The National Newspaper (United Arab Emirates) finds Jane Eyre references in Daoud Hari's The Translator. (More on these previous posts)Early in Queen Victoria's reign, 30 percent of adult Englishwomen were single - and considered, as one social commentator put it, "redundant." If of gentle birth and no means, without a family to care for, an extra woman naturally sought work as a governess. Living in another family's home made romance unlikely and isolation inevitable, with poverty and unemployment always on the horizon. It was a grim life, grimmer still because it was the only choice open to many. As Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre decides, "I want this because it is of no use wanting anything better."
In "Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres," Ruth Brandon covers about 80 years in the profession, concentrating on the era when a rising cadre of nouveaux riches and an abundance of single women came together to make the at-home lady educator a household staple. Few of the 25,000 governesses in England in 1851 were employed past the age of 40, since most families preferred to hire malleable young things, despite the dangers of youth: husbands and sons could always be tempted. (Witness Mr. Rochester.) (...)
It's surprising that Brandon didn't devote a chapter to Charlotte Brontë and her sisters, given her frequent references to the governesses in novels like "Agnes Grey" and "Jane Eyre." Those famous novels could have benefited from an analytical eye. Brandon is also a fiction writer, and she leans heavily on the novels of the period to provide cultural background; she might have spent more time exploring the ways in which a novelist's imagination transformed the governess's actual experience. (...)
The shorter chapters about hitherto overlooked women are far fresher. In 1784, Agnes Porter entered the new profession early enough to eke out a quite pleasant existence with an earl's extended family. Just a couple of decades later, however, Nelly Weeton's letters and diaries recorded suffering to rival Brontë's most gothic moments: a cruelly selfish brother, nasty employers with nightmarish homes and a disastrous marriage entered into, apparently, solely for the chance to bear a child of her own. (...)
Young women today," Brandon notes, "grow up in the world that Mary Wollstonecraft dreamed of." While that may be too sunny (and novelistic) a conclusion, at least we're better off than poor Nelly Weeton, with more to hope for than Jane Eyre. (Susann Cokal)
Despite its harrowing content, this is not a bleak book. Seamless digressions evoke Hari’s childhood, a vivid blend of traditions stretching back thousands of years and fragments of Western culture – novels like Oliver Twist and Jane Eyre along with Clint Eastwood movies. His love of the natural world and of camels in particular is transcendent. (Hephzibah Anderson)Alice Walker's daughter, Rebecca, writes in the Daily Mail about her relationship with her mother and quotes a poem of hers with a Brontë reference:
I was 16 when I found a now-famous poem she wrote comparing me to various calamities that struck and impeded the lives of other women writers. Virginia Woolf was mentally ill and the Brontes died prematurely. My mother had me - a 'delightful distraction', but a calamity nevertheless. I found that a huge shock and very upsetting.On the blogosphere, Mi Butaca reviews (very unfavourably) Wuthering Heights 1939, Old Fogey briefly reviews and classify several Jane Eyre adaptations in an excellent and highly recommended. Check it out. Ratatosk's Acorns posts about Janians (for Jane Eyre) vs Catherinites (for Wuthering Heights).
We swear that we didn't do it :P.An investigation has begun after it emerged some English students in Bedford were given the wrong books to study before an exam.
About 20 AS level English Literature students had read Wuthering Heights by mistake, Redbourne Upper School said.
The mistake was noticed before the exam had begun and the school informed the examination board.
Headteacher Nigel Croft said it was "not a major issue" and that no student would be disadvantaged.
Letters have been sent to parents notifying them of the error and the school's inquiry into how the mistake occurred.
Not even Charlotte Brontë's most famous heroine had a story to match the tangled lives of these real-life governesses. (...)And The Telegraph:
Charlotte Brontë, creator of one of fiction's most famous governesses, Jane Eyre, was herself one, and pressed the experience into fierce creative service. But, as Ruth Brandon compellingly describes in Other People's Daughters, the plain facts were as dramatic and often more traumatic. (Salley Vickers)
By the way, The Independent on Sunday apologizes for its Howarth-instead-of-Haworth spelling mistake last week in this article:Nineteenth-century novels that contain one of these troubled creatures form a genre of their own (think of The Turn of the Screw, Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, The Eustace Diamonds).
Mrs Pryor, the governess in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, realised that men saw her as 'a tabooed woman' to whom 'they were interdicted from granting the usual privileges of the sex', and it is this taboo which fascinates Brandon. A tabooed subject, she argues, is 'mysteriously and threateningly desirable. So the governess... today ranks alongside the nun as a sexual fetish: the most powerless of women transmogrified, by an ironic twist of fate, into the dominatrix'. (Frances Wilson)
We had a headline that managed to misspell the name of one of Yorkshire's most famous towns – revered as the place where the Brontë sisters were brought up and one of the North's greatest literary shrines ("Brontë moor and Inca Mountain. More similar than you think, says Howarth's [sic] twinning group").Another book review that mentions the Brontës is from the Baltimore Sun: The Third Angel by Alice Hoffman (an inveterate Brontëite).
"Don't you know or don't you care?" fumes John Metcalfe from Baildon. "It's Haworth, not Howarth. Typical southern ignorance. You probably come from the same school that misspells Middlesbrough 'Middlesborough' and pronounces Newcastle 'Newc-arse-sell". "What's so exciting," snarls Stuart Binns from Northallerton, "about Haworth being twinned with some trendy travel destination like Machu Picchu? I'd rather spend my hols in the Pennines any day."
Sensible choice, Mr Binns. But this was merely a slip – unforgivable, admittedly – for which we apologise. No slight intended. And as for "southern softies", it's worth pointing out that the editor-in-chief of 'The Independent' is Manchester born and bred, and that the editor of this newspaper is a proud Scot. (Michael Williams)
There is always someone dead or dying in a Hoffman novel; the metaphor of the mortality and immortality of love is one of her most compelling literary conceits. The ghosts in Hoffman's novels are palpably real, as is the one in The Third Angel. These ghosts evoke and invoke the transitory nature of love; they are breathlessly alive with their eternal, pulsing emotion driving them on, haunting their beloved as well as the reader, just as Heathcliff did Cathy - and generations of readers - on the English moor. (...)The Indianapolis Business Journal traces a profile of Jill Long Thompson, who runs for the
Some critics have minimized the complexity of Hoffman's work by referring to her, with a barely disguised sneer, as a romance writer. Well, Hoffman is a romance writer, but then so were Flaubert, Proust, the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen. (Victoria A. Brownworth)
As a child, Thompson read the Bronte sisters and dreamed of becoming a professional baton twirler. (Peter Schnitzler)GulfNews discusses why we are more fascinated by evil, by negativity than by positivity:
Look at literature, the most unforgettable characters are those that personified evil - Macbeth, Heathcliff, Ebenezer Scrooge. Perhaps we remember them because in the end they were redeemed. (Suchitra Bajpai Chaudhary)Heathcliff's redemption? Maybe in some twisted way... but Macbeth's?
S. read this recently and was surprised to find how much she disliked it. The problem was the narrator, William Crimsworth, whom she found self-absorbed and xenophobic (not good qualities in a teacher abroad). (Chris)While William Crimsworth is not our favourite Brontë character for many reasons it should be born in mind that his attitudes, his views of the world are defined by the context in which he was born. Judging a character from a modern-day viewpoint is not wrong per se but judging him solely on that basis might leave us with a confused understanding of him. While William Crimsworth may not have been the most amiable of characters back in the 19th century he had also his good, unconventional points as is the fact that he consents to his wife continuing to work after marriage, for instance.
(...) What made it even more emotional (for me, at least) was that the Parsonage had brought out the original manuscripts of Branwell Bronte's poems that Daphne had purchased from Symington, and later donated to the Parsonage (or perhaps returned them to their rightful home, given the shady circumstances under which Symington had acquired them). Added to which, one of Symington's nephews was in the audience last night, and afterwards, he told me a story that I had never heard before, about Alex Symington's murky involvement with a forged Bronte letter... So the story I told in "Daphne" had a sequel last night...Categories: Books, Haworth, In the News, References, Talks, The Professor, Translations
Today we have a wide stock of Brontë references: Margaret Atwood writes in The Guardian about Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of the Green Gables saga and Jane Eyre makes an appearance:The saying might be that "it's grim up north" - but it's not for novelists as the north of England has been named the best possible literary backdrop available in British literature.
The region - loosely defined as the land either side of the high Pennines, extending north to the Scottish Borders - was the winner in a survey carried out for a new ITV show, Melvyn Bragg's Travels in Written Britain.(...)
Voters cited the perennially successful Catherine Cookson novels, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte as some of the most memorable books set in the north of England. Both the Bronte sisters lived in Haworth, in Yorkshire, and were schooled in Lancashire.(...)
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was also voted the favourite book set in Britain, followed by four more classics: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Rebecca and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. (...)
The survey of around 2500 people was carried out to mark Bragg's television show, the first part of which is broadcast on April 6. During the one-hour programmes, Bragg also takes a look at the contrasting works of Scots authors Sir Walter Scott and Irvine Welsh. (Phil Miller - Reproduced with the permission of The Herald, Glasgow © 2008 Herald & Times Group)
Judging from what we know about the lives of orphans at that time, including the many "London street Arabs", as Marilla calls them, that were being sent to Canada by the Barnardo homes, a statistically accurate Anne would have continued to be poor and neglected. However, through luck and her own merits, Anne is rescued by the Cuthbert siblings, thus joining a long line of redeemed fictional Victorian orphans, from Jane Eyre to Oliver Twist to little Tom the chimney sweep in Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies.The Scotsman reviews Other People's Daughters: The Life and Times of the Governess by Ruth Brandon:
THE MOST FAMOUS GOVERNESS IN literature is undoubtedly Jane Eyre, but as Ruth Brandon points out in this slightly misfiring study, her fate as the eventual wife of her employer was hardly the traditional lot of the Victorian governess. For most, it was a lonely job with long hours, little pay and scant appreciation of their efforts.The Times once again mentions the Heathcliff/Rochester inside Gordon Brown:
Brandon's approach is to look in detail at the lives of six governesses: Agnes Porter, Mary Wollstonecraft, Claire Clairmont, Nelly Weeton, Anna Leonowens and Anna Jameson. Of these six, perhaps Wollstonecraft is the most well-known, although Leonowens was the model for Deborah Kerr's governess in the film version of Leonowens's life, The King and I, and Clairmont was the step-sister of Mary Shelley, who also bore Byron a daughter.
In that sense, then, Wollstonecraft, Clairmont and Leonowens are as atypical of the governess experience as Jane Eyre was. (Read more) (Lesley McDowell)
It's as bad as trying to find a Gordon Brown. Despite castings in the UK and global searches she can't find anyone to play him, “which is annoying as you don't know how long he'll be PM. The problem is he has very old-fashioned looks, Heathcliff or Rochester, tight breeches, muddy lanes, high collars, lambchop face. I've just found an odd-job man in Bulgaria who might fit the bill actually.” (Tim Teeman)The New York Times Travel Spring 2008 Guide devotes an article to Taipei and discovers yet another set of the-Brontës-of (insert pertinent city/country):
Chu T'ien-hsin and her sister [Chu T'ien-Wen] are a bit like the Brontës of Taiwan. They're big time novelists and short-story writers. (Taipei's dailies publish literary supplements, so high brow short stories reach an unusually large audience.) I wanted to talk to Chu about her novella "The Old Capital", which came out in English last year. (Douglas MacGray)TV Blink makes a very unlikely comparison: X-Files's Fox Mulder and Heathcliff:
During the clip reel of the nine-season show, “X-Philes” cheered for sci-fi Heathcliff Fox Mulder and savvy strawberry Sno-Cone Dana Scully. (Chad Rooney and Julieanne Smolinski)The Eloy Enterprise's editor uses a Jane Eyre quote for the title of the article:
"Your self-love dreads a blunder," a certain Mr. Rochester told a literary heroine, Jane Eyre, once upon a time. (Lindsey Gemme)Now for the blogosphere: neon epiphany posts about different Jane Eyre adaptations. Her favourite is Jane Eyre 1973. GirlDetective has seen Alan Stanford's adaptation of Jane Eyre at the Guthrie Theatre and is not at all thrilled:
I understand that details of the story must be cut or compacted to get the audience home before midnight. I missed many of my favorite scenes, such as Jane in the red room. I was disappointed in the staging decisions of others. (...) Perhaps this was enjoyable to those who hadn’t read the book at all, or for a long time. Perhaps it will inspire people to seek out the book. (...) I am too familiar and have too much affection for the source material to appreciate adaptations for themselves. And yet, I know I’ll continue to see them, if only for the brief moments that they bring to life wonderful parts of the books, like the humor in Jane Eyre that is so often overlooked in its reductive description as a dark, gothic tale.A very different reaction to the same play can be read on wonderment:
But I will say that Jane Eyre at the Guthrie was wonderful. It was yet another take on a fantastic story. I’ve watched the BBC miniseries (my favorite), read the original book (not so excellent, but must be appreciated for the beauty that the story is, even if I didn’t care for the writing), and now seen the stage version. All were special in their own way. I thought the miniseries was more true to the book than the stage version, but the modifications for the stage made sense for thatCategories: Books, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Theatre
Today we have nannies, but in the 19th century they had governesses. If the word calls to mind a person forlorn and severe, the reason may well be Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel, "Jane Eyre." Most of us can conjure up a mental picture of governess Jane.Probaby not the best day to talk about Gordon Brown but we have found this article in The Times about Alison Jackson's works which once again contains a mention to his 'Brontë features':
By design, she is outwardly unremarkable. Small, quiet, with pulled-back hair and a dress of subdued gray, she's a plain Jane indeed. Internally, though, she's volcanic. As a 10-year-old orphan foisted on malign relatives, Jane can be filled with rage and an eerie imagination. As a 20-year-old governess, she feels an idolatrous love for her master, Edward Rochester. We chart Jane's maturity by watching her channel her passions. Ultimately, she emerges triumphant over her awful cousins, her tall blonde rival, the mad wife who is revealed living in the attic, and even over the still loving but chastened Mr. Rochester. Jane ends up independently wealthy with the man she wants. How realistic can this portrait possibly be?
In "Governess," Ruth Brandon considers the case studies of six governesses -- "The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres," as the subtitle has it. Taken together, their lives span a generous century from 1750 to 1860 and suggest that, between the fiction and the reality, there are many alarming points of similarity and a few quietly tragic differences.
Most of the melodrama in "Jane Eyre," it turns out, mimics upper- middle-class social dynamics of the era. A sudden reversal of fortune, such as the death of the male head of the family, could push a gently bred and moderately educated girl out of the lady-of-leisure class and into the mass of workers. (That's some ignominy, we working women might say.) But along with social demotion, the young woman would forfeit any chance of marriage. Even worse, she would be a silent but suffering witness to the life she had lost: She was neither mother nor wife, neither servant nor mistress -- although she took on some duties of all these. The governess might be scorned by the mother she was substituting for, insulted by the children who capitalized on her lack of authority and seduced -- or simply seized -- by the men of the family. (Alexandra Mullan)
It's as bad as trying to find a Gordon Brown. Despite castings in the UK and global searches she can't find anyone to play him, “which is annoying as you don't know how long he'll be PM. The problem is he has very old-fashioned looks, Heathcliff or Rochester, tight breeches, muddy lanes, high collars, lambchop face. I've just found an odd-job man in Bulgaria who might fit the bill actually.” (Tim Teeman)The Brontë horses make it to the news yet again. This time through Charlotte Brontë which, according to The Irish Examiner:
Tobar Na Hinfe hinted at ability first time out at Limerick and stepped well up on that subsequently when beaten a head by the useful Charlotte Bronte at Naas. (Pat Keane)As for the blogs: La tormenta en un vaso writes in Spanish about Mary Cholmondeley's Moth and Rust and finds something similar to Jane Eyre. Mes 3 soleils brings to our attention a biography on Emily Brontë in French by Jeanne Champion called La Hurlevent. Also in French, Madame Charlotte reviews La Recluse de Wildfell Hall, not very favourably, though. Sarah's Bookarama reviews Justine Picardie's Daphne.
The Spectator reviews a recently-published book on governesses: Other People's Daughters. The Life And Times Of The Governess by Ruth Brandon. The book cover is, in our opinion, beautiful and the inside references to Jane Eyre are evident. Actually, as Ruth Brandon’s study declares, it was very rare indeed for a governess to marry her employer. Becky Sharp and Jane Eyre tell us much more about the 19th century’s fantasies and fears than about its realities. (Philip Hensher)What we have been unable to find is the table of contents, so we don't know whether the more realistic versions of governesses' marriages in Agnes Grey and Shirley (whose governesses actually share the same maiden name) are featured in the book or not.
The title of Polwhele's bilious production - "The Unsex'd Females" - helped to create a climate in which generations of women lived in fear of the label "bluestocking", which became an insult. In the 19th century, the Brontë sisters and Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) felt it necessary to hide their genius under male pseudonyms; in the 20th century the word conjured up images of desiccated female dons. The original "blues" were much more various than this stereotype suggests, and their dilemmas about intellect, fashion and femininity are still with us today. "Brilliant Women" restores them to their rightful place as our foremothers, the missing link in an unbroken chain of female creativity. The struggle for the right to be clever, sexy and feminine is still going on. (Joan Smith)Incidentally and unrelated to the Brontës save for this exhibition we were reading a book the other day where this quotation by Sydney Smith appeared: If the stocking be blue, the petticoat must be long. It made us smile in a very sad way.
• 'Bronte' boy: Evanston actor Patrick Clear has multiple roles in the new Remy Bumppo Theatre production of "Bronte," previewing March 20 and opening March 24(through May 4). He plays Patrick Bronte, Mr. Rochester and others in this play that explores the Victorian literary family of Charlotte Bronte. Clear also has a small role in the upcoming Batman film, "Dark Knight," as well as in a made-for-TV movie called "In the Best Interest of the Children." For more on "Bronte," visit http://www.remybumppo.org/. (Dorothy Andries and Michael Bonesteel)Don't forget that BrontëBlog readers have a special offer to get 2x1 tickets for the play.
For nearly two decades, Kalamazoo Ballet Company founder Therese Bullard dreamed of staging a "Jane Eyre''-based ballet, and finally last June, hers debuted on the Kalamazoo Civic Theatre stage. But as she breathed a sigh of relief, so did her body.A couple of blogs today sing praises of Jane Eyre: Kylie's Book Nook and Fresh Ideas For You. Not Quite Write draws inspiration form the Brontës. And SixSisters posts two gorgeous ACEOs on Jane Eyre.
She had to be hospitalized for exhaustion, Bullard said Wednesday in a candid yet light-hearted interview in which she focused on the positive side of being forced to get much-needed rest.
"After being incapacitated for a month, I liked the look of myself in the mirror,'' she said, with a hearty laugh.
"I had lost some weight."
Bullard, who has taught ballet in Kalamazoo since 1963, has had to close her ballet company periodically in recent months because of the events of last summer and later, a boiler problem in the building that houses her dance studio. The boiler has since been replaced.
Now Bullard's company is back in full swing and holding performances, which serve as fund-raisers for operational costs. (Roberto Acosta)
Rare photographs illustrate a new book marking the 80th anniversary of the Brontë Parsonage Museum.The Akron Beacon Journal reviews the on going exhibition in the Akron Art Museum
A Room of Their Own celebrates the museum's past and features never-before-seen see pictures from its archives.
Sarah Barrett's £4.50 book offers a short history of each of the rooms in the former home of the Brontë sisters.
There is also information and the garden on the cellar, plus information about Brontë family members, servants and visitors to the house.
The 24-page book, completed with a chronology and bibliography, is on sale at the museum in Haworth. (David Knights)
, Ohio :Bill Brandt: Shadows and SubstanceAs we have posted before, one of Bill Brandt's subjects was Brontë country:
May 31, 2008 - August 24, 2008
Isroff and Bidwell Galleries
Bill Brandt, England’s greatest twentieth-century photographer, began as a photojournalist and became a poet of light and shadow. Decade by decade, Brandt (1904 – 1983) moved toward evermore radical dualities of black and white, not just in his new photographs but also in his printing of older images. This resulted in his own reinterpretation of his earlier work. Bill Brandt: Shadows and Substance presents 67 photographs from throughout the artist’s career. All are vintage prints, providing a rare opportunity to see the work as the artist originally conceived it.
Brandt also documented the countryside as landscapes steeped in the English literary tradition, capturing the settings of famous British writers, such as Emily Bronte's immortalization of the bleakness of the Yorkshire moors.Now, some book reviews. The Japan Times reviews The Last Concubine by Leslie Downer but has a slightly biased image of Wuthering Heights:
It took him several tries, but he finally found his image after a winter hailstorm frosted the moors and a high wind flattened the scant vegetation, resulting in Top Withens (''Wuthering Heights''), Yorkshire Moors (1945). (Dorothy Shinn)
These include a meaningful encounter with an unkempt but attractively Heathcliff-like masterless ronin. When it came to such men, "She felt a strong fascination for these unfamiliar creatures with their odd, slightly repellent odor. Men though they were, they were of much lower status, so much so that the fact she was a woman and they men was rarely relevant."
Or so it seems at first — but it is a law governing such epic sagas as this that the well-born heroine should eventually end up in such alien arms. It was thus in "Wuthering Heights" that Catherine Earnshaw is last seen in the hirsute embrace of the lowly Heathcliff, and this is what romance heroines have been doing ever since.
Emily Bronte's recipe has proved a lasting one and it continues to nurture, at its lower end, the Harlequin romance series and, at its higher end, this exciting historical novel. One could call it a "bodice-ripper" except that the ladies of the shogun wore no bodices — how about "obi-slasher"? (Donald Richie)
The other reviews are of well known books in these newsrounds: Margot Livesey's The House on Fountain Street in The Globe and Mail:
Less satisfying to the reader are the overt parallels between The House on Fortune Street and Jane Eyre, as well as Great Expectations. The 19th-century flavour of the narrative, its mirroring of similar tropes of discovery and disappointment and betrayal, is so obvious as to overwhelm its strengths. (Aritha Van Herk)And Ruth Brandon's Governess: The Lives and Times of the real Jane Eyres:
The appeal of fiction's most famous governess — Jane Eyre — is the romance, of course. Take away the happy ending and what have you got?Inspire Emotion posts a letter from Charlotte Brontë to M. Heger and highlights her drawings. Chainless Soul has posted several posts recently that deserves attention: comments about some Brontës poems, Wuthering Heights and how Sabrina, the Teenage Witch meets Wuthering Heights (in the episode The Long and Winding Short Cut, 3x22, 4/30/1999, written by Carrie Honigblum & Renee Phillips, complete transcript here) Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Books, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Poetry, References, Wuthering Heights
Well, you've got the penury and abuse that made up the lives of most actual governesses in 19th-century Britain. Luckily for historian Brandon, the fascination of history does not depend on happy endings, although there is enough melodrama and injustice to fill a Thomas Hardy novel or two. Or six. (Lynn Harnett in The Seacost)
The inspired idea of Christopher Ash (music) and Carl Miller (book and lyrics) is to have the Brontës star in their own “rise and fall”-style rockumentary. On they come to a bare platform to plug in microphones and start talking to an invisible interviewer, before launching into bracing blasts of song. Unfortunately, everyone has a tiresome habit of holding the microphones too close and thus distorting some of the lyrics.The Seattle Public Library Blog has a few recommendations to read beyond Book-It's production of Jane Eyre.
Twenty-seven songs is too many when a number are unmemorable, yet when the music is good, it’s very good. No One to Marry for Miles is a country-type lament from Anne (Molly Lynch), who is nearly as heavy on the eyeliner as Siobhan Athwal’s marvellously lugubrious and melodramatic Emily.
Adam Lenson’s vivid production taps perceptively into the untamed energy of this moor-roaming clan, the “nobodies from nowhere” who revolutionised English literature.
The family, and this Brontë-soaring show, is anchored by Natasha Barnes as the pragmatic, forceful Charlotte, the only sibling who married. But, the piece asks perceptively, was this a dreadful waste of her talent? (Fiona Mountford)
The Secret History of Jane Eyre. by John PfordresherAnd more on Seattle and Jane Eyre on The Stranger.
Why did Charlotte insist on hiding her authorship of Jane Eyre from everyone but her sisters? Pfordresher lays bare the painful parallels between Charlotte’s life and her novel.
Governess by Ruth Brandon
What was life actually like as a governess in the 19th century? “Not part of the family, not servants, yet not equals.” Brandon explores the economy, psychology, and sociology of governesses and the families they served.
Texts From Jane Eyre, by Daniel Mallory Ortberg
Ortberg, the voice behind Slate’s popular Dear Prudence advice column, created this hilarious collection of imagined text message conversations between famous literary characters. According to Ortberg, “If Mr. Rochester could text Jane Eyre, his ardent missives would obviously be in all-caps.”
The Brontë Sisters – Streaming Video
Heather Saycell’s 2008 film is an engaging examination of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne’s lives and their extraordinary insights into the human heart.
For additional Jane Eyre-inspired titles, check out this list created by librarians at The Seattle Public Library. (Elizabeth W)
58. On BookThe Hindu features the Nilgiris Library.
This unique book club invites you to read through the plays of the current season—Jane Eyre, M. Butterfly, John, and Office Hour—with facilitation by Makaela Pollock.
Some of the books retain their original binding with the library’s insignia. There are treasures there and thrills as one takes out The Life of Charlotte Brontë written by Mrs Gaskell. A black and white illustration of the Haworth Parsonage where the Brontës lived is guaranteed to give goose bumps. (Pankaja Srinivasan)The Sisters' Room talks about the Martin Heron's Literary Landscapes installation on the Haworth moors, just in the way to Top Withins.
Pollack movies, such as the tragicomic romance The Way We Were (1973) and the exhilarating show-biz comedy Tootsie (1982), shot into the realm of beloved classics usually reserved for Old Hollywood love stories such as 1939's Wuthering Heights (one of his own favorites) or romantic comedies such as 1940's The Philadelphia Story (another Pollack favorite). (Michael Sragow)The New Zealand Herald has an article on 'mad women' (that would be its not very politically correct description anyway). Journalists never fail to surprise us. You would expect a reference to Bertha, the 'mad woman' in English literature par excellence, wouldn't you? Well, you get a short allusion to Cathy instead.
It's easy to get carried along in the throes of a romantic passion for a man who's "mad, bad and dangerous to know" but love is far more difficult to sustain when endearing quirks and idiosyncrasies blossom into full blown neuroses and /or personality disorders as a host of women, from Wuthering Heights' Cathy to Kate Moss have found out to their cost. (Noelle McCarthy)Hermione Buckland-Hoby writes in her Guardian blog about virtual bookshelves, but ends her post with a funny anecdote regarding the traditional bookshelf.
It's wonderful for finding new books, but an equal pleasure is to be had from making kneejerk character judgements: I've just stumbled upon a bookcase with one shelf devoted to classics with a capital C: War and Peace, Jane Eyre and co are all lined up with rigid neatness, each one perfectly pristine in its jacket and clearly untouched. And on the shelf below them? A dog-eared sprawl of much-thumbed Bernard Cornwells.But haven't we all seen similar things? Some bookshops sell books by the foot even.
I doubt that anyone acquainted with Emily Bronte’s novel pronounces wuthering, as in Wuthering Heights, with the vowel of strut, though the name Wuthering does have such a vowel. (Anatoly Liberman)Monsters & Critics reviews Ruth Brandon's Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres. And Crescent Moon Book Reviews gives Shirley a 10/10.
As for fairy-tale waifs, coy Lolitas and escapees from the pages of “Wuthering Heights,” they flash their credit cards at Storytailors, certainly the most brilliantly strange new store to set up in Lisbon. (Seth Sherwood)Little Willow interviews author Suzanne Supplee:
What are your ten all-time favorite books?Oregon's weblog talks about (or rather we think so) Wuthering Heights in Thai language. Tender Mercies is reading Jane Eyre. A Girl Walks Into a Bookstore... reviews Ruth Brandon's The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres. Lucky Jane has a post on her personal experience with Jane Eyre, a book which doesn't give her good vibrations.
Ten? Only ten? (...)
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
An interesting event for today, April 24, in Harrogate. Wendy Bardsley, author of the recently published novel Branwell Brontë's Creation gives a talk. From the author herself:Yorkshire Post Literary Lunches are arranged by The Yorkshire Post and are held, normally, either at The Majestic Hotel or The Pavilions of Harrogate.Categories: Alert, TalksAdmissionFor ticket prices, please contact Margaret BrownContact DetailsMargaret Brown, Tel 01423 772217
I shall be speaking on Thursday, 24th April, at the Pavilions, with writers, Clare Francis and Ruth Brandon about my novel, Branwell Bronte's Creation.
I shall talk about what inspired me to write it, how long it took me to write it, and my feelings in general about Branwell's role in the family. I have always been a lover of Bronte literature, and find the way they lived their lives in Haworth fascinating. For a long time now, I have wanted to write a novel about Branwell, who I feel has been misrepresented and given an unfair press over the last 150 years. There area great many positives about him, evidenced from his childhood writings and the writings of his sisters. I wanted to explore his personality and his contribution to the Bronte ouvre, and also give him some dreams.
My novel creates those dreams, and winds them into his biography, I hope showing Branwell in a much more positive, and I feel, truer light.
Jane Eyre, who not surprisingly finds herself in the subtitle of this informative book, is in the minds of many people the archetypal governess, yet there could have been few less typical either as to character or destiny. Her creator, Charlotte Bronte, though, knew her stuff on the subject from personal experience: She had herself been a governess at the beggarly salary of 20 pounds per annum. (Martin Rubin)The mention is quite accurate:
(...) I am fairly stablished in my new place. It is the family of Mr. White of Upperwood House, Rawdon. The house is not very large but exceedingly comfortable and well regulated; the grounds are fine and extensive. In taking the place I have made a large sacrifice in the way of salary, in the hope of securing comfort by which word I do not mean to express good eating and drinking, or warm fire, or soft bed, but the society of cheerful faces, and minds and hearts not dug out of a lead of mine, or cut from a marble quarry. My salary is not really more than £16 p.a., though it is nominally £20, but the expense of washing will be deducted therefrom. My pupils are two in number, a girl of eight and a boy of six. (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, 3 March 1841)Not to the first time that Hillary Clinton gets compared with the Brontës, but certainly the first time the reference goes deep into Brontë criticism:
In their landmark book of literary criticism "The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination" (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar were among the first to spotlight this noxious theme, this isolation and ridicule of powerful women by labeling them crazy, hysterical, perverse, monstrous. To challenge male domination—of the world, or just of oneself—was to be risk being marginalized, ostracized, locked away like Rochester's wife in "Jane Eyre" (1847), the fate that gave the book its title. In real life, behavior that strayed from the polite, demure norm expected of women in the 19th Century was rewarded with psychiatric evaluations and often, imprisonment and death. (Julia Keller in The Chicago Tribune)AudioBookTreasury.com has published an audiobook version of Jane Eyre. Read by several free contributors, you can listen to all the chapters here.
The fillies outnumber the colts in the Gowran Park Rooftop Restaurant Race, in which Summit Surge is highest-rated but must give considerable weight to all his rivals. However, Ger Lyons' charge ran a nice race in better company last Sunday at Leopardstown and should go very close. Charlotte Bronte is hard to assess and her strength in the market will be helpful in determining her prospects. (Johnny Ward in The Independent (Ireland))Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Audio-Radio, Books, Jane Eyre, References, Weirdo
A student production of Jane Eyre is going on the West Virginian Wesleyan College:The Department of Theatre and Dance at West Virginia Wesleyan College presents
Jane Eyre
by Willis Hall
Directed by Gregory Mach
Thursday-Saturday, Feb. 21-23, at 8 p.m.; Sunday, Feb. 24, at 2 p.m.
West Virginia Wesleyan College
59 College Avenue
Buckhannon WV, 26201
“Orphaned at a very young age, raised in a home devoid of love, outspoken Jane meets her match when she is employed as a tutor for the ward of the wealthy and enigmatic Rochester. A love story full of gothic charm, secrets, ghosts, and happy endings, this is a classic period piece based on the best-selling 1847 novel by Charlotte Brontë,” said Gregory Mach, Director of Jane Eyre. The story follows Jane as she grows up, including her miserable childhood, working as a governess, and falling in love with Mr. Rochester.
The theatre department is working with guest Costumer Ruth Humphrey, a former theatre professor at Davis & Elkins College of Elkins. Ruth is working with student Costume Assistants Jessie Zito of Baltimore County, MD and Brandon Ulrich of Roanoke, VA to costume Jane Eyre. The Stage Manager of this productionis Caitlin May of Arthurdale, WV and her assistant is Mikayla Dahleger. Technical direction is led by Keith Saine, professor of theatre arts at WVWC. The Sound Designer of the show is bri conley of Roanoke, VA. Delcie McCord of Crawford, WV joins as a member of the sound crew.
Jane Eyre’s two lead characters, Rochester and Jane, are played by Aaron Harris of Anmoore, WV and Taylor Pugh of Glen Jean, WV, respectively. The remaining cast includes Wesleyan students Luke White of Weston, WV; Julian Marshall of Wheeling, WV; Savannah Teter of Girard, OH; Pippa McGinley of Morgantown, WV; Tiara Stokes of Charleston, WV; Brett Alexander Smith of Charleston, WV; and Sinead Tobin of Fairmont, WV.
In 1986, Goldwyn told the Los Angeles Times his goal was to appeal to sophisticated movie lovers.Also in The Guardian, Peter Kosminsky speaks about his own take on Wuthering Heights. He says what many people think too:
“I was brought up in a tradition of patience,” Goldwyn said. “My father never made films that were instantaneous hits. Wuthering Heights was not a success the first time around. Neither was Best Years of Our Lives. They had to be nursed .... Basically, he was always waiting.”
He usually generates his own projects but had enjoyed Mantel’s study of the rise of Henry VIII’s consigliere Thomas Cromwell. “I love Hilary as a writer, I love her iconoclasm. She’s a true rebel and I admire her for it.” This was enough to trump what he calls “a bit of a confidence crisis about period drama” previously, as a result of having directed “a truly terrible adaptation of Wuthering Heights” in the 1990s – “It was pretty much the first film I made and I was totally out of my depth.” (Tara Conlan)Hats off to him for speaking so openly about it.
Ruth Wilson’s win completes the dominance of freshmen shows tonight with her win for Showtime’s The Affair. She has a funny anecdote of her first Golden Globe nomination for Jane Eyre the year the Globes ceremony was cancelled because of the writers strike, with her watching the stripped-down winners announcement from the hotel bar. She lost then but won tonight for playing “a complex, should I say depressed character” on The Affair. Best line tonight to a co-star, addressed at Dominic West: “Dom, your ass is a thing of great beauty, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” (Nellie Andreeva)Dallas News reviews the play The Book Club Play in which
Tiana Kaye Johnson and Sarah Rutan offer intricately realized portraits of rumbling rebellion. They explode with perfect timing not long after Ana’s nemesis, Alex, played with charismatic verve by Brandon Potter, arrives, pushing to explore Twilight — to Ana’s horror —and the similarities between Edward Cullen and Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff. (Nancy Churnin)Entertainment Weekly's The Community has a recap of episode 2 of season 1 of Dawson's Creek:
At school, Pacey and Miss Jacobs are dealing with the aftermath of their kiss. Pacey struts around like the cat that got the canary, while she is understandably shaken. Lecturing on Wuthering Heights, she says, “Catherine was essentially a mess; Heathcliff was basically a decent guy who had a lot to learn about life.” I THINK there’s a double meaning in that. (Head Over Feels)Glasgow Evening Times speaks to writer Maggie Ritchie:
A title she always goes back to is Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre, which tells the story of Rochester's mad wife in the attic.Picture Us Reading reviews favourably Jane F***ing Eyre by J.K. Really; Pages Unbound reviews The Professor.
"It's another 19th century woman driven mad," says Maggie. "It is so evocative of the smells and colours of the Caribbean where she grew up and conjured up memories of my childhood in Africa and in Venezuela, and inspired me to write my second novel." (Angela McManus)
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