My first proper girlfriend: Emily Brontë

We read in The Observer about One Life. Six Words. What's Yours? which literally asks several writers, comedians, actors ... to summarize their memoirs in a six-word sentence. Toby Litt's one is particularly interesting:

The form favours the wry; perhaps Toby Litt's faux-confessional 'My first proper girlfriend: Emily Brontë'.

The Boston Globe publishes a moderately positive review of Justine Picardie's Daphne (the book is also mentioned in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal):

If Jane Eyre is one of literature's most enduring heroines, then the unnamed narrator of Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca" is surely Eyre's modern successor, another innocent who enters the great house of the brooding master-husband. Yet the two novels are worlds apart; just look at their opening lines. "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again," du Maurier's fey narrator announces, whereas careful Jane begins by saying that "there was no possibility of taking a walk that day." Which woman would you trust, as witness or storyteller?
Du Maurier was reportedly drawn to the Brontës, and that connection is at the heart of Justine Picardie's engaging new novel, "Daphne," which opens with echoes of du Maurier herself: "To begin. Where to begin? To begin at the beginning, wherever that might be."
Picardie, a clever writer and diligent researcher, here tells two alternating stories. One narrative presents du Maurier in the 1950s, already famous, with a faltering marriage and a growing fascination with the Brontës, in particular Branwell, whose biography she is writing. The other story, set in present-day London, is narrated by an anonymous young innocent who has married a moody, divorced Henry James scholar. The new bride is uneasy in her master's gloomy house. Unlike Jane Eyre, however, this orphan is beautiful and a literature student, not a governess. She is also obsessed with du Maurier's novels and with the 1950s correspondence between du Maurier and Alex Symington, a self-styled Brontë expert.
In chapters that shuttle smoothly between past and present, Picardie takes us inside the minds of our unhappy modern heroine, of despairing du Maurier, and of the dishonest Symington. Through poems and letters, we even catch glimpses of Branwell. All of which - along with forgery, incest, mental breakdown, suicide, and affairs lesbian and heterosexual - could have been far too much. But Picardie, as she capably manages the intertwined plots, keeps our attention fixed on the two very different women. Attention is one thing, but affection another. Neither heroine ultimately engages our sympathies as did dreary little Jane or even tiresome Mrs. de Winter. ( Anna Mundow)

The Sunday Mail talks about a possible new film version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island produced by Douglas Rae who is also behind the Wuthering Heights's feature film project:

But before Treasure Island can set sail, Rae will launch another classic film, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.
He said: "We are planning a totally different interpretation as an international movie."(John Millar)

We read in The Independent's review of Mark Bostridge's Florence Nightingale: The woman and her legend how the biographer is a Brontëite:

Bostridge has an evident sympathy with female subjects and a great sensitivity in writing about them. He has previously written a biography of Vera Brittain, and I remember him telling me once that in his teens he was "obsessed" with Charlotte Brontë. This sympathy dates back a long way, to a musical and literary upbringing he shared with his younger brother, the renowned tenor Ian Bostridge. (Suzi Feay)

The Sunday Star Times (New Zealand) interviews Laura Hill, who plays the lead role in an upcoming Polly Teale's Jane Eyre production in Dunedin, New Zealand:

Jane Eyre is a "really big role", says Hill. "It's a classic role; it's going to be physically, vocally and technically demanding and I want to do a good job. I don't like doing things unless I do them well." (...)
"Victorian novels? It was like, `oh come on'. But when I picked Jane Eyre up to read this year, I really enjoyed it."
The plot, says Hill, "is classic soap opera stuff". There's a class struggle, a horrible childhood at a boarding school, thwarted love and a mad woman in the attic, representing the repressed passion of Jane.
"Two sides of the same person. It's not necessarily a brand new idea, but in terms of the theatrical adaptation, it's a central conceit."

Today, The Times's Bookwise includes a question which will be quite easy for the readers of BrontëBlog. Who is she?

3 Ill treated by her guardian aunt, this orphan was sent to Lowood, a school for foundlings. She survived eight difficult years and the death of her close friend, rising to be first girl of the first class, then a teacher.

Finally, the Czech blog Renčina červená knihovna continues publishing Brontë-related posts, the latest devoted to Anne Brontëová and an990 publishes a Polish translation (by the Polish poet Ludmiła Marjańska) of a poem by Emily Brontë.

Categories: Anne Brontë, Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Poetry, References, Theatre, Translations, Wuthering Heights