in which Kitty has Mr. Rochester throwing himself from the burning house, and his mad wife surviving to become best friends with the pious heroine. (Muriel Dobbin)

The Australian Stage interviews Robert Chuter, acclaimed Australian theatre director. Another Brontëite?

In both your film and theatre work, you have a reputation for a strong, often spectacular visual style. Where did that interest come from?
The visual style is pretty instinctual. It’s just there. Sometimes it is inspired by films by Peter Greenaway, Elia Kazan, or a book by Emily Bronte, D. H. Lawrence and Jean Genet. My adaptation of his novel “La Miracle de la Rosa” caused quite a stir both at the Old Melbourne Gaol and Belvoir Street in Sydney. Some critics stated that Genet would have farted in his grave (or turn in it!) if he had of seen it! The visual style is all important. I am absolutely fanatical about costuming and my trademark is obsessive detail. Designers are terrified of me. (Simon Piening)

Another suspect of Brontëiteness (but not exactly on a positive way) is the writer Mikita Brottman, according to this interview in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Reading also skewed her world view. She imagined all men to be romantic and good, for example, if they were akin to Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights." She had no idea that in the real world, Heathcliff would be be considered cruel for his treatment of Cathy. (Geeta Sharma-Jensen)

Curious things on the blogosphere: Check this screenshot of a very implausible Jane Eyre meets Doom game play (although the original source of the picture says Wuthering Heights). Maybe it's more promising another videogame "proposal" Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff's Revenge:

Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff’s Revenge – In this exciting retelling of the Bronte Classic, you take on the roll of a space marine recently returned home to Earth. Your parents died under mysterious circumstances and have left you, Wuthering Heights. It seems though there is more to this Yorkshire manor on the moors than meets the eyes and your young curvaceous fiancé Cathrine is kidnapped. You will have to use all your space marine training to vanquish the evil ghost of Heathcliff and the unspeakable horrors of 1847 England! (FunBoxComedy)

It's a good moment to remember that, as a matter of fact, there is a Wuthering Heights role-play game around. Check it here.

Blise posts about the Brontës in French. Charity & Chaos talks about Jane Eyre as an example of quintessential 'Englishness' (or not).

And finally, a new and unlikely(?) Heathcliff: Roy Keane (ex Manchester United football player and currently manager of the English Premier League club Sunderland) according to The Times:

Someone suggested to Keane that at this point, ugly victories would be sufficient. Though no offence was intended, Keane nevertheless found it. “I don’t think we won ugly, I think it was beautiful,” he said with the brooding intensity that would get him a stint playing Heathcliff on the West End. (David Walsh)

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, References, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights

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Bertha's spam

The Times publishes an excerpt from the upcoming The Blue Hour: A portrait of Jean Rhys, by Lilian Pizzichini (to be published by Bloomsbury on May 5):

Jean Rhys’s earliest memory was of her mother bending over her crib, “smelling sweet in a low-cut black dress”, and kissing her. By the time Jean had become a young girl, however, this slim, pretty mother was a solid, frowning woman, austere and disapproving.

She was a “white Creole” – a member of the tiny white minority on Dominica, the Caribbean island – married to a Welsh doctor, and she had plenty to frown about. Her husband had developed a reckless attitude to money in his years in the tropics, and they had six children. She was already a harassed mother of three when Jean was born in 1890, and she had two more babies, by then into her forties. (Read more)

The Independent (Ireland) talks with the Irish celebrity couple Leigh Arnold and Marcus Sweeney:

"It is better if I don't go out, and stay at home and watch videos and eat lots of popcorn. And not hurt the world with my nastiness and my emotions," she laughs. "It is better to be in watching All About Eve, Rebecca or Wuthering Heights.''
Emily Bronte's only novel, Wuthering Heights, was the story that made Leigh Arnold want to be an actor, she says. "My ultimate role would be Cathy Earnshaw.'' As for her Heathcliff , Marcus Sweeney has, she says, "a genuine heart of gold. I have intense feelings for him.'' (Barry Egan)

The same newspaper has an article about how Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga attracts teenagers and their parents:

It has all the simmering undertones of desire you get in a Jane Austen novel coupled with the passion of Emily Bronte's saga, Wuthering Heights. Modernise this, add the fantasy element of the supernatural and set it against the backdrop of mundane, day-to-day life in a small town, high school goings on and relationships within the family dynamic. (Antonia Leslie)

Michael Kuser in The Sunday's Zaman (Turkey) finds a modern-day equivalent to the attic of Thornfield Hall:

OK, I said I’d look for it, and that’s how I ended up in my computer’s version of Mr. Rochester’s attic, the place where he hid his mad wife from Jane Eyre and everyone else. That’s right, I’m talking about my spam box.

After The Pig Did It, Joseph Caldwell returns to his porcine saga with The Pig Comes to Dinner which is reviewed in The Washington Times:

All these domestic shenanigans get in the way of Kathy's previously thriving literary career. She has profited handsomely from rewriting classics — for example, in "Jane Eyre," her version has Mr. Rochester dying in the fire and Jane becoming a close friend of his mad wife. She is currently working on a new version of George Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss" that she refers to as "The Bloody Mill on the Bloody Floss." (Muriel Dubbin)

Kevin Smokler posts a One Sentence Movie Review of Wuthering Heights 1939. The original book is reviewed on Scriptural (in French), Abijan defends on Bookstove that Nelly is someway responsible for Cathy's death in Wuthering Heights and أرصفــة posts about Jane Eyre 1996 and 2006 (in Arabic).

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights

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Mr Currer Bell goes to a spa

John Mullan's recently published Anonymity is the star of today's news. The Bell Brothers/Brontë sisters references are constant. The Telegraph goes so far to entitle its article: No woman could have penned Jane Eyre:

Charlotte Bronte, who wrote as Currer Bell, insisted: “I am neither Man nor Woman – I come before you as an Author only.” Yet readers of Jane Eyre became obsessed with determining its author’s gender, poring over incidental detail to bolster their case. “Although ladies have written histories and travels and warlike novels… no woman could have penned the ‘Autobiography of Jane Eyre’,” announced one. (Robert Colvile)

Charlotte's quote comes from a letter to William Smith Williams from August 16th, 1849. And the mentioned review was published in Era (14 November 1847) by a, most appropriately, anonymous reviewer. The complete paragraph reads:

Bulwer, James, D'Israeli, and all the serious novel writers of the day lose in comparison with Currer Bell, for we must presume the work to be his. It is no woman's writing. Although ladies have written histories and travels and warlike novels, to say nothing of books upon the different arts and sciences, no woman could have penned "The Autobiography of Jane Eyre". It is all that one of the other sex might invent, and much more ... The tale is one of the heart and the working out of a moral through the natural affections; it is the victory of mind over matter; the mastery of reason over feeling, without unnatural sacrifices. The writer dives deep into human life, and possesses the gift of being able to write as he thinks and feels. There is a vigour in all he says, a power which fixes the reader's attention, and a charm about his "style" and "diction" which fascinates while it edifies.

Another review can be found in The Brisbane Times.

Jane Campion writes in The Guardian a fascinating account of how she met Janet Frame (from whom she adapted for the screen the very gripping An Angel At My Table). It seems that the author of Owls Do Cry was a Brontëite:

I met her on December 24 1982. (...)
"Are you doing anything special for Christmas?" I asked.
"Yes, I am going to spend it with some very old friends," she replied: "I am going to have Christmas with the Brontë sisters, Emily and Charlotte."

More brief news. The Washington Post reviews The Pig Did It by Joseph Caldwell, a book already mentioned on BrontëBlog. Bookstack talks about Maureen Adams's Shaggy Muses. In attesa dell'alba praises Helen Burns in Italian.

Finally, The Guardian's travel section seems to think that the Heathcliff-Cathy couple can be a paradigm of fierce lovemaking:

Ah, romantic breaks! What a wealth of optimistic nuance is concealed in such an innocent little phrase: candles, champagne, dinner à deux, sunsets, moonlight, seashores, camiknickers, shared baths, swooning kisses, Barry White, a man in a balaclava abseiling through your window with a box of Milk Tray. All these things leading inexorably to the bedroom where - freed from the shackles of domestic routine - elemental lovemaking on a par with Cathy and Heathcliff will splice your tremulous souls forever. (Rowan Pelling)

Categories: Books, In the News, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights

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A pig and a Poet Laureate

Some curious, weird (or both) Brontë news.

The Christian Science Monitor reviews The Pig Did It by Joseph Caldwell:

Declan, a tinker by trade, may have been the lover of both Aunt Kitty, who supports herself by writing "corrections" to 19th-century novels, and the owner of the misbehaving porker, Lolly McKeever. (...)
Aunt Kitty's revisions are a hoot. In her version of "Jane Eyre," Rochester is the one who flings himself from the roof of Thornfield Hall, and Jane nurses Bertha, the madwoman in the attic, back to sanity. Her new and improved "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" would delight the many high-schoolers who find Clair something of a pompous jerk. (Yvonne Zipp)

Today, we have one of those news items that have to be read to be believed. This is how Newstrack India classifies possible types of boys in a classroom: the gentle type, the meek and coward and the...

Some, on other hand, are aggressive like Heathcliff, the hero of Emily Bronte’s novel of the same name, who likes to have his girl by hook or by crook. He shows macho mania to scare other competitors in the classroom for he knows beauty has thousand followers. He is bitter, bully and bad. And if there two such over sentimental suitors in a classroom, there are likely chances that fight between them is inevitable, which can be bloody at times. This breed needs urgent attention. (M Shamsur Rabb Khan)

And finally... Emily Brontë, the Poet Laureate, according to The Eastbourne Herald Gazette :

I don't mind people being stupid – it's their prerogative – but I draw the line at those who insist on parading their vast ignorance when I'm trying to watch television.
During a recent edition of The Weakest Link a cocky little fellow (a university student apparently) was asked who succeeded John Betjeman and preceded Andrew Motion as Poet Laureate.
He produced one of those expressions (half sneer, half sigh) intended to convey his astonishment at being asked such a ridiculous question and his confidence that nobody else would either know or care.
"Emily Bronte?" he eventually suggested, and one's mind immediately sped back to all those wonderful A level passes and assurances from politicians that our children have never been better educated. (Keith Newbery)

Well, Ted Hughes (the correct answer) did write poems devoted to Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, References, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights

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