The mad woman at the Grange

We are sad to open this post reporting the death last Monday of Sydney Pollack. The Brontës reach practically everywhere and thus we read the following on The Baltimore Sun:

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.

The OUP Blog etymologist seems to be very fond of analysing the word 'wuthering', as today is not the first time it's featured in a post.

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.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Shirley, Wuthering Heights